Drowning in Fire

SIX

Griffin hiked out of the Chimeran valley on the opposite side from which he’d arrived. Even if he’d wanted to hop in a car and close the gap between him and Keko with an engine, there was no way even the best four-wheel drive could have managed on this landscape. It wasn’t vertical, but pretty damn close. He had to pay smart attention to where he put his hands and feet, the land soft from rain, the vegetation sometimes giving out and making him slide.

This terrain had probably been kid’s play to Keko. Her stamina and strength were already something incredible, a gift of her Chimeran blood, but she’d also grown up here, among the birds with their strange songs, and the ferns and vines that looked injected with steroids. A dangerous advantage for her to have, and he dared let himself worry that maybe he’d underestimated how far ahead she’d gotten.

But then, he had a damn good advantage over her.

When he was well away from the valley, heaving for breath on top of a rise that swept back down to the stronghold and even farther away to the ocean, he unzipped his pack and pulled out Adine’s sensor. A slim silver piece with a screen larger than most smart phones, it fit perfectly in one hand. He flicked it on and the screen jumped, coming to life as it slowly scanned and displayed in uneven, colorful circles the altitude pitches of this mountainous land. Red for the tops of the hills that faded into dark blue at sea level. A jumble of hills and crags, canyons and bodies of water.

He could feel the faint tug of the signatures of the collective Chimeran population far off to his right. There, on the screen, in blinking, shifting white, a graphic cloud echoed what he sensed.

Also, a thin, faint, white streak smeared northwest across the screen, zigzagging through the concentric, colorful circles, traveling down the slopes and back up again. Away from the valley. Away from the spot in which he stood now.

Keko.

He could not physically sense her signature anymore, but it was right there in brilliant clarity, in a visual form no Ofarian, or anyone else, had ever laid eyes on before. The perfect trail for him to follow.

He realized, with a cold feeling, that if this kind of technology should ever fall into the wrong hands, it wouldn’t just be Adine who would be compromised. Every Secondary would be vulnerable. He’d have to get her assurance that this particular device—since he had been the one to commission and pay for it—was the only type of tracker in existence.

But . . . one situation at a time.

Griffin stared at the device and memorized Keko’s path, intermittently dropping the screen to look up and match the digital signature trail with the topography spread out before him. Once he had it committed to memory, he turned off the tracker and stashed it in his pack.

He would never catch up with her on foot. Not with her physical ability, not with her two-day lead and knowledge of the landscape, and not with the day’s light starting to die.

But he’d close a good chunk of the distance if he used his magic.

He opened his mouth and filled it with Ofarian words. He threw out his arms, tilted back his head, and opened up his whole being to let his magic take hold. The language of his ancestors, the one that had originated on another world somewhere up among the stars, spun through him, taking his human body. It sank into him, shifting the molecules of his hair and bones and organs to water, to the element that defined his people.

In fiction, Primaries called magic “power.” He remembered that the first time he’d heard that term as a boy, he’d found it odd. But that was before his body had changed, before he’d actually wielded water and discovered how truly special he was. As soon as he matured he understood the synonym for magic as “power,” because that’s exactly how he felt. Powerful. It had never changed for him. Using it this time in the wet Hawaiian forest as a thirty-five-year-old was as humbling and wonderful as the very first time in his parents’ living room at age thirteen.

Opening his eyes, he looked at his arm, a translucent, shimmering appendage that defied the rules of this world. To transform his body entirely into water was simple and demanded little from either himself or his magic, but he needed his clothing and he needed what he carried on his back. That was a different process entirely, and it required an awful lot.

Digging deep, as deep into his powers as was possible, he centered his concentration, and then pushed his magic outward. It shot out from the confines of his body, stabbing into the cotton threads of his clothes and the nylon strands of his pack, and the many solid pieces of the contents inside. He changed everything, from Adine’s signature sensor down to his scant camper’s food.

Everything, water.

But with gravity and the steep up-and-down terrain dotted with more types of plants than he could ever hope to know, pushing a flow of water overland wouldn’t be the best way to go. Unless . . .

It was risky—it would drain his energy even faster; it would put him in danger of losing his magic altogether—but in the end it would help him the most.

He weighed the options. Chance losing Keko and the Senatus, or chance kissing his water magic good-bye.

It was a no brainer. He was strong. He was centered. He was steadfast. Catching up to Keko would keep her alive, give him the Senatus, and create a better future for Henry. Magic was nothing, in the grand scheme of things. Being Ofarian meant more than magic; Cat Heddig had taught him that. If he had to let it go, so be it. The end absolutely justified the means.

So he became vapor.

The magic tugged hard at his senses and his control, but he took hold of it, quick and firm. His body and belongings divided, dissipated, rising up from the earth. Water to steam. He’d only done this a handful of times in his life—the risks of going to vapor were impressed upon young Ofarians very early—but the skill came back easily. It was the energy he worried about. So what was he doing hovering around navel-gazing for?

He grabbed a gust of wind and rode it. The invisible force yanked him from his hilltop and whisked him northwest. Over the steep drop of the land, across the open space, above the trees. Cutting his pursuit time in half, maybe even more.

Still, he wished he had an air elemental with him to speed things up, to direct traffic so to speak. As it was, he had to ride the existing air currents, expelling even more energy to keep himself on track to follow Keko’s trail.

But that wasn’t even the toughest part. It was keeping himself together. That was the danger of this form. If he spread his vapor too thin there was the threat of it snapping, coming apart. Separating. And if an Ofarian in vapor form lost control of his molecules, too much space coming between them, there was no getting them back together again.

The most tame Ofarian campfire stories described water elementals regaining their bodies after going vapor only to find their magic was gone. The most evil, the most disgusting, had Ofarians coming back into human form without limbs or heads.

That wouldn’t happen to Griffin. He refused to believe it would. He was leader of all Ofarians. And his purpose was paramount. Not even all the powers of the universe—this one and the next—could deny him that. He didn’t fucking care if that was arrogant. He had to believe it. He had to put his trust in it.

As a cloud of steam, he crossed streams and soared over tree canopies, darting through leafy sugar cane farms and scaring feral cats. The drain on his energy taunted him. He could feel it seeping away, his magic and his will squeezing every last bit out of every last drop of strength before he reached for the next. But he was gaining ground. If he was lucky, he’d catch up to Keko before nightfall.

Then all of a sudden he lost the trail, one hill looking too much like the other, the vapor form messing with his awareness. He had to go solid again, had to check the signature tracker, or else he’d be doing even more damage by heading too far in the wrong direction.

He hated to do it, to waste energy on retransformation, knowing he’d have to turn vapor all over again, but he did it, coming back into his body on the edge of ranchland, ten or so cows lingering in the distance. It took longer than he’d thought, and when he swung his pack around his body and ripped open the zipper, the tracker wasn’t fully operational.

He panicked, muttering, “No, no, no! Come on, work!”

He zapped it with more magic, pulling out every last particle of water from its surface and innards. When he turned it on, it took a long time for the screen to flicker into color, even longer for it to register his own signature and the dragging line of Keko’s residual path. The images were patchy, and blinked in and out. The device vibrated oddly, like it was struggling to work. Quickly, he memorized what he saw on the screen. Turned out his aim was only a little bit off, and he made his course correction, committing to memory her new direction.

Next time he came back from either water or vapor form, he feared the sensor would not work at all. Never had any tech felt so unstable or glitchy in his hand. Usually Ofarians had to expend extra energy to transform not-living articles, but he’d never had to worry about tech not working after re-transformation. Perhaps it was the specific mix of magic and technology that Adine had used. Perhaps Ofarian powers didn’t play so nicely with whatever it was that she’d injected into the circuitry.

He’d have to bring that up to her when he returned to San Francisco—no doubt her genius mind could come up with a solution—but for now he had to make the blip of information it fed him count.

He turned to water, and then vapor again, his magic trembling with exertion, and headed back out, riding the air. He zoomed around the dark slashes of twilit trees. He curled around wind-wracked bushes bursting with flowers. He rode as many correct currents as he could, and had to fight against others to keep on his designated path. Push and pull, push and pull.

In the middle of the night he could feel his magic dying. Lowering himself to the ground he assumed solid form. He collapsed in sleep for a few hours, shoveled food in his mouth to build up his strength, and then started out again. Broken daylight just cracked the horizon.

He hadn’t wanted to be right, but he was—the tracker didn’t work at all. But he remembered which direction Keko had gone. And he liked to imagine that he could feel her now, that he was getting close enough for his own Ofarian senses to do their thing.

He also took reassurance in knowing that she had to rest, too, and that she didn’t know she was being followed. If he slept four hours to her seven or eight, and wrung as much water magic out of his body as he could, maybe he could catch up to her when night fell again.

But that single dose of food and brief rest wasn’t nearly enough, and his magic only lasted a few hours. His molecules started to shift midair and he had to drag them along like dead weight. In the last few miles, the burn on his psyche and the ability to hold his form together became simply too much. He had to choose: continue to try to hold his vaporized body together and push just a little farther with no guarantee what it would do to his human form, or turn himself solid and go on by foot.

Before he could decide, he lost his grip on the vapor, the last finger of control releasing the final bit of magic. It happened above ground, before he had a chance to lower himself and find his feet. His body coalesced, its solid form sucking in the vapor, and then he fell, snapping through branches and bouncing off huge, arching banyan tree roots, to hit the ground hard.

He tried to get up but he had hardly any energy left. Breath sawed in and out of his lungs. His sight wavered. Every muscle protested movement, but Griffin ignored every complaint.

He hauled himself up, leaned against the banyan tree and got his bearings, and continued after Keko on foot. Weaving, weak, he needed every yard, every step, every inch. He had to keep moving.

And then, when dusk came, he finally sensed her.

She was a prick of light in the corner of his mind, a low and steady buzz setting into his blood, pulling him forward. Though his feet were leaden, he pushed on because there was a good chance her signature could go cold, and without the tracker he’d lose her.

She was moving slowly, methodically. So carefully that even in his exhausted state, he closed some distance between them as dusk gave way to night. As he drew nearer, the sound of a waterfall grew louder, obliterating the otherwise eerie silence that cloaked Hawaiian nights.

He trudged into a thick stand of giant ferns that looked positively prehistoric in scale and shape. Pushing aside the drooping fronds and charging forward, he almost pitched himself into a steep ravine, the dramatic drop-off ending a hundred feet at the stream bed below. Moonlight filled the space between one side of the ravine and the other; it was deep but not so wide across, maybe thirty feet. Peering to the right, it seemed to empty into the violent ocean a good mile or so away. To the left, it carved a big slice out of the dramatically sloped land, but the deepening darkness hid just how far up it went.

On the opposite side of the ravine, scaling the nearly vertical pitch hand over hand, was Keko.

She was a spider, the way she climbed so easily. A spider who breathed fire. Every time she released her hand or bare foot, a quick, brilliant fireball exploded from her mouth, lighting her way, showing her where to grab next. Griffin watched the scene play out in flashes, like an old-time movie, until Keko finally hauled herself up over the lip of the ravine and rolled to her feet.

Keko. Great stars, he’d found her. He’d found her and there was this chasm yawning between them. If he’d had any strength left, he could climb down and then back up in pursuit. If he’d had any magic left, he could swirl into vapor and reform as solid right in front of her on the other side. But he had neither, and though the ravine wasn’t all that wide, it was too far to jump.

Across the ravine, the moonlight played with her skin and settled into the crevices between her muscles. He was just close enough to see it all, just far enough away not to reach. She wore a tank top, loose, frayed denim shorts, and a pack that crossed over one shoulder, the strap lying diagonally across her back. She was sweating, glowing, breathing hard.

And then she turned around. Stared across the open space. Stared hard . . . right at the spot where Griffin crouched behind a fern.

“I know you’re there.” Her voice burned through the darkness. “The question is, how many of you there are, and whether you think you can actually stop me.”

True to Keko, she did not back into the shadows out of sight, but instead came right up to the cliff edge—facing her unknown hunter. The dark hid the fine details of her face, but he could picture her challenging expression, her intense glower.

Griffin pushed aside another fern frond and showed himself. “It’s me,” he said, echoing the simple declaration she’d given him just days ago on the phone. “Just me.”

A terrible pause, filled with silence and the consistent, pleasurable thrum of her signature. He’d never forgotten its song, the way it meshed so well with his mind. Even when he’d come upon her as a captive in that garage, even when she’d been flaring with rage, he’d been unable to deny how the thing she couldn’t even feel herself affected him. It was a layer of connection between them that she’d never truly understand.

Even across the ravine he could almost hear her mind working, considering, questioning, weighing what to do, how to respond.

“Use your fire as light,” he said. “I’ll prove it.”

Another pause, and inside it he feared she’d run. Then he heard her draw a breath—a Chimeran breath, the kind he so vividly remembered Makaha taking—and a gorgeous stream of sunset gold fire spouted from her lips, arcing up and over the ravine, drawing a hot, crackling, radiant line between them. Her mouth closed but the firelight remained, and in that brief moment he witnessed a world of emotion cross that beautiful face he hadn’t seen in two months.

Disbelief and joy. Distress and relief. Resolution and doubt. Then shock. Then fear. Then a clench of her jaw and a narrowing of those lava black eyes, and a reappearance of that anger he knew so well.

She always managed to send him tilting.

Griffin stood his ground, the rainbow of fire hitting its apex and starting to come down right for him. This flame arrow could easily kill him. He had no water magic left to fight it. No strength left with which to dodge it. He had nothing but his own courage, his own purpose. He had to believe that Keko, whose people valued physical strength and bravery above all, would not kill a person in such a way.

The fire’s heat slicked over his skin, getting closer and closer. He took his own deep breath, standing tall, staring across the void at Keko. Those fathomless eyes, as dark as the deepest part of the ocean, pierced him.

The fire died. Sputtered out mere feet above his head.

Something else charged through the twilight between them. Something old and familiar. Something he’d missed terribly.

He opened his arms. “It’s just me, Keko.”

It had been only a second of darkness, and he already ached for the vision of her face.

“How’d you find me?”

“I’m Ofarian.”

She let out a sound of derision that carried effortlessly through the quiet Hawaiian landscape. “Goddamn bloodhound. Forgot about that.”

He doubted that.

“You should be at the Senatus gathering.” He remembered that tone of voice from the garage. The low one, the threatening one. The one that made clear she wouldn’t be anyone’s prey.

So that was it, why she’d followed the Queen’s footsteps at this particular time. She’d thought the chief would be gone at the Senatus and wouldn’t find her note until he returned. And she never, ever expected Griffin to get involved.

“I was,” he said. “Chief and Bane told me you’d disappeared.”

Even in the silent darkness, her surprise was evident. “What did they say?”

“Give me some more fire. I want to see your face.”

She laughed. “Not a chance.”

“You know it’s just me.”

Tiny, twin flashes of flame sparked and died, and he knew it was annoyance manifesting in her eyes, but that was the extent of light she gave him. “What. Did. They. Say.”

He knew what he could tell her, and what he shouldn’t. He knew what might make her pause, and what would send her sprinting in the opposite direction so fast he’d never have a prayer of catching up.

He said, “They told me, in secret, about the Fire Source. That you were going after it.”

It took her a long, long time to answer. “Did they say why?”

“They didn’t have to. Once they told me the story of your Queen, I figured it out.”

He hoped that was cryptic enough to satisfy. She didn’t supply any more.

“Why are you here, Griffin?”

“I’m going to sit. I’m not going anywhere. Don’t run, okay?” He let his knees give out, let his ass hit the dirt. His body released a grateful sigh. If she were to run, this would be the perfect opportunity.

“Why are you here?” she asked again.

“When Chief and Bane told me you’d gone,” he slowly replied, thinking through every word, “I knew they wanted me to go after you. To bring you back.”

She laughed again, and it sounded like sorrow.

“Let me finish. Chief wants me to bring you back because he doesn’t want you to find the Source and rise above him. Bane wants me to find you because you’re his sister and he’s worried. Your fucking clan laws won’t allow him to go after you himself.”

It was the truth. At least part of it. The part she might actually buy. There was so much more—and so much he didn’t understand himself—but dumping it on her at once was the absolute wrong way to go, not when she was poised to take off from the starting blocks and he was exhausted. He couldn’t mention the Senatus’s demands. He couldn’t even mention what Aya had told him about the Source’s danger. She would despise the first and scoff at the second, thinking that Aya’s warning was just a ploy to get her to back off.

He added, “But that’s not why I came.”

She still hadn’t moved, her body a dimly lit statue at the lip of the ravine. “So tell me.”

The stars were incredible out here, he thought, then realized that he couldn’t be sure if the stars he saw were actually those in the sky or the ones sparkling at the edges of his vision.

“I came for you.” Fatigue had a way of pulling out the truth.

“No, you didn’t.”

“You don’t deserve this end. Throwing yourself into the Source in the hopes that it might give you a name after your death. It’s fucking stupid, Keko. I’m just going to say it.”

“And what if that name is ‘Queen’?”

“Pride is internal. So is strength. Everything else is bullshit.”

“You’re such a fucking boy scout, such an Ofarian, always thinking you know what’s best for everyone else. You’re not Chimeran. You couldn’t possibly understand.”

“I understand you want to lead. Remember when you told me that? I understand that your one dream is gone, and you think this is the only way to get it back.”

“You don’t know anything.” It came out sounding sad and detached, which was unnervingly like how she’d sounded when she called him. “Because you were given what you never really wanted. You were just handed my dreams.”

Ah, now he got it. She was resentful over what he’d told her in the Utah hotel room about how he’d reluctantly taken the Ofarian leadership.

“That would never appeal to you, though,” he said, “just being given something that big. It’s not in your blood. You’d still find something to fight for. But this . . . this”—he waved a hand around the ravine—“is not worth it.”

“You are fighting, too. Don’t tell me you aren’t. All that stuff you told me about, the class system and such, how much you love your people. That’s why you want the Senatus—”

She cut herself off and the warm Hawaiian night suddenly went frigid.

“That’s it. The Senatus sent you to stop me.”

“No.” The denial came too easily.

“Don’t fucking lie to me. You have some sort of deal with them, don’t you?”

This was going south, fast. To admit to that would only lose her. In more ways than one. To deny it would at least buy him some more time. And that’s exactly what he needed.

“You’re wrong, Keko. I’m here because I want you on this Earth. I’m here because there are ways other than dying to get what you want.”

She said nothing, but he knew she still didn’t believe him. Suddenly he was grateful she’d refused him any more light, because he couldn’t be certain what his face showed.

“You know why I think you called me?” he asked softly, his voice easily carrying.

“Enlighten me.”

“I think it was your way of asking for help.”

“Ha!”

“You’ve never had to ask anyone for help in your entire life. You don’t even know how. But you were lost and sad and you knew I would come for you if I thought you needed me.”

“I don’t need you.”

He could have imagined it, but her voice tripped over the word “need.”

“No, maybe you don’t need me. But deep down, you’re glad I’m here. You’re relieved your phone call worked.”

She started to back away and his stomach sank. He tried to find his feet but his strength wouldn’t let him.

“You’re not going to catch me.” She toed farther away from the ravine edge, her dusky skin melding with the darkness. “You’re not going to stop me. This is my name. This is my fight.”

“Keko—”

Then she turned and ran into the night forest. No amount of calling out brought her back.