Someone lifted Geral away from me.
I tried to watch where they took her, but I was blind now that I’d left the too-bright house. No matter how much I blinked, my vision wouldn’t work right after peering through smoke and heat. Maybe my eyes had boiled out.
Cold pressed against my face, then air. Fresh air. I inhaled as deeply as my lungs would allow, like I’d never get another clean breath again.
Strong arms encircled me, picked me up, and I was carried away from the heat and roaring fire. My skin cooled when I sat on the ground, and at last my vision fizzled toward normal. A youthful face floated before me.
“Sam?” Was that my voice sounding so wispy? I sucked on air from the mask again. Coughed.
Breathed.
Sandy hair and sharp features. Cris shook his head and smiled. “Wrong admirer. Sam is over there with Stef. He got Orrin out.”
Orrin had been here? My head pounded, and I tried to focus. Sam was okay. Cris had given me air. I was sitting on the hard, cold ground.
“I thought you’d be across the city by now.” My voice sounded like a toad. That wasn’t much of an improvement.
“I stayed to visit with Orrin and Geral. A little after I left, I heard the explosion.” He gazed around the ruins. “Good thing you and Sam got here so quickly.”
“Will she be okay?” I couldn’t find her in the mass of people around the house. They aimed hoses at the building, spraying the same mist I’d stumbled into.
His tone was gentle, and so was the way he wiped a cloth over my face; it came away soot-black. “I don’t know.”
I appreciated his honesty.
The fire died, leaving only electric emergency lamps to light the ruins. Smoke still rose like giant sylph as people shouted orders, darted around. Their silhouettes were strange and long in the illumination, but I saw Councilors Deborl and Sine speaking. Arguing? I couldn’t tell from where I stood.
When I lowered the mask—I’d forgotten I still held it to my face—I caught a familiar shape across the yard, sitting near a tangle of fallen and blackened pine trees. Sam.
Stef crouched over him, hands on his shoulders. I couldn’t hear their conversation, but Stef glanced my way, darkness obscuring her expression.
She was in love with him. Cris probably was too. I could only think of maybe six people who wouldn’t be.
Gravity dragged at me, but Cris caught my elbows and kept me from slumping over. The mask wasn’t so lucky. It bounced when it hit the dirt.
The reek of smoke permeated the air, but everything seemed so quiet now that the fire was out. The roaring, blaring, consuming fire. All around, people were still gathered in groups, talking and pointing at various places on the house.
Strange that the white stone remained as if nothing had happened. I hadn’t expected anything less from Janan, though. I’d seen the temple mend itself after Templedark, and other structures of white stone withstand onslaughts they shouldn’t. It was wrong. Creepy.
“Can you stand up?” Cris held my shoulders.
“I don’t know.” But I gave it a try, climbing to my feet, using Cris’s shoulder for balance. Across the yard, Sam got up, too, and started toward me, leaving Stef to trail after him. “Thank you for helping me.” I was always too slow with politeness, but at least I’d remembered this time.
“Of course.” Cris smiled. “We’ve got a lot of work to do, you especially. I can’t let you go around with smoky lungs when market day is so close.”
Lights shone in a mobile medical vehicle. Geral was probably in there. “I hope she and the baby are okay.”
“They have a chance because of you.”
I wasn’t sure how that was supposed to make me feel. Good? Proud? Mostly I felt overwhelmed and exhausted.
“Ana.” Sam’s deep voice filled me, sweeter than smoke, sweeter than the burst of fresh air from the mask. Soot and ash stained his face and clothes.
I stepped forward into his arms, relieved just to touch him. Warm. Solid. Real. Neither of us had gotten burned up.
He swayed, but stayed upright as my weight settled against him. “I’m so glad you’re okay,” he murmured into my hair. “I lost track of you in the smoke. I was worried.” Hands pressed hard on the small of my back.
“Any idea what caused the explosion?” Cris asked behind me. I’d forgotten he was here.
Sam shook his head. “Let’s not bother Geral about it, but Orrin is over there. We can ask if they were doing anything unusual.”
“Should I walk Ana back to your house, Sam?” That was Stef. I’d forgotten she was here, too. “No need to burden her with this, and she looks like she could use some rest.”
I peeled myself off Sam. “I’m fine. Besides, Stef, I’m sure your scientific mind will be more useful here than taking me home.”
She looked ready to argue—probably that I was so young and shouldn’t be exposed to such horrorsbut just then light bloomed on the far side of the city. The ground trembled.
“Was that—” she started, but seemed incapable of completing the thought. Like it was too terrible to comprehend.
The words were ash in my mouth. “Another one.”
This was not an accident.
21
SMOKE
THERE WERE THREE more explosions, each an hour after the one before. Stef tried to send me home every time, but I refused. Sam and Cris never backed her up, and her annoyance devolved into a glower.
“She shouldn’t be here,” she told Whit. “She’s too young. This will traumatize her.”
I turned to watch flames die under the fire-suppressant mist. Floodlights burned across the city, and smoke billowed into the sky, so completely veiling the stars they might not exist anymore except in memory. I’d grown used to geyser steam rising at all hours, but this was nothing like that. Smoke plumed dark and angry, evidence of destruction and hatred.
We waited for the sixth explosion. Everyone wore tight faces and worry, but we stood there by the smoldering ruins of the fifth house and nothing happened.
I stared at the white shell of the house—now streaked with cinders and dust, but whole—and hated Janan. I hated him for what he did to newsouls, how he’d deceived everyone for so long, and that he’d never let anything happen to his precious white city as long as he was awake.
My hand found my knife inside my coat pocket, the cool rosewood handle smooth under my sootdarkened fingers. As I had in Menehem’s laboratory, I wished for a weapon against Janan. Something that would
But even if it were possible, Janan reincarnated souls who meant everything to me; I wouldn’t be able to do it.
That made me hate him more.
Sam drew me homeward, into his own white shell of a house. I could sometimes forget about the exterior walls with all the parlor instruments, the honeycomb shelves, and the perfume of roses.
At some point I must have showered, because when I realized I was sitting on the sofa, tense and waiting for another explosion, my clothes were clean and my hair wet. I no longer stank of smoke and ash.
