Skyfire (20 page)

‘The power of rats,' Teddy says solemnly. ‘Never underestimate the little buggers.'

We clamber through the rubble, tumbling one by one into the dark. There's no point trying to stay quiet. If Lord Farran were still nearby, he'd have heard the explosion in our cell. But there's no shouting, no barrage of gunfire, so I assume we're beyond his hearing. Our boots clack like bullets as we scurry forward.

Then Clementine stops. She claws at the back of her neck, tearing down her collar to scratch her fingernails into the flesh.

‘Your proclivity must be almost ready,' Maisy says. ‘If it's that bad …'

‘I think it
is
ready,' Clementine says. ‘The last few minutes, it's just been … well, it feels like the last gust before the end of a storm.' She looks anxiously at her twin. ‘Will you check for me?'

Maisy nods. ‘Of course.'

I hold up the star charm. Maisy lifts Clementine's hair aside and peers at the back of her sister's neck. She lets out a sharp gasp, then says, ‘Air. It's Air.'

The rest of us hurry forwards to see. The markings
form a cluster of clouds, with tendrils of swirling wind and light.

It's funny. When I first met the twins, I'd have expected Clementine's proclivity to be Flame. She's the fiery twin: the brash, loud one who crackles with the heat of her own confidence. It's Maisy who should be Air. The quiet one. The soft one. Like a little summer breeze.

But then I think of Maisy on the mountaintop. Her face straining in concentration, her magic flaring, as she fought back the fire that would have burned us all. That wasn't the face of a summer breeze. That was the face of Flame.

‘Guess you would've moved to the spires, yeah?' Teddy says. ‘If we hadn't nicked off from Bastian's clan, I mean. You've got an ethereal proclivity.'

Clementine glares. ‘I'd never have left you. Any of you. If Danika was allowed to stay in the village, I'd have done the same.'

Her voice is as haughty as the night we met, down in the sewers of Rourton. Back when she dismissed us as a bunch of worthless scruffers. But now the tone clashes with the message of her words, and it occurs to me that Maisy isn't the only twin to have been changed by this journey.

‘Come on,' I say. ‘Let's get out of here.'

The tunnel ahead glows with a strange silver light: the flicker and heat of alchemy. As we wriggle
through the darkness, the heat intensifies. It's painfully hot, but not enough to burn my skin. Not quite.

The stink of sulphur isn't just a smell any more; it's a taste. A mouthful of rotting eggs and old socks, smeared across my tongue.

The tunnel ends with a ledge jutting out into shadow. The air is thick and I cough, spluttering uncontrollably, as unnatural light dances on my skin. And with a terrible lurch, I realise where we are.

The shaft of the geyser.

I can't breathe. I retch, gasping, as all five of us stagger back into the depths of the tunnel.

‘Ugh!' Teddy says. ‘What the hell …?'

‘We'll never make it,' Clementine says. ‘We can't climb up the rocks if we're choking to death – we'll fall, surely, and then …'

She trails off, looking stricken. But it's too late; we're all imagining a body hitting liquid Curiefer. The bubbles and scorching heat. The stink of boiling flesh and splitting bones, swallowed by the shine.

‘If we go back, we'll die anyway,' I say. ‘Farran will either shoot us or drag us off to the battlefield and let King Morrigan do the honours. Isn't a small chance better than nothing?'

‘And if one of us falls?' Clementine says. ‘Will
you take the guilt, Danika? If I fall, or Teddy falls, or Mai –' Her voice hitches. She takes an unsteady breath. ‘If Maisy falls, will you take the blame?'

I stare at her, my mouth dry. I don't want to think about it. I don't want to picture their bodies falling, melting. Nausea bubbles in my throat.

‘I think we can do it,' Maisy says. ‘Clem … if you and I work together, I think we can keep them safe.'

Clementine starts to protest, but Maisy cuts her off.

‘You have an Air proclivity. If you can just push away the gasses, you could clear a space for us to breathe. You could keep fresh air flowing around our faces.'

‘I've only known my proclivity for a few minutes!'

‘I'm not asking you to travel through it,' Maisy says. ‘That would be too dangerous. But you should be able to push outward a little, just to keep the air flowing around us.' She looks at her sister with a pleading expression. ‘I know you can do it, Clem. I know it.'

Clementine glances at the rest of us, awaiting an objection. No one speaks.

‘I can help too,' Maisy says. ‘I can keep us safe from spits of fire. Flame and Air. If ever there were two perfect proclivities for making it out of here alive …'

Clementine looks at her sister. I watch them both: two slender girls, their blonde curls tangled into knots, faces stained with soot and dirt. And just for a moment, the fierceness in Maisy's face transfers to Clementine – like mirrors reflecting back into each other.

Clementine closes her eyes. And around us, the air begins to stir.

The rock stings with heat beneath my hand. I pull my sleeves over my palms and try to ignore the pain in my fingertips.

The boiling pit of Curiefer gurgles below us. Thick bubbles pop and splatter. Sometimes they hit the rocks and explode, spitting fire and alchemy juices. Clementine keeps her teeth gritted and the air around us spins. It's a harsh flurry – amateurish and barely controlled – but it's enough to keep the steam cleared, and the sulphuric gasses out of our lungs.

We climb with every inch of muscle and sinew in our bodies. We cling to rocky ledges, and haul our legs onto protruding boulders. We ignore the aches, the pain, the heat. We ignore the whiplash of air when it slams out of Clementine's control. We ignore the scatterings of pebbles and broken stone from the climbers above us.

Clementine accidentally slams a handful of soot and gas into our faces, and I'm left to splutter as I cling to the rocks. I would trade anything for a gasp of fresh air: one last gasp, out in the open, away from this choking hole of dark and steam. Is that too much to ask? Just one last gasp, before I die?

Don't let go, Danika. Don't let go.

The Curiefer casts an unnatural light through the shaft. Tendrils of liquid lash up like strands of hair, then flop back down into the smouldering pit.

A new blast of gas envelops us. Clementine loses her grip and scrabbles at the rocks, shrieking. I lunge to grab her ankle, but can't quite reach. She writhes, her expression desperate, her eyes clenched shut, struggling to dispel the steam before it can scald the flesh from our bones. I hear Maisy panting, using every desperate skerrick of her Flame proclivity to keep the heat at bay.

And then Clementine falls.

I reach for her with a cry, and my lungs fill with a choke of smoke and ash. I squeeze my eyes shut as the bubble of protective air dissolves and a sulphuric stink fills my throat. I swipe out blindly, vaguely aware of the screams and shouts and scrabbling limbs around me.

Nothing. Just empty air. She's gone.

Suddenly I think of Radnor. I think of his body tumbling from the waterfall; my desperate hands
trying to keep a grip on his limbs as they slip away. And now another body, another friend, lost to the churn of air and flame and –

No!

And without thinking, I dissolve.

Night slips around me, cool and inviting. I slip into its embrace and melt between the steam and shadows. I have no body. No hands, no arms, no eyes, no breath. She's here somewhere. I know she is. Her proclivity is Air; she can't have fallen, she must have –

And then I sense her. Just the slightest twitch. She's dissolved into Air, but she's losing herself: melting like candlewax into the dark until –

Nothing.

Perhaps I imagined it. The chance of sensing Clementine, in her proclivity form, is painfully slim. If we'd both dissolved into Night, it would be simple. Silver used the same trick to save me upon the
Night-song.
But our powers don't match. A connection is technically possible, but difficult. It would require our melted forms to physically cross through each other, to be mutually searching, to overlap in the exact same patch of night-stained air …

Clementine!
I shout the name inside my mind, as rough and raw and coarse as if my voice were made of gravel.

Nothing. Silence.

Then I hear it. My own name, lost and confused. More of a whisper than a cry: the echo of a voice almost gone.
Danika.

And there she is. We cling to each other. A moment of shared breath, of shared power. Toxic steam billows around us, and Curiefer boils below. Somewhere above, our friends are choking. They can't survive without Clementine's proclivity – not for long.

But part of me is slipping. I can feel the lure of Night. What's the point of going back? It just means more pain, more death, more struggling. Easier to end it this way. To end it all here, drifting into peace and shadow …

Maisy!

The word explodes inside my breath. Inside my bones. It's Clementine calling, searching for her sister. The desperation in that cry shakes me from my confusion. I can't fade.
We
can't fade. Our friends still need us.

As one, we bluster back towards the rocks. Suddenly I'm solid, my raw fingertips fumbling on stone and my lungs heaving as Clementine reels a gush of wild breeze into our faces.

‘Clementine!' someone cries.

‘Danika!'

Shouting, fumbling. The raucous cough of half-choked lungs. Ash stings my eyes as our crew takes
a moment to check that we're all here, we're all safe. But we can't afford to rest. Not yet. We have to keep climbing, our bodies strained, our minds wrecked.

And the twins use their proclivities to keep us alive. These spoilt richie girls, who once painted their nails to enter Rourton's sewers, and who brought a pack of designer clothing on a refugee trek. I hated them at first. I hated them for their lives of luxury, while I starved and scrimped on the city's winter streets. I've been wrong many times in my life, but underestimating those girls was perhaps my greatest mistake of all.

Like a slow-spinning waltz, we keep on moving. One hand, then the other. One foot, then the other. A patch of night sky above. Far above. It's barely visible through the haze and steam and gas, but I can see it. I know I can.

The faintest shine of stars.

I clamber over the lip of the geyser. My body trembles with this final effort and I collapse with a grunt. The stone is blessedly cold on my face and burnt fingertips. I hear the others around me: panting, gasping, rolling their own faces across the cold rocks.

I don't know how long we lie there. It could be five minutes, or it could be an hour. All I can sense is the crisp night air. The chill of it is sweeter than roseberries.

Finally, I force myself onto my elbows. My fingertips are still stinging, but I can handle it. What I can't handle is a bullet through the skull – and if we don't start moving, that's exactly what we'll get. ‘Come on,' I say. ‘We've got to move.'

No one responds.

I suck down a slow breath. ‘When Farran finds out we're missing …'

Lukas pulls himself up into a sitting position. His face is strained, but determined. ‘I can sense the sólfoxes,' he says. ‘They're still sleeping where we left them.'

‘Better than me,' Teddy says. ‘My head's all groggy – can't feel a thing yet. Reckon you can call 'em here?'

Lukas shakes his head. ‘Too far away – I can only just sense them. It's like a shadow. Just at the edge of what I can feel. But once we're closer …'

Those words are just what we need to get moving. The thought of descending the mountain on foot, trekking through the wild … it's too much to cope with. Too bleak a plan to face. But to stumble just a little further, and then ride our sólfoxes towards the stars?

Well, that sounds almost feasible.

We struggle to our feet, brushing soot from our clothes. The twins' blonde curls are dark with grime, and my own auburn hair feels thin and oily against my scalp. But there's nowhere to wash ourselves, even if we wanted to. All we can do is clamber down the slope, tiny pebbles skittering beneath each step.

The sólfoxes doze where we left them – curled up together in the branches, an enormous ball of
feathers and claws. Teddy gives a quiet whistle as we approach, and their heads snap up. They stare at us, their eyes huge pale beads, and for a terrible moment I think they're about to pounce. But Lukas holds out his hands and the creatures lower their heads a little, mollified. I release a deep breath.

We bundle onto the sólfoxes' backs, in the same formation as before. I wrap my hands around Lukas's torso, ignoring the sting of his cloak on my swollen fingertips. I'm too exhausted to care. Lukas smells faintly of sulphur, but under the grime I can almost sense the rhythm of his heartbeat. So close. So near.

And with a rush of wind, our sólfox leaps into the night.

As we fly, I look to the side. The second sólfox soars alongside us, with the twins and Teddy bundled on its back. Beyond them lies an endless field of stars.

Back in Rourton, I never had a chance to see stars like these. There was too much light from the factories and forges, from the richies' houses and the squalid apartments. Even the alchemy streetlamps helped to cast a constant glow. They fuzzed out the edges of the stars, as though I were staring into the sky through a constant fog. Always dimness, never darkness.

Here, there's nothing to dilute the night. In the space between mountains – between the geyser's
glow and the city spires – the sky is as black as treacle. I want to reach out and touch the stars, to brush them, to taste them. My magic burns beneath my skin. It would be so easy to let go, to fling myself into the dark and dissolve like –

Stop it, Danika.

What am I thinking? I need to get a grip on my proclivity. It's becoming too persistent, too tempting. And my moment of Night in the geyser hasn't helped. If I can't control my powers, I'll end up floating off in my sleep – dozing into dreams and losing myself to the dark.

‘All right, Danika?' Lukas says.

It takes me a moment to register his voice, barely audible over the rushing wind. I swallow my thoughts and nod into the back of his cloak. ‘Yeah. You?'

‘Yeah. I'm fine.'

The sólfox dips a little lower, and a rumple of wind blasts our bodies. Lukas leans down, bracing himself, and I fall against his back with a gasp.

‘Sorry,' he says. ‘Should've warned you.'

There's something distant in his voice now. Almost uncertain, as though his mind is elsewhere.

‘What's wrong?' I say. ‘Lukas? Are you –'

I lose my words in a bluster of air. The sólfox begins to rise again, soaring up on a thermal with a flickering adjustment of its wings.

Lukas takes a moment to respond. ‘What are we going to do?'

‘About what?' I say.

‘About the war.'

I stiffen a little, but don't speak.

‘The Víndurnics are being conscripted at dawn,' Lukas says. ‘They probably left for the plains as soon as midnight was over. Tomorrow, they'll travel to the Valley, and then …'

‘And then they'll fight,' I say. ‘All the solid souls of Víndurn, against King Morrigan's armies.'

An image of the Magnetic Valley flashes into my mind. A watery channel framed by slopes of wild grass. They'll have to fight on those slopes, up above the waterline. No proclivities, and no alchemy – except for Farran's firestones.
Chasing those distant deserts of green
…

‘If the firestones work,' Lukas says, ‘Lord Farran could transmit any kind of magic into the battle, just like broadcasting a song through the radio.' His voice is hoarse with tension. ‘We have to warn them, Danika. We have to warn the Taladians what they're up against.'

I close my eyes. I know what he's asking. He's asking us to throw away our lives. To fly straight into that battlefield and spread the word. To risk being shot from the sky, or hacked down with swords and knives and axes.

But I know he's right. The Taladian soldiers are just kids themselves: eighteen-year-olds conscripted from cities like Rourton. Kids like Mitcham or Riley. If we hadn't fled, we'd have been forced to join the army ourselves one day. Armed with clunky old weapons like swords and bows, while Lord Farran uses his Curiefer-infused firestones to blast us with magic.

‘You're right.' I take a coarse breath, and force my eyes open. ‘We've got to warn them. But how? There'll be thousands of soldiers, spread all through their army camp, and –'

Lukas cranes his neck around. His face is tight and determined, his eyes like glass in the moonlight. ‘We can't tell an entire army at once. But we can tell the man who leads the field, and let him think better of the risk he's taking.'

‘The man who …' My voice trails off. ‘Oh.'

My fingers clench on his shoulders. I think of crashing bombs, of burning cities. Of hunters and pistols and flames in the dark.
No
. Not after all we've been through. Not after all we've endured to escape …

But if we don't do it, how could we live with ourselves? How could we live with the blood on our hands?

‘Okay. We'll have to talk to the others, but … you're right. We have to warn him. We have to try.' The final words stick in my throat.

As our sólfox soars upwards, plans unravel in my head. What are the first steps? It's easier to look at it piece by piece than to focus on the overall picture.

A picture of my friends' bodies, broken on a battlefield.

But first, Lukas Morrigan will fly us to the Valley.

Tomorrow, we confront a king.