Chapter 47 Elena
ELENA
Our bodies are maps of the divine that flows within us. Fear, then, the man who uses it against his friend. Pity, then, the man who uses it against himself.
—from the diaries of Priestess Nomu of the Fire Order
Elena tried to wrench off the ropes on her hands, but the more she resisted, the tighter they dug into her skin.
They had tied her to one of the killdom’s long-range pulsers, her arms bent back and around the smooth neck of the cannon, her legs bound below.
The mouth of the pulser vibrated slightly behind her back.
“Careful,” the captain called. “If you move more, you might set it off.”
Her chest tightened, panic limning her ribs. Kilith slammed his hand against the hull of the pulser, and Elena jumped. She could not see him, but she heard his laugh, somewhere below on her right.
“It’s been a while since we’ve had some fun.” Footsteps, drawing closer. A hand trailed up her leg, and Elena shuddered, whimpering as the head of the gun bit into her back. Kilith grinned from behind his visor. “Now, where to begin.”
“Kilith,” the captain called, “arm the pulser.”
Elena squirmed as his grin lengthened. “With pleasure, sir.”
His hand slipped down her calf, her ankle, sending goose bumps up her leg.
Kilith spoke into his pod, ordering for the weapons to arm.
The pulser turned, and Elena yelped as she swung with it.
Her feet dangled over the waves. Along the horizon, she saw the black mists of the pit coiling like writhing snakes.
She wondered if Samson and the others were still trapped in its depths.
There was a shimmer in the air, as if the sky itself was vibrating.
Or perhaps it was her. Elena did not realize she was shaking, only that she could not stop.
The pulser swerved right, and she spun, back to the deck.
Below, the captain chuckled. Maya stood beside him, her jaw tight, as the other Sesharians dared not look up.
“Please—”
The pulser jerked left, and she spun back out to sea.
It swung again, and again, her body like a rag doll, lurching with the gun as it whipped back and forth, back and forth, the sea and the ship blurring into splotches of grey.
Elena had no time to think. The wind roared in her ears, and she could hear their laughter rising.
The pulser finally stopped and turned inward.
Elena snapped her mouth shut, but her stomach twisted, and she vomited, dry heaves racking her body.
“Tell me. Aadya, is it? How long was your contract?”
Tears and snot ran down her cheeks. The world was still spinning, and she squeezed her eyes shut. Still, the low sun spiked off the Jantari metal, and she could feel its merciless glare sear through her eyelids.
“C-contract?” she whispered.
“I believe twelve more years, sir,” Maya said.
“Twelve,” the captain mused, and blearily, Elena understood. Her contract to Jantar. He assumed she had one like every other Sesharian laborer.
Behind her, the barrel of the pulser whined to life.
She could almost feel it. The heat building.
She could not burn. But a pulse ripping through her stomach, shredding her lungs?
Even Samson’s fire could not heal her from that.
Elena tried to call her Agni. If only she could wield, spark a flame from between her fingers, but her mind whirled.
They had bound her hands so tightly that she could not even feel her fingers, let alone form the Lotus.
“Twelve years, and for it to end like this. What a waste.”
The captain raised an yron to his lips, considering the hunched laborers before him.
“You.” The unlit yron bobbed from his lips as he pointed to a Sesharian, a man with long hair tied back, his neck bare to the sun.
“And you.” He pointed to a small woman who froze as his accusing finger found her.
“Six years will be added to each of your contracts. Someone must make up for her belligerence.”
“No,” Elena gasped.
“But, sir, she is not—” the woman began.
“I will make sure that it is done,” Maya cut in.
The woman glared at her, and then looked at Elena with such anger, such loathing, Elena wanted to whittle into a ball.
The man looked up, and she expected the same fury, but it was the look of defeat in his eyes, the tired acceptance carving the lines of his face, that cut her deeper than the ropes biting into her flesh.
“Please,” she begged. “They are not responsible.”
“Not responsible?” Kilith laughed. “You are one and the same. Remember that. And if any one of you wants to play the stupid hero, remember her.”
Elena felt the pulser engage. She heard the deep internal thrum of its sensors zap to life, creating a charge. A strangled scream escaped her throat. Agni. She needed her Agni. She wrenched her hands, trying with all her might to snap the ropes as the captain calmly reached into his breast pocket.
The pulser thrummed louder.
Focus! Her fingers clawed the air helplessly as a roar built in her ears. Focus.
Kilith turned to his superior, waiting for his signal.
The captain withdrew his lighter and flicked it open.
A tiny flame bloomed to life. Small, inconsequential.
But Elena heard it draw in its first breath of life, a thunderous clap in the quagmire of her panic.
And like a starving man who sucked water from a rock, she pushed her mind forth, latching on to it.
The lighter’s heat flared in her mind’s eye.
She reached, fingers flexing as if she could grasp that tiny flame.
The captain raised the lighter to his lips, and her focus slid from the flame to his mouth.
To the heat of his breath. To the warmth that pulsated through his veins, his bones, his nadis.
It was like a channel, running from head to toe, and the fire was her boat through it.
She saw him as her Agni did. A collection of chakras and nadis, a glowing, beating mass of prana, flowing throughout. She saw the map of him.
When Samson had fused with her Agni, it was as if an invisible force had latched on to all the bright and essential parts of her, and slowly throttled them.
If he had continued, she was not sure what would have remained of her.
But as she looked at the tiny flame and the heat nodes of the captain, Elena did not care.
She drove forth her mind, grasping on to the captain’s chakras as Samson had done to her.
And she tore.
The captain let out a strangled cry. His hand seized. She felt the temperature of his body rise, tasted his bitter panic as she swam through his nadis, twisting, clawing.
He gasped. Blood beat behind his forehead, his pale skin turning a deep crimson red.
She could see his veins straining against his temples.
All that heat, trapped beneath his skin.
She spiked it up. Like a dial, she turned up his temperature, and the captain screamed.
She took control of his body then. Jerked him left and right like he had done to her.
She rushed her Agni’s awareness to his legs, and his feet skittered over the deck, then his arms, flapping them like a bird.
He tried to scream, and she clamped his throat.
His eyes bulged, the whites straining in their sockets.
Kilith rushed to him, trying to make him stop, screaming for help, screaming that she was a witch, a sorceress, but all she could hear was the rabbitlike beating of the captain’s heart.
Blood poured from her nose. Distantly, Elena noticed the drumbeat of her heart quake with warning, but she did not stop.
Their eyes were wide with terror, and she relished it.
And as that power flooded her veins, as her own Agni flared with a vicious, delicious force of another, she forgot how Samson had made her less.
She forgot her fear. She was burning from the inside out, and it was agonizing.
It was glorious.
So Elena reached. She dug into the deep waters of the captain, wrested into his prana, and burned.
He exploded in a flash of blood and flame.
They tore from inside his chest, eating into his flesh. Kilith screamed. Maya swore. The Sesharians bolted away as the captain’s body toppled. The flames leapt out, rushing the deck. They climbed the gun and burned her bonds, and then Elena dropped to the deck with a solid, heavy thump.
Kilith stared at her in horror as she rose slowly. Her flames wreathed around her, curling around her legs, her arms, her chest and face. A glowing, fervent inferno.
“Please—” he said.
“The next time you want to play the villain, remember me.”
Her inferno drowned his screams.
Boots thundered up the stairs. Elena turned to find Sesharian officers storming the deck, but when they saw her, when they saw what she had done, they froze.
Maya intercepted them, holding Kilith’s pod. She did not look scared. In fact, she looked rather pleased.
“Lower your guns, rustbloods, or Great Serpent preserve me, we’ll burn you down too.”
One fool stepped forward and removed his visor. Elena gasped as she recognized his thick jaw, his dark eyes, the cut in his brow that had come from a mining accident.
“Akino.” She swayed. “I—I thought you were dead.”
“And I never thought I’d see you again,” Akino said.
Maya held up the pod, a bright blue light blinking on its screen. “We need to take the bridge so I can contact Jaya.”
Elena reexamined the healer carefully. “Who are you, really?”
Maya pocketed the pod. “Arohassin. But more importantly, who are you? Witch? Sorceress?” She paused. “Ravani?”
Elena considered, and as she did, she heard the song of her inferno, the intoxicating hiss of her flames as they chanted her one true name. She said, “I am Elena, queen of Ravence.”