Page 16 of Practical Boots

Davos gave her a bleary, angry look, then took a small metal box from one pocket and handed it over. Cat examined the material—silver, not steel—and opened it to find a single leaf lying inside it. Her eyebrows went up and Davos's went down in challenge when she glanced his way, but she shrugged. "Okay. Both of you hold on to me, and don't do anything stupid," she said, again to Davos, "because you'll end up stuck in the Waste forever if you do."

Rick, who was not cut out for this sort of thing, clung to her arm like an ingenue, and Davos put a big hand sullenly around her other arm. Cat lifted the leaf, breathed in its scent, then crushed it in her palm, andstepped.

* * *

In the best case scenario, Cat would have been right. Savos would have been on her way home, or time would have simply passed differently, as it usually did, in the Torn, and she would have been enjoying a long lazy afternoon in a butterfly-filled meadow.

To no one's surprise, it was not the best case scenario.

Passengers in tow, Catsteppedinto a space so dark that for an instant she couldn't even breathe through it. The very next second it filled with light so intense she cowered, and Rick yelped in confused fear. Davos, though, roared as if in pain, and when Cat gave an eye-watering blink in his direction, she saw steam—smoke—rising from his skin.

Rick, decent human being that he was, yanked his own shirt off and threw it over Davos before Cat could put two thoughts together, then emphatically pulled Cat's leather coat off her shoulders so he could use it, too. Cat lifted a hand against the blinding light, trying to find its source, but it was as if someone had shoved the entire sun into a cavern: the light came from everywhere, scalding and dangerously brilliant.

Scalding, but only scalding Davos. Her own skin didn't react the way the big man's did, and even Rick, fragile though humans were in the Torn, didn't seem to be burning.

Pennies dropped like a copper cascade at the back of Cat's mind, filling in blanks about Davos that she hadn't consciously thought about. A woman shrieked, sounding as though she suffered the same kind of pain Davos did, and Cat lifted her voice to bellow, "You'll kill your golden goose if you don't turn that off!"

It burned on for what felt like forever: nine seconds, maybe ten. Then suddenly, as abruptly as it had flared, the light faded, although not entirely. Davos stopped howling, though, and the woman's cries turned into a few gasping sobs, then went quiet. Cat yelled, "Name your claim!" to the echoing walls, and after a long time, a throbbing voice came back:They are born of my earth.

Rick, behind Cat, said, "What the fuck, is that an earthquake?" and a thin shred of humor shot through Cat.

"No. It's a voice. There's an elemental here. They were born of something else as well!" she shouted at the walls. "You have no claim on them!"

I claim all that lies within me.A thrill went through the resonant voice.You are within me.

"What," Rick said shrilly, "is an elemental?"

"Yeah?" Cat yelled. "Is that sunlight within you too?"

It bathes me, the voice said in a remarkably superior tone.It is mine to redirect.

"So anything that touches you is yours, huh? You subsume it? You control and command it? It becomes part of what you are?"

The walls rumbled again, and Cat displayed a harsh smile. "I have a gift for you, then." She edged her foot forward, not quitestepping, but nudging her way toward the Waste. Another few centimeters, and a breach opened, the Waste itself spilling around the toe of her boot.

The voice went cautious, not quite fearful.What is this?

"It's something for you to add to your collection."

No!The protest came barely a breath later, as the Waste began to encroach farther on the cavern floor.It is nothing! I cannot be one with it! It will destroy me!

"I mean, that's a possibility, sure. But I thought you wanted everything you could touch."

I only want that which is real! The sunlight and the water and the glittering pieces of stone! What you call to you now will eat away at me until I am gone, and then go beyond, until all of the Torn is undone!

"I suppose you'd better let Savos go, then," Cat said coolly. "I know she's good at finding those glittering stones for you, but are they worth dying badly over? Are they worth the whole of the Torn?"

A figure rose from the cavern floor, approximating a human form, if such a thing was cast in rough stone and clothed in living earth. It rose tall and tall and taller again, until Cat and the others were dwarfed, and its voice, which had come from everywhere, was now directed through a mouth large enough to be a cave. Rick whispered, "Holy fuck," and the elemental said, "You would not."

"Commit genocide? Probably not. I'd probably pull the Waste back once it finished with you. Assuming I could." Cat nudged her foot forward again, opening the breach a little wider. Ithurt. The elemental wasn't wrong. Waste and Torn weren't meant to interact, not like this. When she went from one to the other, shestepped. She didn't linger at the border. Lingering made her heart beat too fast, made sweat drip down her spine, made her breath come in aching pulls that felt as though they would never be enough. The Waste, used like this,didwant to destroy what it touched, in so much as it had feelings or will or desires.

The Waste, Cat remembered, was always growing. Maybe this was how. Maybe idiot Artificers opened encroaching bits to teach somebody a lesson, and in the end, the Torn paid for it.

Because it did seem like the Torn paid, and not the World. The World seemed to keep expanding, while the Torn grew ever-smaller.

Or maybe that was just an adult's perspective displacing a child's. The Torn had seemed impossibly large, when she was young, but she'd seen far more of the World in her years there than she'd ever seen of the place she'd been born.

Earth roiled under the elemental's surface, exploding in bursts that rained soil around them in clods. Not too closely, though: it didn't want to accidentally touch the creeping Waste. It became more human in guise, or at least, more aelfen, and more feminine, as if copying Cat's own shape in hopes of assuaging her. Sullenly, it said, "I cannot find them the way she can."

---