El Día de Fuego—the day the world burned—was four generations back in Grillo Negro's history. Drawn north by a promise of work, the men and women who would become the village founders found themselves underground, in an experimental farm growing crops in soil that was little more than gravel. With the land above wracked by drought, it was posited as a revolution in the making. Initially, it seemed to be. The workers were housed, fed and paid well. The plants grew quickly: the kind of growth that could feed a hungry world. There was little indication of anything wrong until the day the fire doors slammed shut.
The workers ran to the doors, only to have the path to the fields behind them seal off, too. A white computer technician among them got hold of an information stream on a device he carried. Mexico was burning, it said. First Mexico City, then Toluca and Calpulalpan exploded in flames. It spread like wildfire. There were videos that ended in blackness as the machines that took them died, and those images revealed a horror that remained imprinted on Grillo Negro today.
People were the source of the flames.
People writhed as if in seizures, then threw out their hands. From their hands came fire. Fire that burned everything it touched, consuming glass, charring concrete, and seething along pavement like it was paper, leaving it bubbled and smoking. Then those people gave a last twist and went up like kindling themselves. To this day, we had never found bones.
The burning spread around the world in a day. In Grillo Negro's stories, the founders took turns at the device, watching, until the information stream went out. They were left in silence. They had lost their families. They had watched their homes burn. Their workplace, somehow, had been spared. Lengths of natural caves separated it from the surface, and the flames only seemed to spread through things people had made.
The workers turned on the technician. He was an employee of Petram Radix, the company, and faced with sixty angry people, he confessed. Petram Radix was not leading a revolution. It was an illegal operation, tampering with plants in ways disallowed around the world. He had joined them as a younger man, then lost faith over time. But when he asked to go, he was told he knew too much. The company, likewise, had supported their workers only to prolong the inevitable realization: Petram Radix had never intended to let them leave.
Andrew said he could open the fire doors if he could reach the fields. The grandfather of my grandfather, a clever mechanic named José Manuel, cracked the lock on the smaller door to get him there. Andrew pushed buttons and pulled wires, and after more than a day, the fire doors rumbled open.
José Manuel took leadership of the founders, and the grandfather of Jem's grandfather, Lorenzo, was the brave soul who ventured up to scout the land. He returned safely. The others emerged to find the facility aboveground reduced to a pile of scorched rubble and melted pipe. The sky was a sooty black. The founders traveled to the nearest city to find it reduced to a husk. They named the burning disease Fuego, for wherever it spread, all it left was the aftermath of fire.
The founders and Andrew brought the plants of the farms up to the surface. The sky faded to light grey over the coming weeks, but the clouds cooled the land until half the plants died. The other half were enough to live on while the founders searched for other food. Some looked for the brown house crickets they had eaten back home. They found wild black crickets instead. The women invented the cricket baskets that gave the village its name. With a portable food source, and frosty weather bearing down on them from the north, Grillo Negro set out down the Mexican plateau. They had been searching for warmth, food, and other people ever since.
Someone tapped a pebble on the rock outside my family's tent, a sound sharp but light like the snip of a bird's beak. I pulled my bedfur over my head and hoped it was for my parents. Even the tiny knock was enough to drive a knife through my headache. I'd hardly had a cup to drink the night before, but it had been a long time since Grillo Negro had partied.
The tap did not come again, and I began to wonder if I had imagined it. I had pulled the fur off my head again when a whisper made me jump so hard my leg seized.
"Ad!"
The air was frigid. I struggled into my snowpants under the bedfurs and winced as I pulled on my boots. My jacket at least was warm from its night shift as a pillow. My whole outfit was coywolf, fur-side-in. Coywolves had lovely fur. I grabbed my gloves and belt and jammed my hat over my unkempt hair as I slipped through the tent flap.
Jem was waiting outside. "You look like you just rolled out of bed."
"I did. What's up?"
He smiled, but it was a nervous smile and he couldn't hold it. He took my wrist—I resisted the urge to yank away—and pulled me out of earshot of the tents. Then he spun to face me. "Smoke. South of us. My dad spotted it on his morning run."
If there'd been any trace of sleep left in my body, it was gone now. "Fuego?"
"He thinks so."
"Who all knows?"
"Just us. He wants us to investigate."
I lost hold of one end of my belt, sending my knife and waterskin to the ground. I grabbed them again. "I'm sorry, what?"
"It quieted down by the time he finished watching it." Jem had his scout persona up, but his fingers curled and uncurled against his other palm. "The founders said it burned itself out quickly. And the scouts the last two times never caught the disease."
In a hundred years, our village had spotted smoke only twice. Both had been other settlements claimed by Fuego, exterminated before we knew they were there.
"Are you ready to go?" said Jem. "I've got food."
"We're going?"
He gave me a look. Of course we were going. He was the best scout in the village, and I was among the better fighters. And if the smoke burned out quickly, we had to get moving before we lost our beacon.
"Give me a minute."
I slid around the village perimeter back to my parents' tent. My pack was inside, its leather slack in all but one corner. I threw in my warmer mittens, an extra pair of socks—also knitted from coywolf-fur yarn—and a warmer hat. My preferred hat was the one I was wearing: the head-skin from one of the coywolves that made my outfit, carefully tanned and shaped so it gave me the intensity of a predator. It sometimes froze prey, and drew delightful shrieks from Emma when I startled her with it.
My knife, sling and waterskin were all on my belt, and Jem had said he had food. My comb, flint, dishes, and other essentials were already in the pack. I added my rolled-up bedfurs and ran a mental list to ensure I hadn't missed something.
"Adriana?" murmured my mother's voice in the dark. "Are you going somewhere?"
"Scouting. I might be gone for a while." I slid over and kissed her hair. "Love you."
I left before she could ask questions. Fuego only traveled via roads, wires, and the old transport machines whose husks we sometimes found marooned on the roadsides. That wouldn't stop fear from spreading, though, if the villagers heard the disease had flared nearby.
Jem was over the hill with Grifo at his heel. "Ready?" he said.
"Ready as I'll ever be."
A/N: Another book recommendation!
Ghost Queen in the House of Love by flowerghostqueen
In a world where the Greek gods exist and Ancient Greece expanded into an eternal empire, Hedone and Queen Onia must navigate the dangers of both submitting to or defying the Olympians.