“Don’t move,” the man above me orders, the barrel of his gun pressed into my forehead as I look up at him.

Ash is in much the same position as I, gun held to his head and pressed to the floor. From the corner of my eye, I see a third soldier approach Ash.

“Now, now, kids. We just need to check something, then you’ll be free to go,” he says as he pulls a canteen from his chest strap. A single drop falls on Ash’s exposed skin before the soldier stands again and looks over at me.

What should I do? Can I stop them from checking me somehow? Maybe I should try to burn them before they get the chance. A glance over at Ash has me throwing that thought out for now. The gun is still firmly held at the back of his spine. I can’t act now unless I want to get him shot.

The man and his canteen approach with slow steps. My eyes dart around the room, looking for anything I can use. There don’t seem to be any other soldiers than these three. If there are, they are still out on the street.

“Chill, girl. This won’t take but a moment.”

I try to hold in my scream when the drop hits my cheek, trying my hardest to hide what I am. My efforts are in vain though, the steam and loud sizzling that comes from my face gives me away without doubt.

The eyes of the men in front of me widen. “Jonas. Flare, outside. Now!” The soldier turns his attention back to me. “Now, now. Don’t you move a muscle.”

I can’t let that man get outside. If he gets a signal out, the water mages will be here in a moment. I don’t know why they don’t just try to kill me themselves, but I can’t go against the water mages.

The only thing that stops me from attacking immediately is that Ash is still in danger. I look over to see that the soldier on top of Ash is distracted, looking at me. His gun is lowered and not pointed at Ash.

This is the best invitation I can hope for. I launch my flames at the soldier above Ash. I’m not passive with my fire as I have been in the past. Instead, I put intent behind it. I don’t just want to use my fire as a distraction or to scare them off. I want them to burn.

And burn they do.

The gun, made with a wooden body, bursts into flames easily. Almost as easily as the soldier holding that gun does. His screams fill the air as I launch myself towards the door and send a scorching wave into the man with the canteen standing behind me.

A bullet rips through my chest and hits the wall in front of me. I stumble but push through the pain and out the door behind the soldier called Jonas.

I try to scorch the flare out of his hand before he can fire it, but I don’t reach in time, my flames only an instant too late.

I failed. I wasn’t quick enough, and now this place will swarm with soldiers before long.

An instinctual feeling through the edges of my fire pull me. My flames pull on their own, soaring after the projectile faster than I’ve ever moved them before. I can feel the burning within the flare pulling my flames to it.

I grab a hold of the flare and suck all the energy from within, extinguishing my tendril flames at the same time. My fire is visible in the air to any looking, but it is far better than letting the flare explode.

I can’t see the now defunct flare as it falls back to the earth below, but a bang snaps me away before I can be certain it won’t explode from the impact with the ground. The soldier, Jonas, holds his gun up at me. He’s already fired a shot — which missed, fortunately — and is now struggling to reload his weapon. I burnt his fingers when I hit the flare gun.

I don’t want to give him time, so I throw myself and my flames at him. I cling to his uniform so he can’t escape my fire. Each swing of the stock of his weapon hurts as my flames spread around us. The energy I’d drained from the manor earlier fuelling me as I try to burn through both him and his weapon. After engulfing him in my flames for only a few seconds, the soldier is already throwing away his weapon and rolling around on the ground trying to stop the flames that I won’t allow to relinquish.

I hate this. I hate the screams. I hate the way his skin bubbles under my blaze. I hate that I have to feel it all. But there is no choice, it is either me or him. Never do I want to do this, but I want to live. I don’t want to be scared that any moment one of these people can drop out of nowhere and drop a bucket of water over me.

I don’t want to die.

So he has to die.

The crack of a gun being fired almost knocks me off my feet. No, wait, that’s the bullet that does that. Another tearing its way through my solid flame body. It rips me from the smouldering form of the man once called Jonas.

The other soldier, the one that dropped water on my face, holds his gun at me, standing with his back to the door. I don’t move. I don’t want to kill anyone else.

“Please, just leave. I don’t want any more,” I plead.

The man looks down, the body of his buddy at my feet. I should have expected the anger that crosses his face. I would have sighed if the pain of the third shot through my chest didn’t hurt so much. In a way, it is fair; I should hurt for killing others. But I hate the pain. I won’t sit down and accept their retribution. I want to live. Even if that means I will have to kill thousands, I’ll do it.

Not bothering to move, I throw some flames toward him. I stop myself from sending my inner flame with them, not wanting to feel another die at my hand. But the man dodges, rolling to the side. Without my inner flame controlling the fire, I’m unable to change its trajectory to follow him.

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He fires another shot at me, this time hitting my upper arm, piercing through with ease.

What am I doing? I can’t take it easy just because I don’t want to feel his death. Resolving myself, I grasp him. He’s unable to dodge me this time, now that I have control. I try to burn through him as fast as possible, not wanting him to suffer for longer than necessary. I try to ignore the screams and the feeling of my flames burning under his skin while he still struggles on the ground.

I shouldn’t feel bad. He was trying to kill me. I gave him an opportunity, which is far more than they gave my mum.

A hand grabs my shoulder and I spin, ready to burn whatever soldier I missed. I pull myself back from burning Ash’s face off just in time as he takes a hurried step back.

I drop my hands and extinguish the surrounding blaze. Despite the intense energy still smouldering within, I’m exhausted.

“Are you okay?” I hear Ash’s concerned voice.

“Yeah,” I say. “We should meet with the others and get out of the area.”

❖❖❖

We are back in the group’s original home. The bookshelf that hid the secret room lay knocked on the floor in pieces. The basement area isn’t in good shape either, the beds torn up and thrown around, the table and chairs are now broken. Really, we are only here until the search cools down outside. Having already been searched, it is as good a place as any to hide.

We are sitting around on the floor together. The others’ gazes hold square on me as I try to pretend they don’t exist. The ceiling has a rather interesting pattern ingrained in the wood.

“Solvei, I think it’s time you explained. Who are those soldiers? Why are they after you?” Ash asks.

“They said they were from the Henosis Empire,” Leslie says. “Why are you so important that they’d take an army away from the war to find you? Did you piss off their emperor or something? Maybe you burnt the hair off his head?”

“What? No! I didn’t even know they were from Henosis until today.” Isn’t the Henosis Empire far to the east? Why have they been looking for áed so far from their homeland? “I don’t know why, but they’ve been hunting áed. They killed my mum and half my tribe.”

“How? I saw you today. You brushed off like three bullets as if they were nothing.” Ash says.

“They have water mages. Lots of water mages.” I explain.

“Okay, great. So they want to kill you for… reasons, but why did they attack the Cano head?”

Ash turns to Leslie at that. “They attacked the Cano family? Is that what those gunshots were?”

“Oh, yeah. It was an absolute slaughter,” she says, shaking her head. “They wiped out the entire Cano guard in seconds. Wynn Cano was played with, like a child, before they killed him. And that was after we’d seen the man blow up a wall with his strength. I didn’t even know it was possible to get that strong.”

“Shit. So if the guard is gone, who is in control of the city? Henosis? This is gonna make Mercure’s job so much harder. Let’s hope we have enough to pay.”

I look at the pile of stolen goods between us. Most of it glimmers in the light and some of the stones make me salivate a bit when I brush my finger over them. Some sort of gems with an incredible taste that I have to whip myself away from.

I have no idea what the collection of jewellery and other shiny things is worth, but I am sure it far surpassed everything else we have stolen since I joined their group. If this isn’t enough to pay Ash’s friend Mercure, then I doubt he ever planned to smuggle anyone out in the first place.

In the early afternoon of the next day, we leave our home for the last time. After meeting with Mercure, we won’t be returning. Instead, we are prepared to leave everything but ourselves behind to head north.

The Henosis soldiers are everywhere, but there are so many people around the main street they can’t search everywhere. They set roadblocks to check the cargo of anyone passing. It appears they know I am young, because they splash a small amount of water on any child they see after detaining them.

The ground has grown dry again, which meant we can take some of the tighter detours through the city. While the sky is still overcast, it has yet to rain again since late last night. I can only hope the weather stays as good as it is.

We take a long time to reach the woodworking warehouse that Mercure used as a front. Kerry carries the bag of jewels while the rest of us watch over her.

We agreed not to tell Mercure that I am the target of the soldiers currently putting the city in semi martial law. I’d been worried about telling them last night, thinking they would sell me out to save their own heads, but I am stuck at the moment so I can’t just run away. I am forced to trust them.

It is relieving that they have yet to break that trust, but the stress I feel about the possibility they are just waiting for the perfect time to betray me won’t leave my mind.

A solidly built man leads us through the warehouse to a back office where a thin stick of an albanic sits behind a desk.

We’d keep our hats secured tight over our heads, as is required anywhere we don’t want to be tossed away in but a moment.

“Do you have it?” Mercure says without looking from his desk.

Ash grabs the bag from Kerry’s hands and places it on his desk. “Here.”

Mercure finally looks up, not at us, but at the bag on his table. His face remains apathetic as he opens it and inspects the jewels shown. “Quite unlucky timing you being at the Cano estate at the same time they were wiped out,” he says without looking up. “I heard one of Henosis water mages destroyed a good portion of the old upper district. I’m surprised you got out.”

The others and I remain still until he finishes his inspection.

“Well, all looks good here. Half of this would have gotten you out of the country until today. Unfortunately, security in the city has been raised. I will now be taking the lot.” He finally raises his eyes to dare any of us to complain.

I see the others fidget a bit, but we already expected this. Of course, we had hoped to keep some, so we didn’t have to start with nothing in the northern states.

“I have a proposal,” Mercure says, bringing my attention back to him. He eyes each of us a moment and I swear his eyes linger on me longer than the others.

“I want to know how you got through the Cano security. If you tell me that, I’ll only take half of this pile as I would have before all this.”

I tense and gulp, sending a glance to the others out of the corner of my eye. Crap, when they tell him it was me, he’ll either want to use me himself or he’ll give me to the Henosis. The teenagers beside me I could work with because they strongly desired to leave the country. By helping them, I was helping myself escape.

This man doesn’t have any goals in common. He will either use me for whatever use I’d have, or he’d sell me out to the Henosis. He won’t let me go if he knows.

Do I try to run now, before he can try to stop me? Without the others around, I don’t know how well I’ll be able to hide in the city. Is it better to do as he says for now? Go along with whatever he asks of me, so I’m not put up on the execution block.

I scream in my head. There’s no good solution that comes to mind.

“I’m sorry, but there’s not much I can say.” Ash says. “Really, we just got lucky.”

“Hmm, lucky indeed.” Mercure hums, staring at us a bit too long for comfort.

Wait...

Huh?

I turn to Ash. He didn’t sell me out? But didn’t he want to start a new life? They’d be able to create a perfect life for themselves with that much money. Why give that up?

Ash notices me staring. The smirk that covers his face after seeing me is so self-satisfied that I feel like smacking him. But he didn’t betray me.

I assumed he and the others would sell me out the moment they were given the opportunity. Was that wrong? Can I actually trust them?

I feel like crying at the revelation, but I am interrupted as Mercure rose from his seat.

“Come then, I hope you lot ate before you arrived.”

In a dark corner with no windows or lights, Mercure leads us to several wooden boxes a bit taller than my hip.

“Hop in. They'll be your homes for the next few days. Make sure to ration your food and water, wouldn’t want to die from a touch of hunger after going through so much to get here, would you?”