Page 53 of This Cruel Fate

He clenched his jaw and rolled his shoulders, heading over to the sideboard where the gas fireplace burned steadily on. It was a gym tailored for variants, the owner was an older variant who had been in the barracks but whom Xolia had never met. Xolia waited for him to take up the flame along his arm where upon he would launch into a violent assault. He was punishing in his fighting strategy, there was no finessing or skirting around an opponent for him, just a full-on attack.

That didn’t happen. His back was still turned to her when screaming bullets of flame shot at her. She dodged two on her left but leaned right into a third that punctured her shoulder. It tore through skin and muscle, and she grunted at the burning pain of it.

Brandishing a sword of fire, Adonis turned on her, advancing quickly. Pain continued to lance through her shoulder, her fatigue slowing down the healing process. “Come on, Xo,” he said. He brought the sword in a long arc, and Xolia reached down within herself, searching for any intrinsic feeling of what to do.

She tugged at the pit in her stomach she always associated with her powers. Nothing budged. There was no dam breaking, no revelation of power. Barely jumping away in time to avoid the edge of Adonis’s sword, she ran to the other end of the court. Her blood thrashed in her veins, begging to be released to protect her. To fight back. She refrained from the temptation while Adonis advanced once more.

With his left hand he sent another barrage of bullets her way. They flew low, aiming at her legs. Come on, come on, come on, Xolia pleaded with herself. If she could just break past whatever hidden barrier kept her from accessing the full amount of her powers, she could?—

A bullet grazed the side of her ribcage, burning and cauterizing the skin in tandem. She faltered in her step, and a moment later Adonis was above, with his sword raised above his head. She closed her eyes, screaming at herself.

The heat from the flame dissipated, and Xolia snapped her head up. Adonis was halfway across the court, his face turning blue. Xolia breathed deeply, trying to regain control. Disappointment coiled low in her stomach, and she severed the control she had taken over his blood.

Limping, she made her way to Adonis and offered him a hand to stand back up. “I’m done for today,” she snapped. “And I’m sorry,” she added. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

“Don’t apologize,” he said. Adonis grabbed the tops of her arms and surveyed the various burns that littered her body. “I’m sorry.”

Xolia shook her head. She had asked him to do it. “I just can’t get it to work.”

“I know you want it to happen right away,” Adonis said. “But it takes time.”

“What worked for you anyway?” she asked. He had never discussed it, just that it had been years of self-exploration before he was able to summon the flame.

He pulled a small lick of flame to his palm, growing it until it covered his entire hand, stopping at his wrist. “I started with my fingers. One knuckle at a time. Then the whole hand.” With his unlit hand, he made a chopping motion. The flame snuffed out. “I did that daily until I managed to make a flame. It was so hot it melted the knife, the metal from the knife stayed burned into my skin for almost a month even though my hand grew back. It’s old magic, Xo, it doesn’t work the same.”

“You tortured yourself?” To have enough concentration to do that, to that extent, was a marvel to Xolia. She would throw herself into danger, but there was a distinct difference between someone else inflicting immeasurable pain on you and doing it yourself.

He shrugged. “Who would I have told?”

Xolia conceded the point. If she didn’t have him, she would have to resort to drastic measures too. “I’m sorry you had to do that to yourself.”

“It worked, didn’t it?” He offered a lifeless smile. “But even that took months. You’ll figure it out, just give it time.”

Time. The thing she didn’t have. They were just over a month away from her official announcement as Peter’s running mate. Everything would change. “I know,” she said, tired of the subject. Complaining about it wasn’t going to bring it about any faster. “Let’s leave so I can heal before I see Peter.”

Xolia walked through Peter’s wing of the Presidential Palace with a slight limp. The cauterized cuts would be healed by dinner time, but they persisted into the early afternoon. Peter was adamant about her starting to build her staff, she would need help with the ensuing media frenzy the minute the news broke, or so he said. She didn’t remember much of what the media was like when Peter and Atlas were inducted as chancellor and vice chancellor. And whose fault was that?

All she remembered was the large amount of speculation about the sudden shift from a presidency to a chancellorship. Xolia wasn’t sure she understood every decision that had gone into the political shift, but she knew the presidency had had a democratically elected senate, while Peter filled his Senate with his own picks.

Lana brought Xolia to a different part of the palace. This part of the building started to look more familiar to her. Lana opened the door to an octagonal office, a wide wall of windows letting in copious amounts of sunlight and showing a breathtaking view of the perfectly pristine grounds. They sprawled for over an acre, taking up space in a city that had little to give. She could have fit her apartment building six times over in the span of the Presidential Palace’s gardens. Nestled among trees, but hidden from view, was Atlas’s home.

Peter sat behind a desk that was adjacent to the wall of windows on the right side, giving him an easy view of both the door and the outside. On the left side were bookshelves covered with old and heavy tomes, all first editions of works by prominent Risian historians or scholars, she assumed, and couches that she recognized from more than one photo that had made its rounds through the media. Peter sat behind his desk, sun ghosting over him. The room was bordering on unpleasantly warm, but even with that and the sun, Peter shivered. Xolia hoped it was a trick of the shadow over his face that his lips seemed blue.

Once she and Lana were fully inside, Peter opened his eyes and swiveled around to them. “Xolia, I’m so glad you’ve made it. Lana and I spent all morning preparing candidates who could be your chief of staff. Whomever you choose, you’ll come to rely on heavily. They will coordinate your daily schedule and events that you must attend, politicians you’ll have to lunch with. It’s not an easy decision, so please, choose carefully.”

“I understand,” she said. While she did, she still couldn’t understand why Atlas seemingly had no staff, no guards, no one around him at any time. Peter didn’t look well enough to be heavily questioned by her, however, so she kept her mouth shut and took a seat next to Peter behind his grand desk.

“You don’t need to make the decision today. We have over twenty candidates to choose from, we’ll only be seeing five today.”

Xolia bit back a grimace at the thought of sitting through four sets of interviews. It’s part of the job. Get used to it. Xolia still hoped that the first interviewee would be good enough for the job, though, and she nodded to Peter. She was ready.

The first option was atrocious. So was the second. And the third. All humans who had passable knowledge of the government. While impressive, they either talked down to Xolia or completely misunderstood her. They lacked the ambition and drive she needed to make this campaign successful.

After a small intermission of food and tea and brief discussions between Peter and Xolia, the fourth hopeful chief of staff was admitted. At first, Xolia was ready to write her off. She was middle-aged, human. Her experiences were perfectly acceptable and perfectly bland. Nothing stood out, it was all written just so to get her in the door. When the woman walked in, Xolia’s eyes narrowed in suspicion.

Smile lines and crow’s feet betrayed her age, but there were no other signs of aging. No scars. No piercings. Nothing permanent in her appearance except the effects of time. She double checked the paperwork. Human. Her birth year would put her at forty-seven. Which could be believable, except Xolia had never seen a human make it almost half a century with no permanent changes to their appearance, whether by choice or illness. Even Peter weathered the burden of being human, and he was only ten years older than the interviewee, Bridget Halding.

Xolia glanced at Peter to see if he suspected anything. His smile was perfectly cordial, his eyes warm. Not an ounce of suspicion lurked beneath. She shouldn’t have been surprised; she’d never known a human to second-guess one of their own. It was why they were so adamant about variants being registered as such, even in the post-Gornne world.

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