EMBERFALL (When The Ancient Fire Chooses You Survival Is Only The Beginning)

CHAPTER ONE

The scratch marks were the only honest thing in the room.

ísaveth had made them herself — thirty-nine thin lines carved into the concrete wall behind the cot's left leg, low enough that the guards missed them on their sweeps.

One mark per morning. One mark for every day she had woken in this place with the chemical smell in her nose and the particular silence of a room that had been designed to make a person feel like the last living thing on earth.

She was not the last living thing.

She could hear the others through the wall — breathing, occasionally weeping, the muffled sounds of people enduring the same situation with different levels of composure.

She had stopped tracking the sounds after the second week.

Not from cruelty. From the simple math of survival.

Other people's fear was a contagion she could not afford.

She sat on the edge of the cot now with her back straight and her hands flat on her thighs and her eyes moving across the room in the slow, methodical pattern she had developed on day three.

Wall. Door. Ceiling vent. Wall. Door. The vent was twelve inches by nine.

She had established this by counting the concrete blocks around it.

Too small for a person. Adequate for air circulation, which was the only thing keeping the room from being completely unbreathable.

She had catalogued everything worth cataloguing in the first seventy-two hours.

After that, all she had was time and the wire.

The wire was three inches long, bent at one end, salvaged from a fraying section of the cot's frame on day two.

She had not decided yet what she would do with it if the door opened and the guards came in without syringes.

She had a few ideas. None of them were particularly sophisticated, but sophistication had never been the point.

The point was having something in her hand rather than nothing.

She closed her fingers around it now and let the small pressure of it ground her.

Thirty-nine days.

The headache that had been building since the previous evening was sharpening at the base of her skull — not the ordinary kind, nothing so manageable as that.

This was the screaming kind. The kind that arrived without warning and filled her head with a sound that had no external source, a high, sustained pressure that sat behind her eyes and pulsed with every heartbeat.

It had started on day thirty-six. It came twice daily now, sometimes three times, and each episode lasted longer than the one before.

She had not told anyone about it.

There was no one to tell, and information — any information, including information about her own deteriorating condition — was the one resource she still controlled completely.

The door opened.

Two of them, as always. They moved with the particular blankness of people performing a task so many times that the task had stopped requiring thought.

The taller one carried the case. The shorter one stood at the door with his arms crossed and his eyes on a point six inches above her head, which she had concluded was deliberate — a technique for depersonalizing the subject, for making the person in the room into a problem rather than a human being.

She looked directly at him.

He did not look back.

She had stopped trying to make them see her around day ten.

The taller one opened the case on the small table by the wall.

The syringes were laid in a foam-lined row — four of them, same as the past eleven days.

Whatever they were injecting had changed two weeks ago.

The compound was different — thicker, darker in the barrel, and the burn it produced when it entered her bloodstream was not the sharp heat of the early weeks but something deeper.

Something that moved through her bones rather than along them, that settled in her spine and radiated outward in waves that left her shaking and breathless and entirely, systematically furious.

She did not show the fury.

The fury was hers. The only thing in this room that was.

She pushed her sleeve up herself, which she had started doing on day twenty because doing it herself was the last small act of agency available to her at this moment, and she was not giving that up either.

The taller one paused.

Looked at her arm.

Looked at her face.

Said nothing, and administered the injection.

The burn started immediately. Deep and cellular and thorough, moving from the injection site up through her shoulder and across her chest and down into the center of her sternum, where it settled like a coal finding a permanent home.

She breathed through it with the controlled evenness she had developed over thirty-nine days — in for four counts, out for four counts, eyes on the wall, hands flat on her thighs, the wire pressing a small, honest line into her palm.

It passed.

It always passed.

They packed the case. They left. The door sealed with the same soft, definitive click it always made — a sound she had come to associate with the precise moment when endurance became the only available strategy.

She sat in the quiet and let her body finish processing.

And then, from somewhere deep inside her chest — from the place where the burn always settled, from the hollow her sternum had started to feel differently about in the past several days — something pulsed.

Warm.

Brief.

Entirely unlike the pain.

She pressed her free hand against her chest. Felt nothing she could name. Removed her hand. Filed it in the category she had labeled deal with later and focused on the wall and the thirty-nine marks and the morning she was going to add a fortieth.

She did not know there would not be a fortieth.

She did not know a great many things that she was about to find out in rapid succession.

The wall at the far end of the corridor shook.

The first sound was not an explosion.

It was subtler than that and somehow worse — a deep, structural groan that moved through the concrete beneath ísaveth's feet like something massive shifting its weight overhead. Dust came down from the ceiling vent in a fine, steady curtain. The light fixture swung once on its bracket and steadied.

Then the outer wall of the corridor ceased to exist.

Not crumbled. Not collapsed inward in pieces.

One moment it was there — twelve inches of reinforced concrete that had been the eastern boundary of her world for thirty-nine days — and the next it was rubble on the floor and cold night air was pouring through the gap it had occupied, and the darkness beyond it was full of shapes moving too fast and too large to be anything ordinary.

ísaveth was on her feet before the second wave of dust hit her.

Her back was against the far wall and the wire was in her fist and she was absolutely, deliberately not moving until she had a clearer picture of what she was looking at.

The sounds in the corridor were enormous — crashes, something that might have been voices but pitched lower than any voice she had heard before, the particular sounds of bodies impacting other bodies with very significant force.

The cell door blew open.

Not the lock. The entire door, frame and all, landing flat in the corridor with a reverberant clang that she felt in her back teeth.

The shape that filled the gap it had left was large.

Broad across the shoulders. Dark skin, short hair, a face that was somewhere between twenty and thirty with the kind of jaw that suggested the bones inside had decided to be precise about themselves.

He was dressed practically — nothing military, nothing elaborate — and he moved with an economy of motion that told her more about his training than anything he was wearing.

He looked at her.

Then at the wire in her fist.

Something at the corner of his mouth shifted — not quite a smile. The edge of one.

"Can you walk?"

His voice was level. No urgency in it, which she found more reassuring than urgency would have been.

"Yes," she said.

"Fast?"

She looked at him for precisely one second.

"Watch me," she said.

She crossed the room. He stepped back without being asked.

She moved into the corridor and stopped, because the corridor was no longer the corridor she had memorized — it was a combat scene in varying stages of resolution, with three of the facility's guards already down and two more engaged with shapes she could not categorize quickly because they were moving too fast for classification.

"Don't stop," he said, coming up beside her. "Left. Stay close."

"I know what left means."

"Good."

They moved.

The guards who remained upright did not reach them.

She did not look closely at why. She kept her eyes forward and her feet moving and her breathing at the four-count she had maintained for thirty-nine days, because the four-count was the only thing in this situation she had complete control over and she was holding onto it.

The facility had four interior corridors based on what she had been able to infer from sounds and movement patterns over the past weeks.

They moved through two of them — past cells whose doors were already open, past people being helped out by other large, fast-moving shapes that she was beginning to associate with the word *clan* without having the full context for it yet.

She would get the context later.

Right now there was a gap in the building's eastern wall ahead of them and cold air coming through it and the particular quality of darkness that meant actual night sky rather than artificial lighting, and she moved toward it with every cell of intent she had.

They came through the gap.

The night was cold and enormous and smelled like mountain air and freedom, and ísaveth stopped walking for exactly three seconds and breathed it.

"Keep moving," he said, not unkindly.

"I know," she said. And did.

Behind them, the facility burned.

She did not look back. She had made that discipline into a rule at age seven and she had not broken it once.

She was not breaking it tonight.