Page 33 of Of Flame and Fury

Dira didn’t hesitate. She turned away and began shouting into her tele-comm.

Kel struggled to look away from the corpses. She couldn’t see much of the mother’s features. Her face was covered by dark, matted hair. But the child’s face—a young boy—was perfectly clear.

Bekn stood back, eyes averted. A moment later, he marched off toward the train’s steering carriage.

Coup, however, stepped closer. His focus remained on the mother’s hidden face.

“They can’t have died more than a day ago,” he said softly. “We need to move their bodies before something else in the forest finds them.”

Kel nodded slowly. No matter her feelings toward him, Coup’s voice—barely a croak—made her wish she hadn’t stopped the train.She wished she’d just called the council to investigate. She wouldn’t wish AB on anyone.

Coup and Bekn’s mother had been taken by the same plague that had killed this mother and child, and from the rasp in Coup’s voice, Kel knew this was an all-too-familiar sight for him.

The thick, silent pain in the air reminded her of their perch on top of the darkened hill, after her aviary had burned to ashes.

Kel’s attention drifted back to the bodies. She noticed a lump of fabric to the left of the mother.

“They both have packs,” Kel realized. The bags had fallen open, rotten food and bottled water spilling free. “They must have been heading to Vohre.”

This far gone to the blight, they wouldn’t have been permitted on a government train. No one knew how AB spread. It wasn’t contagious—but fear was. Their only choices would have been to wait for a torturous death in Fieror, or brave the trek to Vohre’s advanced medical facilities in the hopes of greeting death painlessly.

It was rare to see two AB patients in close vicinity; the symptoms of those who had it often flared up when near one another. But this mother, buried beneath a blanket of her own blood, had refused to abandon her son.

Like any Saltan, Kel knew the warning signs of AB. Confusion, memory loss, insomnia, tremors. AB struck the brain and caused rapid tissue deterioration. It killed within months of onset. The lucky few had symptoms; time to say their goodbyes.

She wondered how Coup’s mother had looked. Had she passed peacefully, in her sleep? Or had her symptoms stripped her away, layer by layer?

A strange impulse itched her fingers. She wanted to reach out, to comfort Coup in some small way. But the urge itself kept herstill. Her hands twitched, waging a silent war until a council van appeared beside the train tracks. She led Coup back toward the train as the mother and child were placed on stretchers and covered with white sheets.

The train driver quickly restarted their journey. Coup returned to his chair, silent.

The forest passed once more in a blur. Kel tried to count the trees, but her eyes kept focusing on the glass window. The reflection staring back at her. Not her face, but that of the mother’s and son’s.

Dira and Bekn nestled in chairs at the other end of the carriage. Awkwardly, with her chair’s leather cushion groaning, Kel leaned toward Coup. “Are you… are you all right?”

Her words snapped Coup from his reverie. He spun to face her, hands clawed into the chair’s arms. “Now’s not the time for you to grow a heart, Varra. I’d rather your hate than your pity.”

Kel’s mouth closed. If Bekn and Dira had heard their exchange, they said nothing. Stiffly, Kel rose from her seat.

The memory of her father’s body, torn apart like a rag doll in a storm, always lingered at the edges of her thoughts. She knew what it was like to be flooded with unexpected reminders of death.

Kel moved to the next carriage. She unlocked Savita’s enormous trailer, pulled on the leather gloves always stashed in her pocket, and sat cross-legged in a corner as Sav cleaned her wings. When her phoenix moved and laid beside her, Kel thought Savita might be the only creature in the world who would never truly leave her.

FOURTEEN

Fieror was a city of dry grass, old buildings and dust storms. With rare clouds and rarer rain, the sun scorched the ground and bathed Fieror’s buildings in endlessly sharp, cinder heat. But with Cristo’s help, Vohre had hurled itself a hundred years into the future.

Even from the city’s outskirts, where Cristo’s central compound sat, every building shone with digital screens. Sunlight beat against the tall structures, yet arching trees and plants protected the streets from the heat. It was the greenest place Kel had ever seen. Even greener than the dark forest they’d just passed on the train. In the distance, Kel could see crowds shoving past each other in an endless tide.

The train had tossed them out too far from Vohre’s center to make out much more. Kel turned from the cityscape at her left and jogged to catch up with the three of Cristo’s employees who were struggling to lead Savita away.

“Where are you taking her?” Kel asked.

Sav ruffled her wings as a man guided her forward, a leg of raw meat dangling between his hands. Kel had made it clear to Sav that she was safe—for now—to follow the employees, though theworkers may be the ones in danger, tantalizing Sav with fresh cuts. The phoenix’s head was lowered, wings pinned as she stared at the meat.

The brown-haired man to Savita’s right replied, “We’re just taking her to get settled inside her new aviary. You’ll be shown the way on your tour.”

Kel folded her arms. The workers had appeared beside their carriage when the train stopped outside Cristo’s property. They’d asked for Kel’s login details for Savita’s collar, and made quick work of luring Sav away.

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