Blink. Marcus was staring at the flame in Chenoa’s meditation room. Blink. The flame was staring back at him, beckoning him towards it. Blink. He was in the flame.
Blink. And Marcus barely fought off the impulse to scream as he looked around himself in shock and fear.
The world was on fire. No! The world was made out of fire!
Marcus now stood on a vast plain that stretched out to the horizon in every direction. A plain in the orange and red of a wood-fed flame. Yet, even as he focused on it, he could see flames that were fed by other fuels: the blue flame of natural gas, the darker red and black of coal, the yellow, green, blue, orange, and even white flames made by burning metals and metallic salts. Oily gasoline and petroleum fires, the electric blue of aviation fuel burning, and the white and red of rocket fuel.
Every shade was here, either dancing across the orange and red plane like dancing wraiths. Or dropping out of a firestorm-filled sky in fire twisters to walk across the land like giants, stepping over the wraiths with almost intelligent action to regally stride across his frame of view. And, despite the heat distortion twisting the very air of this place into a shimmering ocean of motion, he could see everything with a crystal clear brilliance, it was almost as if his vision had become superhuman.
Even as he became aware of every shade of fire that was present in this place, Marcus could also feel every kind of fire. Hot fire, cold fire, chemical fire, nuclear fire, molecular decomposition fire; combustion, implosion, consumption and welding. Every possible kind he could think of, and a thousand more that he couldn’t. And yet, as hot as some of those flames were, he was merely aware of the heat, not actually feeling burnt by any of them. In fact, it was as if he was standing on a tropical beach being caressed by a cool breeze off the ocean.
As he tried to wrap his brain around what he was seeing, Marcus looked down at himself. And was astonished to see that he was still made out of fire. But now, instead of being wild flames coursing through the space his body once occupied, he had an actual body that wrapped around the now white-hot core still visible through his translucent skin.
The young elemental lifted his hand and looked down at it. There, bones made out of crystalized fire, muscles out of condensed flame, and blood: seething magma. The air moving in and out of his lungs danced with heat distortion and he could see flickers of flames dancing across the muscles that were active, like his postural muscles keeping him standing erect. Even his nerves, which he could amazingly now see, were tiny conduits of pure light, the impulses moving so much faster than the biochemicals that normally conducted the impulses through his nervous system.
That hand then rose to his face and he nearly shouted out loud in relief to find it touching something solid. His face, his eyes, even his hair felt like it did when he was in the real world and not in this place. This place of entropic decay. This … this plane of fire.
The sudden flare of a new flame emerging from amongst the countless ones rippling across the plain caught his attention. His eyes drawn to it, he could feel them narrow as he focused on the familiar lick of a wood-fueled fire. Then he felt his heart slow as the flame suddenly became the only thing he could see. Blink. Blink. Blink.
The man dressed in tribal clothing stumbled wildly back from the fire as what looked like a man of pure flame grew out of his small campfire to over six feet before carefully stepping out of the fire and onto the dried grass beside the fire pit, instantly lighting it on fire.
<Allah be merciful!> the man cried out in Farsi, holding up his hands in fear.
The man made out of fire looked at him with eyes that glowed before turning to slowly survey the place where he had appeared. There, a flock of mixed sheep and goats that stirred uneasily with the man’s shouting, beside them a small dog barking wildly in alarm, and beyond them a dry plateau. A wave of the man’s hand produced a flicker of flame over it that was smaller than expected. He was somewhere in the mountains, the air thinner here, but still capable of supporting flame.
Then he was refocusing on the man, who continued to make pushing away motions with his hands as if he could somehow push the man of fire back into the flames. Eyes narrowing, he concentrated on what the man was saying. Was that a version of Farsi that was called Dari, one of the most common of the many dialects spoken in Afghanistan? He seemed to remember it from at least a dozen different briefs on the Taliban and the current instability in that part of the world, his sped-up thoughts suddenly gifted with perfect recall.
Yes, the man was speaking Dari. Which meant he was in Afghanistan somewhere, in their mountains. Somehow, by walking a short distance on the plane of fire, he had traveled a distance of twelve thousand, eight hundred kilometers. Instantly.
Again he paused to digest that. How was it that a handful of steps in an elemental plane allowed him to travel that distance? It was like he was hopping from one fire, the one in Chenoa’s meditation chamber, to this camp fire in the mountains of Afghanistan, with the plane connecting the two points together.
The thought made him look back at the campfire. And, yet again, he found it pulling him in with almost no ability to resist its siren’s call.
Still, Marcus was almost relieved to be back on the plane of fire instead of some cold plateau thousands of kilometers from the Briar Patch. Which, of course, as he slowly turned in a circle and watched new flames pop up almost continuously, made him wonder how he was going to get back there.
One, in particular, caught his attention. It was massive, a monster amongst its peers, giving him the impression that it hungered, no, it needed to feed, that it needed to conquer. Before he could stop himself, he was walking towards it, focusing on its powerful presence as he did. And, in that same strange pulling sensation, he was being yanked into the seething flame. Blink. Blink. Blink.
The smoke eater took a step back, arm in front of his face and his Polaski tool in the other as a sudden surge in the flames consuming the stand of pine trees in front of him threatened to jump over top of him to the stand he was trying to dig a fire break in front of, where the rest of his twenty man team were feverishly working to prevent this part of the complex from laddering around them.
“Dee Five to Command,” he shouted into the mike hanging close to his mouth.
“I got you, Brad. What’s your situation?” a tired but determined voice said into his ear.
“We’ve got an aggressive element on the fire edge that is trying to do a running crown over our fire break, Kyle! We need reinforcement or this fire is going to go right over top of us into sector nine bee!!”
“Those boys from Montana are close, and so are the Kiwis, Brad,” Kyle replied. “I’m sending both your way now! Be advised, Air Tactical says their bomber is five minutes from refill down at Ness Lake. Then they’ll be on station in fifteen. You need to hold for twenty.”
“Roger that. I’m falling back to our break point to restart my line and update my team boss.” Then he was turning to run towards the stand behind him as the inferno at his back snarled its fury.
At least, he meant to. He didn’t, because when he turned, he found a person made out of pure fire standing not a meter and a half from him. Stumbling to a halt, he threw up his P-tool protectively in front of himself.
“I, I don’t know what you are, man. But I just want to get somewhere safe!” he stammered as the man of fire focused two bright eyes of pure white on him.
Those eyes then swung off him and to the flames behind him, burning out of control as it chewed through this part of the crown land forest just south of the town of Prince George, one of the larger municipalities in the interior of the Province of British Columbia, Canada. Thousands of hectares were already torched, and this forest fire showed no signs of slowing down.
“Please, man. Just let me rejoin my crew!” the firefighter pleaded. And the strange man of fire jerked a thumb over his shoulder to indicate that he run past him. Which, with adrenaline fueling his sprint in his heavy firefighting protective gear, he did.
But, as he ran, Brad heard a strange, almost whispering sound behind him. Throwing a look over his shoulder, he nearly stumbled and fell in surprise.
It was the man of fire. But, instead of feeding the flames as Brad half expected he would be, he was walking towards the fire edge, hands raised out in front of him. And the flames were being pulled right off the seared trees and into his body, effectively snuffing them out.
That’s when Brad did stagger to a halt, so he could turn and watch with eyes wide behind his goggles as the man continued forward, blunting the fire’s advance more effectively than any water strafe from a bomber. Then he was gone into the flame itself, the fire edge following him as he stepped through the trees and out of sight. Ten, fifteen, twenty, then thirty meters back from the previous fire edge he dragged the flames.
That was where the flames’ visible retreat halted. Brad watched it for a long moment, his breath held. Then he was sagging with relief when the new fire edge held position, pinned in place by some invisible force.
Whoever that man of fire was, he had just saved his entire team from getting encircled! Which left the relieved smoke jumper with one burning question: did he tell his crew what he just saw??
Because he was pretty sure they wouldn’t believe him. They would just chalk it up to yet another phantom glimpsed in the heart of a fire, a flame ghost that walked through the flames untouched to mock them!
Marcus blinked and sighed with relief when he found himself back on the plane, pulled in by a flame that had danced down the side of a charred tree like a strange sort of snake. While he knew he couldn’t be burnt by the fire’s fiery touch, it was still disturbing to pop into the middle of a raging forest fire somewhere in Canada, if he was any judge of accents from that firefighter. He was just glad his pyromancy was powerful enough to push the fire back and save that guy. At least the jump there had a positive result.
Having seen the grid of lines in the hallway on his way to Chenoa’s study, and now having traveled to two completely separate locations on the planet using the plane of fire to connect them together, Marcus was starting to come to a very interesting conclusion. The entire world was, in some metaphysical way, connected by the plane of fire network!
Another breath and the fire primal suddenly felt the energy pouring out of his core slightly ebb. Instantly a wave of fatigue washed through him. What did that mean?? Was he running out of juice? And if he did, what would happen? Would he revert to his normal physical self? Oh shit, would he revert in here on the plane of fire, surrounded by every kind of fire possible?? And what the hell would that do to him? Burn him instantly to ash??
They were questions that gave him sufficient reason to start looking for a way out. But how? It wasn’t like there were street signs here, or highway signs, or even giant Acme arrows pointing in any direction to tell him where to go!
Marcus grimaced. Like what the actual fuck! How was he going to …?
Wait a minute. Focusing on a flame pulled him into it, and pulled him along the plane faster than he could sprint, right? Maybe, using his idea that the entire world was connected via the flame network, instead of focusing on a flame in particular, he focused on a destination. Then maybe his fire-sped up brain, which was gathering information about this place in a manner that was almost beyond his comprehension, could guide him to a flame it sensed was close to that destination.
It was a dart in the dark. But hell, ironic pun intended, it wasn’t like he was having any other bright, pun also intended, ideas right about now.
Closing his eyes, Marcus focused on the Briar Patch. The base, his room, even Madam Chenoa’s meditation chamber. And as he did, he felt his body turn itself of its own accord. Was it actually working??
Then he stopped moving. Letting his eyes fly back open, Marcus frowned as, for a brief moment, he could see a lattice of golden lines overlaying the red and orange plane. The grid from the hallway!! Almost like the guide lights at an airport for landing at night, these ones seemed to be pointing in one direction in particular. A blink of his eyes and the lines were gone and he found himself staring at another wood-fed flame. ‘Okay. Here’s hoping this bullshit works in my favor!’ he thought grimly as he focused on the flame and felt it pull him in.
But, just before his final blink fed him through and off the plane, Marcus felt a presence. Not like Valentina’s in his dreams. Like the boy he had seen in the flames of his power core.
Twisting wildly, he tried to find it. There! Almost lost against the overall red and orange of the plane. The standing figure of a boy, no more than ten or twelve.
“Wait!” he shouted, holding his hand out towards the figure. But it was already too late. With the final blink, he was pulled into the flame and the plane, and the mysterious figure of the boy, disappeared.
The hunter looked up from the rifle he was cleaning as his camp fire abruptly flared, as if the flame had found a juicy bit of dried sap to chew through. Then his eyes narrowed as he watched a man’s head appear in those momentarily brightened flames. A head that began to rise, as if attached to a body on an elevator’s platform.
Higher and higher it rose until a man just over six feet, and completely made of fire, stood in the middle of his fire pit. Then, with a strange fluttering sound, like a flame dancing in the wind, he stepped out of the fire and, with a surge of light and motion, was a normal man. Who then slumped to a knee, clearly exhausted.
The hunter, an Apache long used to spending days, sometimes weeks alone up in the hills above the main town in his reservation, looked at the man for a long moment as he sucked in big lungfuls of air. Then, calmly, the hunter reached into his backpack and pulled out the big bag of weed he had stored there and threw it into the fire.
“You alright there, fella?” he asked. Not that he believed he’d get an answer, but might as well check.
“Yeah, I think so,” the young man said between gasps for breath, mildly surprising the hunter with an actual answer.
“You one of those enhanced fellas from that base down in the desert?” the hunter carefully asked. “One of those hyper humans I see on the internet?”
Marcus looked over at him. And saw a middle-aged Apache man, his face dark and weathered from being out in the elements, dressed simply and straightforward as a hunter. And, unlike the shepherd in Afghanistan, there was no fear in his face. Just a wary curiosity. And a healthy smell of prime weed. Wait, no, that wasn’t the hunter. That was the bundle of grass now charring in the fire itself.
“Yeah,” he said after that thoughtful pause. “Looks like our transporter experiment went a little awry!”
The hunter immediately snorted.
“I’d say, brother,” he scoffed. “Unless your eggheads wanted to teleport you into my frickin’ camp fire!”
“Not exactly,” Marcus admitted. He straightened up.
“Not to be a dick or anything, but I lost my phone in the jump here. Mind if I use yours to call in an extraction team?”
“Nope.” The hunter handed him his smartphone. “As long as you don’t tell ‘em how you were able to make the call. I’d rather not have a tactical team showing up on my doorstep to haul me away to Area 51!” “Deal.”
Marcus quickly dialed the Briar Patch’s emergency access number then held it up to his ear.
“Joshua Tree Tours,” a woman’s voice said when the call picked up. “Giving you a taste of the
Arizona Desert from the comfort of our air conditioned tour bus! How can I direct your call?”
“I’m looking to book a tour to High Cliff,” Marcus replied with the assigned handshake code to identify himself as a RedSky asset.
“Is this line secure?” the woman immediately asked, going from travel agent friendly to frostily efficient in a heartbeat.
“Negative,” Marcus tautly replied.
“Understood. Code in.”
“Code Delta Epsilon Foxtrot seven seven five,” he rattled off. Translation: Asset off reservation.
“Verified. Request?”
“Victor Charlie Hotel eight two.” Which roughly translated to: Descendant Four requesting an immediate extraction from his current location back to the Patch.
“Grid?”
“34 and 110.”
“Copy. Helo in fifteen.” Then the line went dead.
Nodding his thanks, Marcus tossed the phone back to the hunter. Then he was turning and jogging out into the desert.
It was nearly an hour later that found the fire primal cooling his heels in Barna’s office. Under armed escort, no less.
“You do realize that you are a rather expensive government asset, right, Marcus?” the frowning RedSky liaison said, leaning across his desk to look hard at the young man.
“Yes, sir,” Marcus replied with a sigh.
There it was: his weekly reminder of his ‘value’. He then looked up at the six man tactical team that now stood in close proximity to him, fingers close to the triggers on their automatic rifles. Not that he was going anywhere with his ankles and wrists both secured with zip ties. Normally that wouldn’t have deterred him since he could just burn through them. But exiting the plane of fire had completely drained him. He wouldn’t be able to light even a match on fire at this point!
“And I’m pretty sure I told you to stay on base,” Barna continued, his voice tight with disappointment. “And yet we find you up in the hills, by Snowflake. Mind telling me how you got up there? And why Snowflake?"
“Why, sir?”
“Yeah. Snowflake isn’t Vegas, kid.”
“Well, I wasn’t selling RedSky secrets to the Mormons there, if that’s what you’re asking,” Marcus said, brow raised.
“Pretty sure being sarcastic at this point in the interrogation will get you six months in solitary, Gray,” Barna hissed. “In a cell filled with ice water.”
Marcus sighed again. “Whatever, sir. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you the real reason anyway. Might as well start throwing in the buckets of ice now. As long as I get a set of those cute little plastic water wings …”
“Gray! For fuck’s sake!” Barna snapped.
“Okay, fine. I’ll tell you how. But like I said, you’re not going to believe me.” Marcus paused to gather his thoughts. “About an hour and a half ago, I was in Madam Chenoa’s meditation chamber. It was a follow up from my ordered visit the day before where I triggered a painful childhood memory that somehow unlocked my flame form.”
Barna immediately sat back, his expression going from annoyed and frustrated to thoughtful.
“Go on,” he urged.
“Well, I got frustrated with some of the answers I was getting about questions I had about, um, some dreams I was having and I unintentionally ignited my flame form and lit some of the madam’s stuff on fire by accident. She tried putting it out but, before she could, I looked into the flame. And found myself being drawn into it. Like a magnet or something. Before I knew it, I wasn’t in Chenoa’s study any more. I was on this vast plane of fire.”
“And what happened there?” Barna pressed, now furiously making notes on a tablet much as Chenoa had been doing before stopping to show Marcus the video from the surveillance of his and Valentina’s rooms.
“Uh, I saw a flame that caught my attention and when I focused on it, it sucked me through and back into the real world. And I was in Afghanistan.”
“Anywhere in particular? Kandahar?"
"Kabul? Herat, maybe?”
“I don’t know, actually. I stepped out of a camp fire somewhere up in the mountains. Which promptly scared some local shepherd shitless.”
“And you knew you were in Afghanistan how?”
“The shepherd was speaking Dari, the Afghani version of Farsi. I recognized it from the recent briefings we’ve had on the Taliban.” Barna slowly nodded.
“Logical. And how did you get to Snowflake from there?” he asked. “Another ride through the fire?”
“Yeah, actually, but not without a side trip first. I went back into the shepherd’s campfire and back onto the plane of fire, hoping I could just jump back to the base. But, before I could focus, I sensed a real powerful fire nearby and was pulled into that instead and found myself in Canada somewhere, in the middle of a forest fire. After saving some firefighters, I used the forest fire to jump back onto the plane. Where I felt myself getting tired, so I knew I had to try and get back to the Patch and not get caught in there. So I tried focusing on my destination and one fire in particular that I saw seemed to call to me.” Marcus shrugged.
“I went through it and popped out of some brush fire that a farmer outside of Snowflake was using to clear some weeds.”
Again Marcus glanced at the tactical team in position around him.
“I jogged into town and called for an extraction. The rest you know.”
“Indeed,” Barna said, his thoughtful expression deepening. “And it was a hunter’s campfire that you actually jumped into, not some farmer’s brush fire.”
“Shit.” Marcus grimaced. “The smartphone’s GPS gave it away, didn’t it.”
“Yup. Don’t worry about him. We don’t need him to corroborate your story or keep you secret as people are generally aware the United States uses both enhanced and hyper humans to protect its interests both domestically and abroad. And the Canadian equivalent of the CIA, CSIS took a report from a firefighting team in British Columbia of a hyper human saving them from the fire they were fighting, confirming that part of your story.” Barna frowned as he looked at a thoughtful Marcus.
“They just about scrambled their own team of super soldiers to deal with you, though, until we said you were one of ours, protecting you from prosecution with the North American Joint Hyper-human Cooperation Agreement, signed by our two countries. But it was tempting to let the Canadians kick your ass anyway, the JHCA notwithstanding.”
“You thought I was going rogue,” Marcus said, eyes abruptly narrowed. “Didn’t you.”
“Actually, no,” Barna said, finishing what he was writing down before looking at Marcus. “I had a multi-million dollar hyper human asset disappear without a trace, only to reappear a few minutes later in Snowflake, several hundred miles to the north. With hyper human deployment by enemies of the state rapidly accelerating, I had to make sure it was really you that was coming back. And not some Soulless doppelganger, sent to hold your place after you had been captured.”
“Descendants can’t be doppeled,” Marcus pointed out with a frown. “The Soulless only have a sliver of our capabilities. They’re not true copies or clones. And Null Faction, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, ISIS, or any of those guys: they don’t have the resources to capture a primal! They’d get frickin’ wrecked! The cost benefit alone would deter them!”
“Be that as it may, I still had to be sure it was you. So I did a little psychological testing.” Marcus grimaced.
“I hate psych tests,” he growled.
Barna smiled thinly.
“I know. But, after applying some psychological pressure, and not very much, mind you, you gave me an explanation that matched up to Madam Chenoa’s recollection of the incident in her meditation chamber. Which, to me at least, told me you were both speaking the truth and still dedicated to our Descendants program here, at Red Butte.”
The RedSky liaison to the Descendants team finished what he was writing. He then grabbed a folder filled with reports and tossed it in front of a frowning Marcus.
“And what’s that?” the fire primal asked without moving towards the folder on the desk despite his curiosity. Mostly because of the zip ties still binding his wrists and ankles, of course. “Chenoa’s report from this morning’s session,” Barna replied. “Along with a psych eval requisition, a CAT scan request, and an MRI scan request.”
“Ah.” Marcus’s expression tightened. “She told you about what I said with the dreams and shit.”
“She didn’t have much choice, Agent Gray,” Barna noted. “We monitor her training sessions in her study remotely. We have your entire conversation recorded.” He folded his arms. “Either she gave us a report on what triggered you into your flame form, or we pulled it off the video and suspended her for non-cooperation. You can guess which option she chose.”
“That’s cold, Barna,” Marcus grunted. “Even for RedSky. She’s been with the program since the beginning.”
“Which is why we don’t want her protecting you four against the needs of the company,” a new voice said from behind him.
Marcus’s escort immediately stiffened to attention and Barna stood from behind the desk to assume almost a military parade stance.
“Mr Rose, sir!” Barna said, twitching like he wanted to salute. “I wasn’t made aware you were visiting Red Butte today!”
Marcus frowned. Rose? As in Lawrence Rose, the CEO of RedSky?? Then the lean former marine was stepping into view around his escort, dressed in a dark gray suit and not looking a day older than that day he confronted Jane Gray at Woodfield Mall back in 2012.
“It wasn’t on the schedule, Jacob,” Rose indicated with a frown on his lean face before he looked over at Marcus. “I was in Phoenix, meeting with a senator about our funding review in the Senate next month.”
The CEO of RedSky then turned to lean back against the front of Barna’s desk, arms folded as he looked at Marcus.
“Decided to have a bit of an adventure today, Mr. Gray?” he asked.
Marcus bit off the sarcastic retort that nearly got out of his mouth. While poking Barna proved amusing at times, Rose was an entirely different matter. The guy was the original Captain America, the product of the same super soldier that produced Barna, but somehow … more. More determined, more gritty, more badass, and more liable to kick his ass if he stepped out of line.
So, he chewed on his tongue to avoid it slipping up. And:
“Not deliberately, Mr. Rose, sir,” he said, his tone muted enough that Barna’s brow lifted, considering how he was talking to Rose’s second-in-command just moments before.
Rose glanced at the armed operators on either side of the fire primal. Then he was dismissing them with a slight motion of his chin.
“I want to believe you, Mr. Gray,” he said once the operators had left the office, leaving only him, Barna, and Marcus, Rose’s expression unaltered. “If you can truly travel instantaneously from one location to another, that increases your value to not only RedSky, but to the United States military. With terrorist elements striking America’s allies in Asia, Europe, South America, and even Africa at will, having the capability to dispatch a Quick Reaction Force-style team to an incursion becomes invaluable to our overall security.” Rose pushed away from the desk.
“But before I go before an appropriations committee to tell them our asset value has gone up, and so should our contractual fee from DoD, we need to repeat your jump.” He smiled thinly.
“Feel like going to the test range and showing me both your fire form and your ability to teleport?”
****