Drowning in Fire

TWO

“I don’t like it, sir.”

Griffin hated when David called him sir in private, but of course that’s why David did it: to show his ultimate displeasure with his leader and best friend when no one else was around.

Griffin stared down his head of security. No room for friendship right now. The two men had managed to draw solid lines between personal and professional, and it had served them well in the five years of Griffin’s Ofarian leadership.

“Don’t have a choice,” Griffin replied. “The Senatus premier invited me back to a gathering after three years. Me. Not an Ofarian contingent. I’m not walking in there with my cabinet behind me and a row of soldiers along the flanks.”

David made a frustrated face and pinched his lips between his fingers, staring out the windshield of the car in which they sat on a sloped South San Francisco neighborhood street.

“Not after we just narrowly dodged a war with the Chimerans,” Griffin added, much quieter. “Not after what happened the last time the Senatus invited me to sit around their fire.”

Thinking of fire made him think of Keko, as always. He shook his head at his lap, still unable to believe how she’d suddenly reappeared in his life two months ago . . . and then had disappeared again, leaving him unexpectedly shredded.

Three years apart from her, he discovered, hadn’t cut into any of his want.

Griffin unfolded himself from the car and David followed, pushing out from behind the steering wheel. “Fine. You’ll come with me,” Griffin said over the roof. “Gwen’ll meet us there. That’s it. That’s all I’m bringing.”

David ran a hand through his curly blond hair and nodded tightly, knowing there would be no further discussion on the matter. “I’ll make sure you’re safe, that all the roads to the gathering are clear.”

Their eyes met, smudging that line between personal and professional. “I know you will.”

David jogged around the hood and hopped up onto the sidewalk. The mild winter day was punctuated by music streaming from an open window. A Primary man washed his car in his driveway. A couple walked their mutt, heading for the two Ofarian men. The working class neighborhood was where Griffin had grown up, and it smelled and felt the same. Wonderfully the same.

He let the couple and the dog pass by before saying to David, “They’re throwing me a peace offering. As they should. The Chimeran chief owes me a massive apology, I owe them a first-person account of Keko’s capture, and then we’ll be back on even footing. I hope.”

David grinned. “So you’re saying it’s good that your ex-lover has a jealous, angry streak?”

Griffin laughed ruefully, and it hurt. Thinking of Keko usually did.

“Are you ever going to tell me what happened three years ago?”

David had been with Griffin in Colorado two months back when they’d discovered Keko being held captive by one of their own, and the revelation of Griffin’s previous liaison with the Chimeran woman had come to light. But Griffin had never spoken of the awful misunderstanding that final night three years ago around the Senatus bonfire. It would only undermine his already tenuous position among his own cabinet and his Ofarian detractors, who still possessed a powerful voice.

An image of the mighty Makaha, reduced to sagging in the snow and dirt, half his arm black, his mouth open in a scream, assaulted Griffin’s memory. Followed quickly by one of Keko, and her horror and shock and disgust. And then her back as she’d turned away.

“Maybe someday,” Griffin replied.

After the incident, he’d appealed to the Senatus many times, but his stance that Makaha had attacked first fell on deaf ears. So he’d given up trying to make contact, but had not given up on his dreams. He still desperately wanted to be part of the Senatus, but he realized now that he’d rushed the process before. He’d barged in waving his opinions like flags, but after witnessing their fractured system and lack of true communication, he knew now that he needed a new approach. He just didn’t know what that was.

David may have been more right than his joke intended. The chance to move forward with the Senatus had risen from the ashes of any possible future with Keko. Ash. Yeah, that’s what they were now. Griffin tried to see that as a good thing.

“Will Kekona be there?”

Griffin shrugged, feigning ignorance by checking his watch, but he remembered all too well what Cat had told him after she’d returned from Hawaii two months ago: Keko’s generalship had been given to Bane. He also knew that that action would’ve destroyed her. And there was nothing he could do about it.

As he caught David watching him, he knew that no amount of nonchalance would fool his friend, but that David would also never press for information Griffin wasn’t willing to give.

Griffin peered across the street to the picture window of the second-floor apartment, alive with the flicker from the TV. “You sure you want to sit out here tonight? Call up Hansen to be on watch. This is beneath you.” He said that last sentence with a grin.

“Nah. I’d rather handle it myself. Kelse is working late anyway.”

Griffin understood. Back when his main job had been the safety of Gwen Carroway, the woman everyone had thought would be the next Ofarian leader, her protection had been his life. He’d hated handing over the responsibility to anyone else.

“I’ll be just a couple hours. Want me to bring out leftovers?”

“Hell, yeah.” David patted his gut as he ambled over to the bus stop bench across from the Aames’s apartment. Perfect sight lines in all directions.

Griffin shouldn’t need all this protection in his own city, his own childhood neighborhood where he was about to have Sunday dinner with his family, but after the assassination attempt by Wes Pritchart five years ago, and the detractors that had since grown more vocal once his “relationship” with a Chimeran had come to light, they couldn’t be too careful.

Griffin jogged to his family’s building and inserted his key, the same one he used to wear around his neck when he was young and his parents had been away on duty. Inside, the same stairs still creaked. The same carpet still welcomed him into his parents’ place, only now it was flattened and darker with permanent stains.

“Hey, Pop.”

Griffin’s father sat wide-legged on one of the couches making an L around the TV. He looked up from the baseball documentary whose volume was cranked all the way up to compensate for the driving beat of the music pumping from his sisters’ room.

“Griffin,” Pop said with a nod toward the TV. “You’d like this. All about the Yankees.”

Griffin grimaced and chuckled. He loved baseball, hated the Yankees.

Pop lifted a beer bottle to his smiling lips. “I think your mother could use some help.”

Nothing like a visit home to remind you that you aren’t leader of the Ofarians in every way.

“Sure,” Griffin said, sliding around the pinch of furniture cramped into the tiny living room. How his parents had raised nine kids in here, he’d never know. But they’d stuck to their “Keep Ofarians Strong By Population” creed and had never once complained.

Until Griffin had helped overthrow the old Board. Until he’d been given command. Until his father had to take a position in a Primary security firm to pay the bills. After that, the issue of struggling Ofarian classes and touchy Primary integration sat right in the middle of the dining room table along with the mashed potatoes and pork roast. Pop thought that being born into and serving in the Ofarian soldier class was the greatest honor ever, and its reduction in numbers was a slap in the face. He never missed an opportunity to tell Griffin as much.

But then, Pop had never been an assassin.

Despite Griffin’s difference of opinion, they were still his parents.

Griffin leaned into the kitchen, where his mom was spooning green beans into a big bowl. “Hey,” he said, smiling. “Need help?”

She looked up, her cheeks pink from the warm kitchen and hard work. She had the exact opposite coloring of Griffin and his father—her blond hair just starting to gray at age 52, her pale skin barely showing her distinguished wrinkles. “Hi, baby.”

The endearment never failed to make him happy, even though she was only seventeen years older than he was.

She added, “Could you go tell Henry and your sisters that dinner is in fifteen?”

Down the short hallway, Griffin rapped on the door to his sixteen and seventeen year-old sisters’ room, which positively vibrated with the music’s bass. When no one answered, he cracked the door open. Meg, the older one, was teaching the younger, Eve, some sort of dance routine.

“Fifteen minutes,” he shouted. “And turn that down. I could hear it on the street.” They stopped moving, and Meg gave him a classic eye roll. He pointed a finger, grinning. “I could give you nelicoda for that.”

As he suspected, the threat of dosing her with the chemical that neutralized water magic did nothing, just made her roll her eyes even more dramatically as she reached for the volume knob and twisted it down.

“Close the door, will you?” Eve said on his way out.

“Not a chance,” he replied.

The door to Henry’s room—which had once been Griffin’s room, along with two of his brothers—was slightly ajar, and Griffin pushed it all the way open. The twelve year old was perched on the edge of his bed, playing a handheld video game.

Griffin lingered in the doorway, unnoticed. “Hey, you. Whatcha playin’?”

Henry finally ripped his eyes from the screen and looked up. “Griff!”

The kid was a mini-Griffin: thick, dark hair that could never be anything but super short, and brown eyes hooded beneath eyebrows that he would have to get used to being teased about. He dove back into his game, thumbs flying, elbows twitching up and down.

“Armed Battle 4,” Henry said. “Wanna play me? Bet I can kick your ass.”

“Language, dude.” Griffin crossed the carpet to ruffle his littlest brother’s hair. He peered over the small shoulder at the game screen. Humans destroying other humans and aliens that looked nothing like real Secondaries. Guns and knives and chain ropes. Blood and body parts everywhere. Death and glory in the form of points.

I won’t tell anyone. I swear.

I didn’t mean to see that.

Please don’t. Oh, God, no. Please don’t. Please don’t kill me.

Three different Primary voices. All saying essentially the same thing. There’d been nine more who’d never gotten a chance to say or plead for anything before Griffin had taken their lives.

“No, thanks,” Griffin managed to get out, trying to seem as casual as possible. “Hey, can you turn that off for a second?”

Distracted, Henry kept playing, the sounds of death and dying stabbing into Griffin’s brain. His hand shot out, knocking the game to the bedspread. Henry slowly turned to Griffin, and the look on the kid’s face was nothing like the playful defiance Meg had given him. He looked petrified, and Griffin felt guilty.

“Sorry.” Griffin ran a shaking hand through his hair. “I, uh . . .”

“’S’okay.”

Brothers born to such different generations. Henry gazed up at him with nothing but pure adoration and his own heartfelt apology, though he’d done nothing wrong. Griffin sank to the bed and wrapped an arm around the shoulders that had yet to widen into the Aames shape. The boy was still pretty scrawny, all knobby knees and long limbs, but he was on the verge of change. About to come into his body—and his water powers.

The first of the Aames family who didn’t have to become a soldier because the Ofarian class system dictated it.

Be an advertising executive, Henry, Griffin wanted to tell him. Be a writer or an engineer or a janitor. Be something no one tells you to be, and don’t be afraid to go into the Primary world to do it.

Griffin held his brother tight, sending his dreams and wishes through the embrace.

“Um. Griff?” Henry’s voice was muffled, and Griffin realized he’d wrapped his other arm around the kid and had curled Henry’s face into his shoulder.

He let Henry go. “Sorry,” he said again.

The answering grin was pure joy, pure pride. Henry stood up, then dropped into a fighting stance Griffin recognized from Ofarian-sanctioned practice sessions, meant to prepare kids for soldier testing and training. “Want to help me on something? Captain Hansen says I’ve got promise, but I need help on my form and I need to practice, and Meg and Eve just ignore me, even though they’re both really good already. Please, Griff. You’re the best fighter we have.”

Maybe once upon a time.

Sliding his hands to his knees, Griffin said, “I’d rather help you with—”

“Math.” Henry heaved a great sigh as he came up out of the stance. “I know.” He went to his desk and fiddled with a familiar orange textbook. “It’s kind of embarrassing, you know, to be Griffin Aames’s brother and be one of the worst in training.”

“I’m sure that’s not true.” Griffin tried not to let this revelation mess with the filter he’d applied to this boy who had such incredible promise. “I know someone who could make you a genius, though. You’re already smart, but she could send you to the top of your class in math, teach you things about computers you never even knew existed.”

Griffin had been looking for ways to bring Adine, the half-Secondary tech wizard, further into the Ofarian world, and he saw instruction as a possible natural progression. Henry seemed to brighten for about one-point-two seconds, then his face fell, because when you’re twelve, how could math or computers ever compare to being able to throw your opponent and disable his weapon?

Henry shrugged, dejection making the corners of his mouth turn down. He started to throw some punches at an invisible foe that did indeed need some practice.

Griffin rose to his feet. “Dinner’s almost ready.”

“Pop says you’re going back to the Senatus tomorrow.”

Griffin’s eyebrows lifted. Pop had told Henry that? Probably with a side of opinion and a whole helping of doubt. He heard the skepticism in Henry’s voice, echoed straight from Pop’s words, and vowed to change that attitude toward the positive. When Henry’s future—and that of all the Ofarian kids in that generation—shone brighter than any Ofarian’s before him, Griffin would finally lean back and exhale in satisfaction. But not until then.

“I am,” Griffin replied.

“Pop says—”

Griffin’s phone rang, and the vibration made him jump. So few people had access to his personal number, and those who did knew he had dinner with his family every Sunday and that it was cherished time. He pulled the phone from his jeans pocket, stared at the unfamiliar number, and warily answered. “Yeah?”

So strange, to recognize someone’s breath, the light, sharp inhalation before speaking. Even the pause was achingly familiar.

“It’s me.”

As though she were standing right there turning on her magic, a wave of heat washed over him. He fell sideways into the wall, realizing he’d been longing to hear from her these past two months and dreading it at the same time.

Behind him, Henry took up the video game again, and Meg cranked up the volume on the same song she’d played a million times already. In the living room, Pop shouted futilely for silence over the TV.

“Just a second,” he murmured into the phone, pushing off the wall and weaving back around the living room furniture toward the front door. Pop threw him a worried, questioning look and Griffin waved him off, miming that it wasn’t anything. When really, it was everything.

Out in the stairwell, Griffin shut the door on the noise. His toes stuck out over the edge of the very top step and his heart was clobbering the hell out of his ribcage. He closed his eyes and just listened to her breathe on the other end, waiting. It sounded like it was raining where she was, raindrops hitting glass.

“Keko,” he finally said, opening his eyes.

“I always liked the way you said my name.” When they’d been wrapped together in wrinkled, damp hotel sheets, talking until daylight, her voice had sounded much the same. Wistful. Gentle. Feminine. He’d liked the way she said his name, too.

Odd that in the timeline he was running through his head right now, he skipped right over the last time they’d seen each other—two months ago when she’d bolted from that house in Colorado, believing that he had been behind her kidnapping. Hating him.

“You destroyed one of my trucks,” he said, referring to her escape, how she’d spewed a fireball at one of his vehicles and then stolen the other.

“I also tried to start a war.” So matter of fact. Still the trademark Keko confidence, but with a layer of sadness underneath. A twinge of regret.

It unsettled Griffin to hear something so unlike her. He lowered himself to the second step. “I know why you did it.”

She laughed, a short, bitter sound. “So sure of yourself, are you? That you were the face that almost launched a thousand ships?”

He plucked at a stray carpet fiber between his shoes. “You were still angry with me for what happened with Makaha. You felt I hadn’t paid for it, that I wasn’t sorry. You wanted to make me sorry.” When she said nothing and let the rain in the background provide the soundtrack, he added, “And you were as angry as I was about the way things between us ended.”

“I don’t want to talk about that.”

Then what? he wanted to ask, but didn’t. A long silence followed, but he would’ve sat there all night, as long as she didn’t hang up.

“Do you still talk to Gwen?” she asked, the question surprising him as much as her abruptness.

“Of course.”

“I’m not . . . jealous . . . of her anymore.”

His heartbeat picked up speed. His head tried to wrap around the fact that Kekona Kalani had used the word jealous.

“Were you ever?” he asked.

She sighed. “Not the first night we were together. Or the second. But when you told me about her, how you two were once supposed to get married and that you were still working together, I felt . . .” Keko trailed off, and Griffin thought that maybe it was because she didn’t actually know any words for those kinds of emotions. It had been obvious to him she was used to going through life with two speeds: on and off. Everything else in between wasn’t worth a glance, let alone a thought.

His head dropped, and even though she couldn’t see him, he shook it. “You never had any reason to be jealous. She and I . . . what we were supposed to be . . . it wasn’t ever . . .”

His turn to scramble for descriptors.

“What?” she said.

“Love.”

The word hung there. Maybe it could have been love once between him and Keko. When they’d parted in that hotel room, when he’d held her hand as she drove him to the Senatus meeting site for the last time, it had seemed like love might have been an exciting, easy road to begin to travel together. But now?

The divide between them was too great. Years and distance and near wars and ugly cultural mishaps, not to mention their separate races, had filled it in with nothing good. The chasm had just gotten deeper and wider the longer they’d been apart.

“I hear you’re getting what you want,” she said, tonelessly.

I don’t have you. The force of the unexpected thought almost pitched him forward down the stairs.

“And what’s that?” he asked.

“The Senatus. I’m sure this one will go better than the last. I won’t be there to distract you.”

“Keko—”

“You said that if I hadn’t fucked you, none of this would’ve happened.”

Breath hissed out between his teeth. “There were two people in that hotel room. Two adults. Makaha still came after me. Even if you’d told me about the magic rule, I would’ve defended myself. No use rehashing it.”

“But I think about it a lot.” The way her voice turned distant started to frighten him. She didn’t sound like herself at all. “When I roll over in the Common House and see Makaha sleeping, half an arm thrown out to one side, I think about how I could’ve served him better.”

“Great stars, Keko. The Common House?” He remembered all too well her description of the place, what it meant—or didn’t mean—to Chimeran society. Griffin had called the concept barbaric. “They sent you there?”

“Chief did, yeah. He told the people I was wrong about my reasons for going to war. He didn’t tell them about you.” Keko cleared her throat. “Doesn’t matter anymore.”

Now she definitely scared him. Being general had meant everything to her. More, maybe, than the Senatus meant to him. She’d been on track to be the next chief.

Through the line he heard the continuous pelt of rain, then the honk of a car horn and the swoosh of it driving through a puddle on pavement.

Griffin jumped up. “You told me there was only one phone in the Chimeran stronghold.”

And Cat had told Griffin that there were only two or three vehicles in the whole Chimeran valley on the Big Island. No paved roads.

“Where are you?” he demanded.

Still no answer.

“Keko, why are you calling? What aren’t you telling me?”

“I figured out how to serve my people again.” Her voice drifted high and far away. She sounded eerily at peace, strangely at ease for all that she’d been through. “I’m calling to say good-bye to you.”

“Good-bye? What the hell is going—”

“We’ve parted on such shitty terms too many times, Griffin. Just this once, this very last time, I wanted it to be good.”

Panic enveloped him. “Wait—”

She hung up.

He stabbed the redial button, but it just rang and rang and rang.