Author: Jodi Meadows

“So even regular jobs are suspended?” Whit asked. “For whatever it is they’re building?”

Stef nodded. “It’s in the industrial quarter. It looks like they’re using the geothermal energy lines for something. And many of the warehouses have been destroyed. There’s a picture.” She turned the SED to share it with the rest of us.

As she’d said, a large section of the industrial quarter had been seized and razed. Where there had once been warehouses, now only a few odd buildings and skeletal tubes remained. Some of those were water lines or sewer lines, while others were for power generation. Along the far edge of the quarter, the textile mill, pottery workshop, and forgers were still standing. For now.

Whatever they were building, it wasn’t far along enough for us to guess its purpose. Something wide and flat, though that could simply be the foundation for something bigger, especially if they were gathering more materials.

“Just because we don’t know what it is,” Sam said, “doesn’t mean we don’t know what it’s for in the end.”

“Janan.” Stef nodded. “No doubt it’s to benefit him.”

“There’s so much we still need to know,” Whit said. “Which means we need to get back to those books. Ana?”

“I’m ready.” I glanced at Cris—or the sylph I thought was Cris. “Did you happen to learn how to read these books when you became a sylph?”

Cris hummed and trilled, almost like a chuckle as he shook his head. But before I could be disappointed, he twitched, and another sylph came forward.

I struggled for a pronoun. I’d always thought of sylph as genderless its, but it seemed rude to say that to . . . not their faces, since they didn’t have faces, but . . . Ugh. I addressed the new sylph. “You can help me translate the symbols from the books?”

The sylph nodded, mostly a vertical rolling of smoke.

“Great.” It would be a long night if we had to ask yes and no questions about the meanings of words, though. Still, we could start with confirming the words we already had. “Whit?”

He stood and headed for my bag, where I kept the temple books. “The sooner we get this done, the sooner we’re not living in a cave.”

Sam leaned toward me—and the sylph. “He misses the library.”

I sighed. “I do, too. All the books. The well-lit reading areas.”

“The chairs.” Stef swooned dramatically. “I miss chairs. My legs are tired after all this walking.”

Cris whistled, like bragging he didn’t have sore legs.

“Ready?” Whit handed everyone books and notebooks, and we all got to work. Sylph floated around as we went through pages, confirming or attempting to correct our translations. It was difficult, trying to understand the sylph, but as the night deepened, I began catching on to their movements more quickly, and their trills and hmms, the moods conveyed by their pitch and the notes they sang.

When I glanced at Sam to see if he’d begun understanding the sylph, he smiled.

At the end of the session, when everyone was yawning and curling up in their sleeping bags and most of the sylph had retreated around the cave to keep it warm, I found Cris.

“Thank you for your help.”

He nodded.

“Did you know we were looking for you?”

Yes.

“Do the other sylph know what happened five thousand years ago? How they became sylph?”

Yes. An emphatic yes.

“Did phoenixes curse them?” Meuric had believed phoenixes were responsible, but Meuric had also been in a lot of pain.

Yes.

Phoenixes. They were connected to so much, but no one had seen one in centuries. “Will you be able to tell me what happened? Or the books?”

Yes, and yes.

“Were any of these sylph responsible for chasing me last year? Or burning my hands?”

Cris nodded, hesitantly, and then there was something like an apology, or an excuse. I couldn’t quite understand the way his voice rose and fell, and he cut off whatever he was trying to say with a soft, frustrated keening.

“It’s okay.” I held out my hand for him and tried to smile. “I know you won’t let them hurt us.”

He hummed irritably.

“Or they wouldn’t anyway.”

He nodded.

“I know you’re here to help.”

Cris surged forward, shadowy tendrils winding around my forearms as he tried so hard to express something. I could almost catch it. Almost.

-We are your army.-

12

CHOICE

THERE WEREN’T WORDS, really. It more like a melody, a song with lyrics half-remembered. It was the notion of words, the way music tugged inside me and made ideas bubble up from a deep and forgotten place.

A spiral of shock kept me from responding. Sylph could speak. They loved music. They had language. How, in thousands of years of people running from the sylph, had no one ever noticed the sylph communicated?

Cris shifted, and his song sounded like a question. Like, -Do you understand me?-

“Yes,” I whispered. “I think so.”

Cris wringed himself into tight coils of shadow, then zipped from the cave faster than my eyes could follow.

“Wait.” But he was already gone. Everyone else was fast asleep. I almost left the cave to follow the sylph, but after the roc, the centaurs and troll, and the sylph’s arrival, I wanted to sleep for a week.

The lamps were all low, and Sam had chosen a dark corner to put our sleeping bags, where we were sort of alone.

I peeled off my shoes and coat, then crawled into my sleeping bag, edging closer to Sam, who was passed out, his dark hair fallen over his face. He looked so relaxed, all the lines of stressed erased as he dreamed. And when I caressed his cheek, my fingers pale over his tanned skin, he sighed and pulled into my touch.

With a heavy yawn, I pulled out my SED and took it inside my sleeping bag to hide the glow under the layers of wool and silk. I sent a message to Orrin, letting him know we were all safe here.

Have the sylph we sent arrived?

He was either up very late, or very early, because my SED buzzed with a reply.

Yes. Everyone was afraid, but the sylph just float around the camp perimeter.

They’ll keep you warm, too, if you let them.

That’s probably too much to ask most of us.

A few minutes later, he said he had to go, so I put in my earpieces and listened to music while playing around with maps of the land around Range, wondering what to do next. We couldn’t go back to Menehem’s lab until we had a plan. We wouldn’t have a good plan until we’d learned everything we could from the books—and the sylph.

We had sylph.

We had the poison.

We had four people who wouldn’t give up.

There had to be a way to stop Janan from ascending.

I drifted to sleep, walking dreams of fire from the earth and sky, and shadows flooding the world. I dreamt of birth and death and rebirth, and the overwhelming sorrow of one fleeting life.

My body felt sluggish when I awoke, but the scent of searing meat drew me out of my sleeping bag to find Stef on the other side of the cave, teaching a sylph how to cook.

“All right,” I said, mostly to myself as I ran my fingers through my hair, all wild with sleep. Sam and Whit were gone. “How soon for breakfast?”

“Not much longer.” She adjusted her baking sheet on a rock. There was no fire under it, just a sylph coiled around the metal, which glowed red. “And you mean late lunch. Everyone slept most of the day. The others went outside to catch a few more meals before the snow hits. Would you mind fetching them?”

I dragged on my boots and hauled our lanterns and solar batteries outside to charge while there was still light.

Clouds blanketed the sky and the cold air prickled against my face, but it didn’t look like the storm would be bad. A light snowfall. It would cover our tracks.

Instead of wandering the woods to find Sam and Whit, I sent a SED message and waited by a stream, absorbing what sunlight I could, too. The last couple of days had ruined my sleeping schedule. All this being awake in the middle of the night.

After the others returned and we all ate, I took Sam outside and brought my flute and a lantern. It wasn’t dark yet, but under the forest canopy, the animal paths were dim and difficult to see.

“The cold weather will just make you sharp.” He glanced at the woods. “And the sound may frighten lunch away from our snares.”

“Then let’s go this way.” I led him in the opposite direction he’d come from earlier. “I wanted to ask you something. About the sylph.”

We’d left them in the cave, too. Sam and I were alone. “Okay,” he said.

“I keep imagining I hear words, almost.” I glanced up at him, but he was just staring into the forest as we walked. “Last night, I was talking to Cris, and I could have sworn he said something back. Then he just vanished.”

Sam was quiet for a while, but as we descended a rocky slope, he said, “I thought I must have been imagining it. I knew I was hearing emotions while they sang, but every now and then I thought I heard words. Or—something like words. Something that made me think of words.”

“Exactly. That’s exactly what I heard.” I slipped my mittened hand into his glove, relieved. “Cris said they’re my army.”

“Your army.” His tone was all awe.

“I know. It seems crazy to me, too.”

A sort of reverence filled his words, low and hopeful. “Is it really that strange? The way they follow you, the way they protect you. They’ve been acting like your army since the first time we saw them at the lab. They were guarding you.”

“I want to know why.”

“Me too.” He scanned the bank of a shallow stream and guided me toward a rock, big enough for both of us to sit on. “There’s a lot we need to ask the sylph.”

That was for sure. And not at all a statement I ever thought I’d hear coming from anyone’s mouth. Just a few months ago, we’d been wondering why they kept following me, and whether they were going to burn us up in our sleep. And now Cris was one of them. Now we were relying on the sylph.

“Thank you.” I held my flute case against my chest and waited as Sam swept snow off the rock and sat. I perched next to him and placed my flute across my lap, keeping as close to him as I could without sitting on him.

“For what?” He wrapped his arm around me and set down the lantern, illuminating our boots, water bubbling over pebbles, and pine needles. His leg pressed against mine.

“For understanding about the sylph. And not thinking I was crazy with the centaurs. I know everyone must have some history with them, but these—”

Sam turned and rested his other hand on my knee. His fingers curled around, and I could feel the heat of him even through the layers of cloth between us. “I trust you. You see the world differently from the rest of us, and I want to learn to see the world that way, too. You challenge us, inspire us. You inspire me. We were wrong about sylph. Maybe we were wrong about centaurs.”

I ducked my head, hiding a blush. “Maybe you weren’t wrong about sylph at first. Like you said, they do seem to like me. And their liking me doesn’t change thousands of years of violence between you all.”

He gave a weary chuckle. “You have good instincts. You’re right to question things, even when you’ve heard all our stories. If you hadn’t questioned reincarnation, we’d still be in Heart with no idea why Deborl had taken over the city, or what we were being made to build.”

“We might be happier not knowing.” That sounded like we weren’t happy now. But were we? I was happy with him, but all this getting shot at, dodging explosions, hiding in caves—that certainly didn’t make me happy.

“We’d have problems no matter what, Ana.”