What kinds of organizations had the means, motive, and opportunity to abduct a freshly-minted flamebearer directly off the eastbound M4 Motorway in broad daylight?

The list was depressingly long. The Vaetna could, in theory, although that went against their modus operandi. At the other end of the spectrum—at least in the public perception—were the shadowy paramilitary groups and cults oriented around the reappropriation of Frozen Flame shards, to use for themselves or to sell to the highest bidder. However, between the two and often conspicuously overlooked by the media lay the NATO Paranatural Control Task Force. Ostensibly, the PCTF’s main job was to crack down on unauthorized magic and help handle rogue infernos from flamefall gone sour, from a more established “world police” geopolitical position than the young rogue nation that was the Spire. They were actually pretty competent at that, too. They were styled as the peacekeepers for this era of magic; their nickname had gone from “PCs” to “PeeCees” and at last to “Peacies.”

But they were also the American hegemony’s apparatus for hunting and harvesting the flame which fed magical research in the West. An ugly, ugly thing, not only responsible for extralegal black-baggings of flamebearers but also known to have fingers in the pie of basically any Western research in magic outside the Spire. In the UK, they could and did operate with near-impunity, being largely above the law “as a matter of international security” and other familiar buzzwords about counterterrorism and so on, the signs of a broader slide toward fascism that the Spire’s emergence had only blunted. They were also, arguably, more well-resourced than the Spire in terms of manpower and funding, if less gifted in magic by an order of magnitude—and critically, more physically local around here than any Spire assets. They actually had a base right next to Heathrow as part of a five-year-long Mexican standoff with the Vaetna—but also to intercept people doing exactly what I was: fleeing for the haven that was the Gate.

All this was not to say the PCTF was particularly evil; their bones came from the then-young initiatives that had helped me recover from the inferno that had taken my dad, and that was still a core part of their role, an international response to an indiscriminate natural disaster. But the rumors persisted, half-verified accounts of facilities where uncooperative flamebearers had their flame extracted and used. The positive spin on it was that research needed resources, and not all research was strictly for weapons; advances in medical magitech had been revolutionary even in only six years. Advances mostly limited to the rich, though.

The important part was that at the moment, they were a mortal threat to my freedom and probably my life.

To their credit, the way they got me was remarkably non-disruptive to the various travelers and commuters sharing the motorway with us. No car chase or helicopters appearing overhead, no bullet splattering the cabbie’s grey matter against the dashboard. He simply pulled off the freeway and killed the engine. I protested, but I already knew what was happening, and couldn’t really blame him despite the spike of adrenaline entering my blood. It wasn’t proper mind control—that didn’t exist—just a telepathic broadcast of orders backed up by the implicit threat of violence. After a moment, they targeted me too.

“FLAMEBEARER.” THIS IS A PCTF RESCUE MESSAGE. EXIT THE VEHICLE AND LAY ON THE GRASS. COOPERATE AND YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED.

Rescue. I would have laughed if I wasn’t busy trying to not hyperventilate. “Cooperate and you will not be harmed” was gallows humor on the forums regarding the treatment of flamebearers. It was terrifying to have those words now directed at me. All of these organizations, sans the Spire and a handful of equally esoteric outliers, intended to harm us; it was just a matter of when and how. Maybe they’d directly take the flame from my soul, maybe they’d just lock me up and use me as a battery for blood mages to wield their craft. Maybe they’d be civil, offer me tea and a chance to work for them—but I would be party to those first two options. I liked to think of magic as amoral, a tool to be used for good or ill—even flamefalls were just natural disasters, as random as being hit by a meteor—but even I had to admit the breadth of evidence that the externalities were measured in the suffering of people with whom I now shared a label.

I stayed in the car, not so much an act of defiance as simply being overwhelmed by panic. What could I do? I hadn’t been idle while riding in the backseat of the cab; I had scrawled some more glyphs that might plausibly aid my escape, but I had close to zero confidence in using them in an actual life-and-death combat situation. Even if I could control the magic well enough in the moment, could I—would I—kill somebody?

REPEAT: EXIT THE VEHICLE AND LAY ON THE GRASS. COOPERATE AND YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED.

I knew I wouldn’t really get the chance to find out whether I was up to the task of murder, face-to-face. If I didn’t comply, they’d probably hit me with some combination of subsonics and magic to make me pass out—more likely comatose—and then just grab me anyway, standard crowd control stuff. That they hadn’t already done so was probably more of an indication that they weren’t quite in position yet, rather than of unwillingness or mercy. That meant that I had a currently closing window to try to make a break for it on foot, or maybe even hijack the cab. The former would lead to a foot chase through the woods flanking this stretch of road, and led us down the rest of the flowchart anyway. The latter was objectively insane.

So—other options. Could I hide? They already had a lock on me in some way, and any additional use of magic would just make more ripple by which to track me, so no. Negotiation? Probably not. This tended to only end one way, barring a fight or interference—

My phone buzzed. I scrambled to get it out, hands shaking.

skychicken: stall 3 min

I stared at the message, seriously lost for words. I looked around, out the car’s windows, as though expecting to see someone relaying my situation. Stall for what? Had he managed to call the goddamned Vaetna? My mental machinery restarted after a very long moment—precious time lost—and jumped into top gear. How could I stall? I was above using the poor cabbie as a hostage—again, not that I was really sure I could bring myself to do that in the first place. In fact—

“You should probably get out.”

I was a little surprised that he hadn’t yet, actually, if only because in his position I would have also been thinking along the lines of hostages. It had happened before. He twisted in his seat and looked at me, a gravelly face for an equally gravelly voice.

“That’s what I ought to tell you.”

I blinked at him. A strange exasperation rose in me, separate from the life-and-death panic. “Fuck no. What’s it to you?”

“You’ll steal my car.”

He was visibly uncomfortable at the prospect of having a walking inferno in his car. I decided to press on that. “Do you want me to take you hostage?”

He flinched. “The Peacies would save me.”

Ridiculous, to be honest—how much faith did he have in them? They weren’t even here yet. I could kill him right now, in theory, not that I would. I could, however, go for intimidation. I held up my arm—not the one with the spear-mark. My right, the one with the old burn scars wrapping around it like a leathery glove, almost to the elbow. I showed it to him and did my best snarl. “How do you think I got this?”

The intended effect was to make myself appear as some kind of hardened veteran flamebearer who had been doing this for years, rather than the terrified, somewhat overwhelmed kid, flametouched not an hour ago. It was pretty much this or attempt to pull out the spear in the confined space of the car—patently ridiculous, or spend precious mental energy on weaving a simple spell just for intimidation.

It did the trick. He scrambled out of the car, and I locked the doors behind him and refocused on the plan, pulling out my notebook and scrawling another glyph. Another first-order fully representable in 2D, another game-changer application of magic that laughed at the laws of physics. The lattice was a square inlaid with dots that concentrated toward the corners, surrounded by some parabolic swoops. I tore out the page and sat on it, then yanked the fire from my chest like I was starting a lawnmower.

Fuck me, that hurt. I was reasonably sure I had actually pulled a muscle or something. I made an ugly groaning noise as the flame twisted into the rough twine of lattice-able magic, and I pushed it into the glyph. I hoped that eventually the pain would become more manageable with practice—but at least the actual weaving was almost trivial when I had an actual glyph upon which to structure the lattice. As it was, the spell went off fine. What had I cast?

{AFFIX}

In essence, I had essentially glued my arse to the car. Stupid, low-tech, but a pretty potent metaphysical anchoring. It wasn’t like sewing my jeans to the car seat, it was a more fundamental attachment of ‘me’ to ‘the car’. They would have to either break the magic or physically cut apart the car to extract me; making me pass out wouldn’t undo it. Or they could torture me until I gave in and undid the magic on my own. I shoved aside the unpleasant thought; there was no time.

REPEAT: EXIT THE VEHICLE AND LAY ON THE GRASS. COOPERATE AND YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED. THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING.

Fuck off. I didn’t know telepathy, but spite cost me nothing…though I probably wouldn’t be brave enough to say that in person if it came to that. How long had it been? A minute?

Back to the magic. That had been the easy part. Next, defense. Arguably, if this worked, the butt-gluing was mostly redundant, but this one was going to hurt and I felt better having something already in place for if I passed out.

To put my spear into my arm, I had {COMPOSED} the concept of ‘the spear’ onto the concept of ‘the (blood-space) on my arm’. Very abstract, very useful, very flexible—very difficult and dangerous to do on objects you’re currently sitting inside. Folding matter and space like that is the kind of thing it’s hilariously easy to kill yourself with if you make a mistake, telefragging some object directly inside you or shifting a slice of the space your body was occupying. I had needed blood magic to help stabilize the process the first time, creating a gap in my body for the spear to fill.

I glimpsed motion in the rearview mirror and glanced up to see an SUV pulling off the road behind me, black and white with unmistakable Peacies yellow accents. Fuck. I had no time to draw another glyph, and I didn’t trust myself to do this blind with the Frozen Flame alone; blood magic would again have to make up the difference. I could live without a few toes, maybe. Easy enough for the Spire to replace. That was a grim thought, but I was in full panic mode at this point, and the adrenaline would hopefully blunt the worst of the pain. There were better ways to do this with a more complex series of glyphs or more refined control of the thread, but I had the capacity for neither and no more time.

I pictured the lattice and started to weave my fraying twine, in my clumsy and unfamiliar way, sloppy and inefficient, working blind, remembering hundreds of times I had seen Vaetna and VNTs do this with elegance and trivial ease in luminous silk. I heard a car door slam shut behind me—forced it out of my mind. Keep weaving, imagine the funnel. Wrap it, pull it around. A tap on the window.

“Please step out of the car, sir.”

I looked at the PCTF operative, more military in appearance than police. Actually, it was more like an exoskeletal bomb suit, two and a half meters tall, aglow with magical enhancement and reinforcement. Something designed to withstand the full force of what I could throw at him, a stripped-down version of what had once been used to fight Vaetna. The precaution was reasonable, too; to him, I must have looked like a wild animal, hunted, cornered, face aglow in the white light of the thread I wove, some crazed spell surely intended to burn us all to ash. A manic grin spread across my face as the power of the Frozen Flame surged through me. Decidedly uncharacteristic, but in that moment, I held the cards.

“Make me.”

And I buried the car. Down, down—not that far down. Four meters from where it had been? Enough to be well and truly buried, but not into the bedrock or anything, nor deep enough that the soil would cause the windows or roof to collapse—I hoped. For a moment, my connection to the lattice made me aware that a dirt copy of the car sat where the real one just had. Then the magic broke, and it crumbled.

As did I. Screaming pain. I howled in the claustrophobic darkness, completely blind. Hot tears ran down my cheeks, burning compared to the icy aftershock of the magic pulsing through my head, one of the many chaotic side effects of magic cast with no regard for ripple. If that had been all, it would have been fine, compared to the alternative. But that had not been all—I had paid a far higher blood price than I had expected. I had sort of ‘offered’ three toes on my right foot, prioritizing them to be severed as a more abstract price than the direct mechanical function that the cut on my arm had served. I had miscalculated the price.

The magic had taken fully half of my right foot. All five toes and the ball of the foot, gone, blood pouring into the sock already. Some hazy part of my mind, drowning under the pain, observed that I would go into shock and bleed out if I didn’t deal with it right now. Once, seven years ago, I had been faced with a similar do-or-die in the face of pain so severe it obliterated all else—and I had failed.

Not this time. I refused. Despite the agony and the moaning sobs of incoherent suffering, I yanked the shoe off, and then the sock, slick blood coating my hands. I couldn’t bring myself to feel at the wound to determine the nature of the damage; I might pass out if I touched it, and then I was dead.

The bleeding had to stop. I called upon the Frozen Flame once more to perform its most basic nature. I focused through the pain, on the pain, demanding fire, so fundamental it had no glyph, no word in magic. I blubbered anyway.

“Fire. Give me fire.”

Nothing but my ichor trickling into the darkness. Had I just killed myself? All that to bleed out down here in the dark before any rescue could arrive?

“Flame. Please. Make it—go—away.”

It had killed my father, marred my body with its passage. It had been so beautiful in spite of that, transcendent, the spark of obsession. All those years holed up in my room, learning, idolizing, hoping—and now it had returned to me, fulfilled my dream. The flame had come to lift me up from the dark, after all I studied and proved that I would be able to wield it like nobody else. I was worthy.

But now, in this moment, when I needed it most—no fire came. This box was the same as things had always been. There was only me, begging for flame in the darkness. This had always been my destiny, an ignominious death as my flesh failed beneath me, true magic taunting me from beyond my grasp, unfettered by glyphs to bind it. At least let it end in fire, like how it had taken Dad.

“You can’t leave me like this. You—can’t. You chose me.”

The Frozen Flame didn’t respond. It didn’t care, of course.

Something animal inside me turned to seething rage, fueled by the torment and my looming mortality—and a sense of betrayal. How could it turn its back on me now? I flailed for the only thing that had allowed me to escape the pain before, when I had been flametouched—it brought more pain as the flesh was torn from my arm. But what was one more match in the inferno? I raised the spear as I had before. The darkness was claustrophobic, but also made the space around me seem vast and endless. Perhaps I wasn’t holding the real spear at all, and this was within my mind once again.

It all made a horrific, twisted kind of sense, the same awful perspective from before. The Frozen Flame was not an ally, barely even a weapon. It was an animal to be tormented, corralled, put to work. It struck people at random, and it was kill or be killed, control or be controlled. Except it did not fear death as we did—it would find a new Flamefall, a new host. It feared only pain. In that, it was like me. No wonder the PCTF treated us how it did.

My thoughts at the time weren’t nearly so rational or organized; I only made these connections after. I just wanted the pain to stop, and the most primitive part of me understood that inflicting pain—revenge—in turn upon this thing inside me would make that happen. So I seized my fate and stabbed.

Then, and only then, did I hear them again.

Doesn’t know any better—pain begets pain—why won’t you trust us?

Trust?

Flame burst from me, lighting up the interior of the car, the pooled blood reflecting an unearthly white above the crimson, casting flickering shadows impossibly dark. It had not ignited from my chest—the scars on my right arm were the source, a gauntlet of fire, a surefire sign that our first encounter seven years ago was somehow related to now. In that bleaching light, I saw the source of the agony: the front of my foot had been perfectly severed, as though sliced in a singular stroke by the blade of some chthonic arbiter. I hesitated for one eternal second, the animal part of me now cowering and cringing at the prospect of even more suffering. Then I grabbed the stump, and every sensation was overwhelmed by burning. I’m sure I screamed; the Peacies up above might have even heard it through meters of earth. Then everything went dark—well, even darker—and unconsciousness took me.

I would have died of oxygen deprivation, down there in the pitch blackness of the metal tomb I had made for myself, had Sky’s promised aid not come. I was obviously not aware of what had happened up above, nor how I was extracted from the dirt. But I was indeed rescued.

Just not by the Spire.

—

I stand at the edge of a vast body of water. The surface is frozen; there is movement below, brief sparks of light shooting across the depths. The shore I stand on is sandy—I turn and see a forest, trees impossibly tall, continuing out toward the mist shrouding either horizon, held back only by the narrow stretch of beach that matches it all the way across. The mist penetrates the trees as well, a gloom to confound all who enter.

The forest has no name, but I know the sea, so I walk off the beach and onto the ice. I look down through it. It is clear, and shiny, and I see my reflection staring back up at me. We lock eyes for a moment, and I wonder how thick the ice is, how hard I would have to strike it to break the barrier between us. A flicker illuminates him from below, another light from the depths that vanishes as quickly as it appeared. I return to scanning the horizon for something, anything. But there is only the sea, the beach, and the forest. Even the sky is empty, no sun or clouds.

Something thumps below my feet. I look down again and realize half of my foot is missing, bleeding onto the ice. It is a distant, abstract realization, not one of pain or even concern. The blood dyes the ice red, seeping down and through and into the water. The lights below come closer, circling, inspecting, snapping at one another. Not all are the same. Some are coils of luminous silk, others more like schools of pinpoints swarming together. A few are not creatures of their own at all, but merely appendages of something else, sent up from the inky depths to investigate.

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Another thump, and the ice cracks.

—

I awoke in a bed, as I usually did. Not my bed, though, a hospital bed. A nice hospital bed, the kind of high-tech ICU that had benefited the most from magic’s arrival in the world. IVs and monitoring equipment shared room with bandages inscribed with complex interlinked glyphs, a few I recognized as second- or third-order as the fogginess of sleep retreated, things like {SUSTAIN} and {REVITALISE}. So whoever had me also had access to Frozen Flame magic. That boded somewhat poorly; I would have rather woken up in an entirely mundane hospital—or a ditch. I didn’t have the energy to be afraid.

Nothing hurt, which was testament to both the magic and the morphine. I gingerly began to move my limbs, which were being somewhat stubborn, asserting that they preferred to remain where they were. I eventually managed to extract my left arm and checked my forearm—my spear was there, which led me to a few observations.

First, I wasn’t cuffed or anything. I guessed they either trusted me to not cause a mess or trusted the magic to keep me from causing a mess. Fortunately for everyone, I wasn’t feeling very inclined to cause a mess until I knew who had me.

Second, they hadn’t siphoned the Frozen Flame from me, which filled me with…a modicum of relief. There had been a real chance that they could have just torn the magic from my soul and then released me back into the wild like a shark being hunted solely for its fin, forever crippled. Maybe that would have been better for the both of us. I hadn’t forgotten, this time.

Third—why was the IV drip labeled in Japanese? Some pieces began to come together in my brain, analytical and historical mind taking the stage while the emotional centers were exhausted.

When the Frozen Flame had first made its presence known, the immediate cultural comparison had been to superpowers. The Vaetna’s appearance and general disposition had compounded this, until they had made it quite, quite clear that for all their benevolence and general goodwill they were not classic paragon superheroes. They were associated with the Spire as a political entity in a way that the idealized superhero wasn’t—plus the armor and focus on bladed weaponry, it might be more accurate to call them knights. Of course, that didn’t stop people like me from being rabid fans, especially if we deeply identified with the Spire’s cause.

For other groups that harnessed the Frozen Flame, the zeitgeist had shifted somewhat. Cults cropping up around or otherwise worshiping Flamebearers were relatively common, but stranger groups also existed, especially outside of the Western metaculture. In this case, Japan had its own reference points for superhuman abilities and magic, and that had had very direct consequences on the way the Frozen Flame was both viewed and harnessed in east Asia.

Four years ago, a flamebearer and an anonymous Japanese billionaire had come to an agreement…or at least, it was assumed to be an agreement. Who knew what really had gone on behind closed doors. Regardless, they had given up their flame, distributed it, and in doing so had created—

A team of magical girls.

It hadn’t really been creation ex nihilo; the girls had been doing it since more or less the start of the age of magic, during the chaotic period of the firestorms, when there were few central organizations equipped to deal with flamefall. This had just made it official, given them resources and real notoriety. The Vaetna had generally been supportive and congratulatory, as had the world at large. It had all the elements of good PR—a willing sacrifice of personal power toward a greater goal, a collective ideal that was pretty unilaterally positive and emphasized doing good in the world, and a generally cleaner image than the Spire’s complicated and at times bloodsoaked humanitarianism-by-the-sword stance.

They were called Lighthouse, or Todai. Confusingly, ‘Todai’ was also a name for Tokyo University, but that had been part of the pun they had been founded on—all five members had been Tokyo U students at the time.

What was I doing in their medical ward? I felt it was a fairly safe bet that these had been Sky’s contact, which raised its own questions about how well-connected he was. Speaking of which, I fumbled for my phone, and was further relieved that it hadn’t been confiscated. I had…a lot of unread messages. I opened up the chatroom.

ezzen: I live, apparently.

starstar97: thank fuck

starstar97: its been a mess out there

starstar97: prove its you! whats the peak ripple ever recorded from one of heungs dives?

skychicken: lay off star, it’s them

ezzen: 96-orange over 3-silver. Do I need to also recount the pulse?

starstar97: yep its them lol :DDDDDD

starstar97: sky said you didnt make it to the spire

starstar97: but hes been very cagey about where you DID end up

ezzen: Can I share?

skychicken: youre as safe as youre gonna get other than the spire. so its your call

ezzen: Ok :D

ezzen: hold on theres a funny bit i can do

ezzen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_infernos_in_Japan#Blue_spark_incident_(Ao_hibana_jiken,_青火花事件)

starstar97: youre at fucking todai

starstar97: ???????

starstar97: what the flying fuck

Star was a huge fan of Lighthouse.

starstar97: sky this is 100% your fault somehow

skychicken: guilty as charged

skychicken: not to overly show my hand but sapphire owes me a favor or two :P

starstar97: :ooooo you literally never get less mysterious

starstar97: you doin ok e?

ezzen: Mostly…Hold on. I need to check something.

I slowly, gingerly, tried to move my toes, confirming what I had felt and seen in that momentary firelight.

ezzen: Let’s say I could be doing better.

ezzen: I am now the proud owner of only 15 digits.

starstar97: O.O

moth30: oh cool ez is alive lemme backscroll

moth30: what the fuck

starstar97: e what does that mean

moth30: WHAT THE FUCK

ezzen: Ok so to summarize

ezzen: I got caught by the PCTF

ezzen: Escaped, but had to do a liiiiiiiittle sanguimancy.

ezzen: And lost the front half of my right foot.

ezzen: Not entirely sure how I got here, actually.

moth30: feels like you should be more fucked up about this

ezzen: Pretty sure that’s the drugs. We’ll see o.O

starstar97: DDDDDD:

ezzen: Hold on, nurse is here.

At least, I assumed that the short, slender robot was the nurse. I wondered which Radiance’s magic was animating this one.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Colliot.”

Great, they knew my last name. And presumably everything else about me.

“Dalton is, uh, fine.”

I was more than a little thrown off by its appearance. In a mercifully non-anime way, its design was sleek and sexless, and its movements had a grace and deft touch that I usually associated with the Vaetna. The smooth, curved panel on the front of its head displayed a distinctly feminine and Japanese face.

“Please call me Ebi. How are you feeling?”

The question felt a little moot; Ebi was surely linked directly into my various vital monitors. I supposed the question was more of a qualitative one.

“Not in much pain. Two out of ten? A bit miffed about my foot. How long have I been here?”

“Seventeen hours, plus two hours in transit from where you were recovered.”

Two hours was a weird number, too long for a single teleport but too short for most conventional transport. It meant either a hypersonic airlift—something Todai probably did have access to—or more likely some kind of series of telehops, given how quickly they had gotten to me in the first place. Britain to Tokyo was not a trivial journey either way. I frowned. That was a lot of resources to spend on one flamebearer, especially now that I had come down from that pain-induced sense of importance and feeling that I was chosen. How much influence did skychicken wield? For a moment I entertained the idea that he was the secret billionaire who had started Lighthouse, but I really felt like we would have seen more hints of that in the years of knowing one another. I stowed that line of suspicion for now.

“And how was I recovered? Or, I guess—why was I taken here and not the Spire?”

“Politics.”

It—she—had said it with such bite that I was absolutely certain she was fully sentient. Had the singularity happened and nobody had noticed?

“You’re—a real AI.”

“Maybe!”

Great, she was screwing with me. A new voice came from outside the room. “I’m here too!”

A woman bounded into the room. I identified her instantly—Hina Suzuki, Radiance Sapphire. Not in uniform or transformation, but still stylishly dressed in a blouse and skirt, hair done up in a way that kept most of it out of the way but still framed her face with soft brown hair. Gorgeous, unsurprisingly; all of the Radiances were distractingly attractive. It was part of their brand. The biggest giveaway of her identity was the impossibly brilliant azure of her eyes, so intense it made the blue sky outside the window grey by comparison. The mark of white ripple, maybe, like the sense of instability Sahan projected onto everything around him by contrast.

She engulfed Ebi in a huge hug and then practically zipped around the room, inspecting everything, before crouching at the foot of my bed, a puppy ready to play. The voice didn’t quite match the face—there was a layer of huskiness, like she was speaking in a lower register than she was used to.

“How’s your foot?”

“It’s…not?”

The vibrant energy vanished from her for a moment, and she gave a single, solemn nod. Then she returned to practically bouncing around the room.

“We’ll work on that. So, so, so soso—you want to know what happened, right? Here’s how it went. We all saw the Flamefall, right? The ripple was so weird, probably ‘cause it went through the camera to hit you, and then the second one a little later was probably that binding on your arm—that’s cool, by the way, you should show Ai when she’s around so she can do it right—and right after I got a message from J—from our friend to come pick you up. I had to dig you out, y’know!”

She paused, tilting her head. The moment dragged on, my habitual inability to maintain eye contact warring with the way my gaze was drawn toward those sapphire irises. She was standing next to my bed, now, seeming entirely disinterested in continuing to speak. It was so awkward—I had to say something.

“Uh, sorry. Didn’t have other ideas.”

She immediately began speaking again. Apparently it had been my turn?

“It was neat! I mean, you would have been screwed without me, but—anyway I was going to take you to the Spire, but then the ripple went all BOOM! and then there were Vaetna and then a Peacie gunship showed up and they almost started shooting at each other but then Sani showed up and started yelling about more flamefalls and—”

She stopped. Squinted at me. “I’m going too fast.”

I rubbed my face. The Vaetna had shown up after all? “Please back up.”

I meant it both in terms of the events and the fact that she had been progressively inching toward me as she talked until she had just been a couple inches away. I was too drugged and rattled from the day’s events—yesterday’s, rather—and some of the other things she had just said to really be embarrassed by the closeness, but she was…a lot.

“Okay, from the beginning. How did you get to where I was so fast?”

She waved her hand. “I was in Dublin for a thing. Wait—you’re not supposed to know that. I didn’t say anything.” She grinned. Ebi facepalmed, a soft clunk. “You’re here because the Spire is kind of a little bit at war now. Maybe.”

I chewed on this for a bit. Still not quite getting an emotional response. Maybe I had broken something inside me when I had used the Flame again, when I had realized the cruelty of what I was doing.

“As in…Dubai levels of ‘at war’? Raising levels?”

“Kinda? Ripple has been going crazy all day. Sani basically said to take you back here until it blows over.”

I nodded slowly at that. This was the second-best outcome, really. “Other flamefalls?”

She bounced, nervous. “Three, right after yours.”

“Where?”

She shook her head, reddish-brown hair going everywhere, not unlike a dog shaking itself dry. “Doesn’t matter. You do.”

I rubbed my face again. She looked expectantly at me—I realized she was prompting me. “How do you mean?”

“You’re unprecedented! Through the camera? Crazy stuff. The Vaetna want to know, too. Everyone does. But that’s for later. For now, get better! We’ll give you a real checkup, for your Light—uh, Flame. We’ll figure out something for your foot, too.”

I processed this. “Alright…the Flame stuff I understand, and I’m grateful, but…even the foot? Taking me across the world? Why?”

Flamebearers were important, valuable, but not that important. She tapped her chin theatrically. Something glinted in her eyes.

“Hmmmm. Why do you think, Ezzen?”

I froze. My mouth went dry. In some ways, I had always hoped for this moment, to be recognized face-to-face for my knowledge and passion for magic and the Vaetna. But the thing leaning over my bed was not a Vaetna, for all the similarities. She had suddenly changed completely, from the excitable puppy to something else. She grinned and leaned in real close. Too close. Her breath tickled my lips. There was something coiled and vicious behind her eyes. Terror gripped me.

“Because we know who you are, and that makes you interesting.”

I shivered, the sudden fear having jarred my emotions back into operation. Her smile was more like bared teeth, fangs for tearing into flesh and crushing bone. I had never seen those in any video or photo of her. Something at the back of my brain recategorized her as a hyena, not a dog. Where had Ebi gone? How could she leave me alone with this…thing? She went on.

“You’ve got magical knowledge on the same level as any of us, and newly come into your Light. And you’ve already passed the two hardest tests that any of us face: you’re still human and still free.”

I wasn’t even sure she was human, for all she wore a woman’s shape. Too many things were just a little off, this close. Aside from the teeth, her eyes were a bit too big; the edges of those blue irises looked almost stitched.

“And you’ve already had close contact with the Flame once. Sorry about your dad, I guess.” There was some real pity in her voice, there, but then the predatory mania returned. “And the way you did it! Stabbing yourself to master the inferno? The blood magic! Cauterizing yourself—controlling your Light directly! Do you have any idea how good at this you could be, with time, with training?”

She practically purred that last word, advancing further on me, sensual and nightmarish despite having never lost that playful edge to her voice. I was paralyzed, prey before something full of teeth. I had felt safer bleeding in the dark. The way I had hurt my Flame to control it, the grand and horrible revelation that this was what magic was for us—this side of her seemed a natural fit for that. She advanced on me even further to whisper in my ear, her body heat a silent temptation—of what? She could kill me in an instant, if she wanted.

“You matter now. The ripple says so, and everyone will know by the time you’re out of here. The war isn’t about you, not yet—but it will be, eventually, once they figure out who you are. You’re a bunch of special things in one package. It’s so exciting.”

Something clicked inside my brain. Why would the Vaetna not have simply taken me back to the Spire? They had a standing policy of asylum for Flamebearers, and it had been obvious I was headed there. And with the way she was acting, this chilling demeanor beneath her peppy veneer—the war? Was I really worth so much? Taken together—the fear sublimated into action, a need to defend myself. My spear was in my hand, the point at her throat, blood dripping from my trembling arm onto the sheets.

“Get away from me.”

It was an empty threat, realistically speaking, but she shed the predatory energy in an instant. She leaned back, cocking her head at the speartip, a friendly dog with too much energy once more.

“Ooh, look at that! Actual…” she snapped her fingers, searching for the word, the first time she had seemed anything but completely fluent. “Ripple warping? That sounds right.” Her eyes ran down the haft to look at the gash on my arm. For a moment, the monster was back again, looking at the wound downright amorously. “Seriously, ask Ai to fix that for you. We can get a proper tat binding for that in like half an hour.”

“You abducted me.” I practically choked the words out.

She shrugged. “What? Nah. It was a rescue!”

“Then why not the Spire?” Sani wouldn’t have told her to take me here.

“I told you. You’re Ezzen! You have so much more potential than some random office worker. Even if you weren’t the guy who wrote all those papers, or if you weren’t the first case of a second-contact flametouched—I’d still want to get ahead of the game. We could train you up, make a Radiance out of you.”

What?

Seriously, what?

I had always wanted to wield magic; formal training of any kind would be a dream come true. But the fantasy had always been to do so with the Spire, as a Vaetna. Joining another group, even one with a good reputation like Lighthouse, had hardly even entered my mind. I wanted smooth carapace and the dance of blades, not ribbons and heart-shaped explosions. That was Star’s fantasy. And besides, Radiances—that was, the members of Lighthouse—were magical girls. Was this all a hilarious misunderstanding? I certainly didn’t look particularly masculine. I half-lowered the spear.

“You. Um. You did do your reading on me, right?”

“Dalton Colliot, 20 years old. Born to Samantha and Carpenter Colliot in Bristol, UK. Lived in Philadelphia between the ages of 8 and 13, then went back to Bristol after father died by inferno. Goes by ‘Ezzen’ online, Vaetna superfan and magical expert. What did I miss?”

“Male.”

She let out a sigh, breezy, as though this fact of my identity was an inconvenience of circumstance. Like a traffic jam, or finding that you were out of milk. “So?”

“I figured that’d matter.”

“Not as much as you’d think. You wouldn’t be the first.”

It wasn’t much of an offer—they essentially had me hostage. Did the Vaetna know? They must—maybe that was what she had meant about the war, or maybe that was purely a function of my existing level of magical knowledge. I had to get out of here. But at the same time…the Vaetna weren’t taking new members; it was unclear if that was a ‘couldn’t’ or ‘wouldn’t’. Lighthouse apparently was, the gender thing notwithstanding. This was an opportunity to live a version of my dream, if a slightly altered one.

She trotted toward the door, stopping to turn those too-blue eyes on me again. “Also, seriously, if absolutely nothing else, please tell me you’ll get Ai to look at that. Blood’s a great look on you, but that just comes off as amateurish. You were in a hurry, I guess. Later!”

And she was gone, leaving me alone with my thoughts and the spreading patch of crimson on the sheets. I put away the spear, chewing on the conversation, grateful at the painkillers still in my system.

All in all, I was safe…ish. Safer than being out on the road, at least. But Hina had been terrifying for those few moments. What was she? Was that what using the Flame turned you into, if it was really as cruel and basal of a process as it had felt? That was followed by a moment of terrible suspicion—what if the Vaetna were like that too, hidden beneath it all?

That thought was too unpleasant to stomach, so I resisted the urge to derail into it, returning to contemplating the cause-and-effect. It could be the other way around—a filtering effect where only the ones with the capacity to be…like that…achieved real power and notoriety. Both? I didn’t want to be that. Did I have a choice? The voice—voices? more than one?—had implied I was doing it wrong. Trust? There was some hope in that, maybe, but that raised the further question of who or what the hell that had been. The Frozen Flame didn’t talk.

Also—“you wouldn’t be the first.” What did that mean?

I would find out soon enough.