Drowning in Fire

ONE

Present day

Griffin’s jacket had lost its scent.

For the millionth time, Keko wondered why she’d kept it these past two months, this tangible proof that she’d been wrong and Griffin had been telling the truth. And for the millionth time since he’d found her being held captive in that Colorado garage and had given her the jacket to cover up her nakedness, she held the jacket at eye level and remembered how his body had filled it out.

The black all-weather coat lined with the zippers and pockets of a soldier now smelled like any other article of clothing in the Big Island’s Chimeran valley, but if she closed her eyes, she could inhale and recall his scent.

There was no point in keeping it any longer. She knew very well what she’d done. The consequences of her actions had transformed her world. She didn’t need to be constantly reminded of what she’d lost. Or whom.

With a fling of her arm, she tossed Griffin’s jacket over the cliff on which she stood. The warm Hawaiian wind caught it, flinging it about, but Keko easily hit it with her fire, the spout of flame from between her lips striking true. The jacket caught, dancing on the air as it burned, as it fell down, down, down, to flutter as ash into the ocean waves far below.

Take it back, she thought at the water, at Griffin. It’s yours.

“There you are.”

The male voice came from behind, drifting up from lower down the slope that dropped off into the Chimeran’s hidden valley. Shading her eyes with her hand, Keko peered over the ragged face of rock she’d climbed to get up to this spot. Makaha stood where the winding trail ended abruptly, his face turned upward, the hair that was now too long brushing his shoulders.

“Do you need me?” she called down.

He grinned, and the sight of it hurt her heart. Three years after Griffin had taken half of Makaha’s right arm in a storm of ice, and she was finally able to speak with her oldest friend on equal ground again, the disparity of their stations and status within the clan erased.

Because she’d fallen just as far down as he.

“Hold on,” she told him. “I’ll come to you.”

He couldn’t climb, after all.

The rock tore into her fingertips and toes as she scrabbled her way down, faster than what was probably careful. On the last few feet, she shoved away from the rock and leaped, dropping into the dirt right in front of the man who used to be one of the most ferocious warriors of the race. Makaha. Fierce. He’d been named well, but Griffin had snatched away that meaning, turning it into a joke.

“What’s going on?” she asked Makaha, hoping against hope that it might be something of worth. Something she could use to get her status and dignity back.

His grin saddened but didn’t die, because he knew very well how she felt. “Nothing. The final drums for dinner came and went and I knew you hadn’t eaten all day. If you hurry there might be something left.”

Scrambling for scraps after the ali’i and the warriors and the rest of the Chimeran people had eaten their fill. This was her life now.

She pressed a hand to her hollow stomach. She barely ate these days, but she didn’t really miss it. She didn’t need that massive amount of energy anymore. Not for beating clothes against rocks in the stream. Not for dragging garbage to the trucks to be hauled up and out of the valley.

“Yeah,” she said, her voice hollow. “Okay.”

Makaha didn’t move. The stump of an arm gestured to her spot up on the cliff. “Was that what I think it was? That fire?”

She thought of the jacket’s ash, floating on, and then mixing into the waves, and said nothing.

Makaha stared hard at her. He’d caught her once, a little more than a month ago, with the jacket draped around her shoulders, her nose buried in the collar. But he’d left her to her own grief, her own regrets, her own anger. Makaha’s thoughts about Griffin were his own, and rightfully so. They’d never spoken directly of the Ofarian who’d hurt them both in different ways.

With a terse nod down the slope Makaha said, “Come on. Let’s go be pitiful together.”

He could joke because he’d accepted his status. Moved on. To Keko, the very idea seemed foreign.

Yet she followed him down into the valley, turning her back on the myriad blues and greens of the ocean that surrounded her island home. Water, water, everywhere. She would never be able to escape him.

The ground flattened out, a ring of dense foliage surrounding the great meadow that was the crux of the Chimeran stronghold. White boarded homes with tin roofs climbed the sides of the valley, their foggy windows looking toward the water in the distance, their yards little more than patches of dirt. A giant canopy made of mismatched waterproof fabrics sewn together stretched over a mass of picnic tables at the far end, the adjacent cooking fires now reduced to smoking embers. And in between Keko and the satiation of her growling stomach stood a mass of Chimeran warriors.

A flood of brown-skinned fighters streamed onto the meadow, forming lines along the green to prepare for their evening drills and exercises and prayers to the Queen. Bane appeared, half a head taller than any other, and started to meander among his men and women, hands on hips, assessing with his trademark frown.

“You know what,” she told Makaha, who’d stopped next to her behind a fountain of giant banana tree leaves, “I’m not hungry after all.”

Her friend heaved a sigh, but it was one of commiseration. Maybe he’d gotten to the point where he could walk in front of the warriors he’d once been a part of, but as their so recently disgraced former general, she could not.

“What are you doing now?” she asked him.

He jutted his only thumb toward the Common House, the one-story building with the seemingly never-ending row of cracked and crooked windows that sat in perennial shadow. Almost two months of having to sleep in there, and she’d never, ever get used to it.

“Runners brought in boxes of clothing today,” he said. “I’m sorting them before the sun goes down.”

How long had it taken him, Keko wondered, to shake off the shame? To have been able to say that without cringing? Because her shame still clung desperately to her back, its claws sharp and deep and painful.

“Can I help?” It took a few tries to get it out.

He couldn’t hide his surprise. “Sure. I’ll show you what to do.”

They ducked into the cool, dim Common House. Long lines of grass-woven mats covered the floor. She didn’t look to the anonymous spot she’d been given right in the center of all the others. The only way she found it was when she came in late at night and all the other disgraced or unworthy Chimerans were snoring. Hers was the only mat without a body. And it was just a place to crash, nothing more.

She tried not to think about the hammock she’d strung up in her house on the bluff, the comfortable, knotted, creaking thing with the perfect view of the valley and the ocean beyond. The house and hammock that belonged to Bane now.

But every now and then, when a piece of grass from her Common House mat broke loose and scratched her skin, she let her mind drift to the feathertop mattress at that hotel in Utah, and the man who had pressed her body deeper into it. Then, just as quickly, she forced her mind back to the cold, hard reality at hand.

The back corner of the Common House had been stacked precariously with leaning cardboard boxes stamped with the name of the fake church charity Chimerans used to get donations from unsuspecting Primaries. Makaha grabbed a box, using his stump to balance it, and dumped the mass of colorful, wrinkled hand-me-downs onto the cracked cement floor.

“Kids’ clothing over there,” he said, pointing to a pile. “Men’s by the door. Women’s just opposite.”

He started work right away, but Keko just watched him, a massive lump in her throat and a terrible tremble shooting through her limbs. She couldn’t move, was absolutely frozen. His piles swirled into meaningless colors, his repetitive motions hammering into her brain. Frustration and humiliation pounded their awful little fists against the backs of her eyes and clogged up her chest.

No. She would not cry. But she also knew she couldn’t handle this. Doing what Makaha had been doing day in and day out for three years, and doing it without emotion. This was not her. It would not ever be her.

Keko’s feet started to back away before she even told them to. When they hit a grass mat, she turned and ran down the rows, the exit doorway a slanted rectangle of dying light in the distance.

Makaha didn’t call after her, but his pity as he watched her go was like a knife in the back. He knew she would have to come back eventually. So did she, and that made her run even faster.

She burst out of the Common House and plunged into the dark under the mango trees. She didn’t stop there, but went deeper and deeper into the vegetation that surrounded the central meadow. She didn’t stop until she was truly alone, bracing her hands on her knees and taking deep draws of wet Hawaiian air. It would rain that night. More water.

Griffin had taken it all—Makaha’s life, her life.

No, that little voice reminded her, as it had every day since her secret affair with Griffin had been revealed to a select few in her clan, and Chief had learned the truth behind Keko’s planned war against the Ofarians. You did this to yourself.

When Keko had been captured and kept prisoner in Colorado, an Ofarian had been behind it, and she’d assumed it had been done on Griffin’s order—a desperate, last-ditch attempt to weasel his way back into the Senatus. She’d planned an attack on him to retaliate, but she’d been wrong, and her war had been exposed for the awful, messy heartbreak that it was. That was what had stripped her of being general. That was truly why Chief had sent her to the Common House.

It was her fault. It was all her fault. She was such an asshole, to keep dragging Griffin into it, for blaming him. She wasn’t here, hiding in the bushes from the people she used to command, because of something he did. She had to get over it. To acknowledge all that she’d done.

She had to fix it. And she had to act soon.

A great shout—a chorus that simultaneously chilled her and sent volcanic-level heat through her veins—shot through the valley. Hundreds of Chimeran voices, low and sharp, full of passion and fire and love for the land and the magic, rose up as one. She knew the chant by heart, had learned it as a toddler, and then led her warriors in it nightly—as Bane was doing now. Though she was still standing beneath the canopy of leaves, her body was mentally going through ghost motions, and making the companion movements to the warriors’ call to action: the slap of the elbows and thighs, the stomp of feet, the lift of palms to the sky, and the power and confidence that came with it.

When it was over, when the chant ended on a terrific roar that shook the leaves around her, Keko released the tension in her muscles one by one. She took a great Chimeran inhale and felt the fire magic surge inside her. Its presence always managed to bring some calm. Inching forward, she parted the branches and gazed out onto the meadow.

Bane had his men and women in the traditional lines, the best, most proven along the front with him, those who were still in training and had yet to issue a challenge at the back. The last line swerved crooked just a hair, and Keko had to fight the urge to jog out and smack the offenders into straightness. They were Bane’s now.

General Bane, the “long-awaited child.” General Bane, who’d been her greatest motivation and the hardest competitor her entire life. It killed her to see him where she belonged, but completely destroyed her to know that she could stalk out onto the meadow right now and issue a challenge to any one of those younglings in the back row, and they wouldn’t take it. They wouldn’t be required to take it. Battles for status were mutual, and no one would ever agree to fight her, the general who’d tried to start a war over false reasons.

The general who’d violated kapu by getting involved with a water elemental. Her heart, the traitorous organ, turned sour and huge inside her chest.

If only she’d told Griffin about the “no battle magic during Senatus gatherings” rule.

If only he hadn’t destroyed her best friend, and then asked her to take his side against her own people.

If only she could have forgotten what he’d awakened inside her.

If only he had actually been behind her capture.

If.

If.

If.

She was fucking sick of ifs. Chimerans weren’t made like that. They acted. They fought. She was a warrior. Period. And she would fight tonight—not with fire or fists, but with words.

Beyond the lines of warriors who had now paired off and were working on stretching and strengthening drills, rose the ali’i’s house, a lone light coming from the kitchen window. Chief’s thick silhouette moved behind the glass.

Yes, she’d made some pretty hefty mistakes, but Chief had been the one to strip her life away. And he was the only one with the power to give a portion of it back. She started toward the house. Not across the field where the warriors would see her, but around the perimeter, sticking to the cover of the trees and vines, and relying on the deepening dark of twilight.

It was dangerous to beg. It was shameful. But she didn’t have any further to fall. She’d struck the bottom and bore the bruises to show for it. She had absolutely nothing to lose.

The garden behind the ali’i’s house was barricaded by a low stone wall, overgrown with neglect, and cool and dark at this time when day merged with night. Her uncle had been ali’i so long that Keko remembered the placement of each paving stone, having skipped across them as a little girl whenever she’d come to the house for personal lessons. Her aunt had lived long enough to see Keko best Bane for the generalship, but after her aunt had died, the house had fallen into the same poor, weather-worn state as the rest of the valley.

That’s what happened, after all, when a people cut themselves off from the modern world.

Chief usually drank a glass of fresh fruit juice on his upper terrace in the evenings, watching the practice of the warriors he commanded. That’s where he would be now, and when he came downstairs after the sun had set, she would surprise him. And she would make her final argument.

As she crossed the garden, Bane’s voice echoed throughout the valley, guiding his warriors in a new series of exercises that practiced fighting at night. She blocked out the sounds as best she could as she padded along the narrow patio toward the back door. Inside, Chief ambled out of the kitchen and made his way to the sitting room on the other side of the glass door from Keko.

She frowned. Chief was a creature of habit and embraced rituals, so for him not to be up on the front balcony, fruit juice in hand, watching and nodding down at his warriors, made Keko’s skin prickle with a chill. Enough that she had to tap into her inner fire and crank it up.

Her uncle, her father’s brother, was somewhere in his sixth decade of living but looked only in his fourth. A little softer now but still strong. An imposing figure worthy of his title and too beloved to have been challenged for his position in all his years. That love and respect had kept her from challenging him, too, and now she stewed with regret.

Keko had been planning on it, however, and Chief had known her challenge was imminent. They’d even discussed it, because when he eventually accepted the challenge and she beat him—because she would have—it meant he was endorsing her as ali’i.

That would never happen now. There was only her name and her dignity to earn back.

Inside, an empty-handed Chief shuffled toward the burgundy couch with the hardened, dipped cushions. Something in the way he moved kept Keko riveted to her spot just outside the back door. She crouched, watching through the glass, her movements nothing but a whisper.

The faint light coming from the kitchen just barely illuminated Chief as he went to the wobbly end table. He paused with his hand on the knob of the single drawer, then slowly opened it. He took something out, but with his back to Keko she couldn’t see what it was. Then he turned around and the shape of it was unmistakable: a tapered candle.

Chief drew a deep breath—the breath of a Chimeran, the one that used the oxygen from the atmosphere to stoke their fire magic inside, the one that expanded their special ribs. It was odd, though, because the depth of a breath indicated the level of magic you wanted to conjure, and you didn’t need to take that deep of a breath to create the small flame needed to light a candle. Yet Chief’s chest expanded like he was calling forth a great inferno needed at the height of battle.

His lips parted. His chest deflated. The magic escaped his body.

And no flame came out.

Not a single spark. Not even a curl of smoke. Nothing.

The mighty Chimeran ali’i stumbled backward as though struck. His calves hit the couch and he collapsed onto it, his normally erect and powerful body a boneless mass. His chest, empty of magic and fire, heaved. He lifted the candle to eye level and stared at the wick as though willing it to light with his mind. Then he bent at the waist and shoved a hand underneath the couch cushions, removing something hidden. Keko couldn’t tell what it was until a tiny burst of hot, gold light briefly illuminated the room.

A match. There were matches in the Chimeran ali’i’s house.

Keko couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. The earth could have opened up behind her and she wouldn’t have known.

Chief touched the match to the candle, and the newly lit wick threw his distressed, hopeless, and fearful expression into terrifying focus.

Still crouching, still in a daze, Keko lost her balance. Her body tilted forward before she realized it, and her hand shot out, catching the door. The latch was faulty and the door creaked open. Only an inch or so, but enough for the sound to slice through the silent house.

Chief’s head snapped up. The matchbook disappeared behind his back. He jumped to his feet.

Keko rose, too. She pushed the door open wide and ventured into the cool interior, lit by the dancing flame of the single candle. Another rare wave of goose bumps rolled across her skin, but this time she couldn’t find the focus to reach for her fire and erase them.

The door clicked shut behind her. Chief was struggling to breathe, the sound ragged and nervous.

“Uncle?”

“Kekona.” His hand shook and the candle flame jumped. He turned to set the taper into a holder on the end table, and the table’s uneven legs rattled on the tile floor. When he faced her again, she barely recognized him. Such terror deepened the creases along his forehead and strained the lines around his mouth. He seemed pale, the silver along his temples pronounced.

She advanced slowly into the room. “You have no fire.”

He took a step back. Never had she seen him retreat. Not when facing a warrior, and certainly never when confronted by one of the disgraced.

“What happened to your fire?” She heard the rise in her voice, the demand, but did not try to rein it in.

His panicked eyes flicked to the door at her back.

“I came alone,” she said. That made him even more apprehensive and it empowered her to move closer. “In the name of the Queen, what’s going on? What happened to your fire?”

He licked his lips, and a single whispered word dropped pitifully from them. “Gone.”

“Gone.” The word reverberated inside her. She would mark his claim as impossible if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes.

“It’s still inside.” His voice came out stressed and thin, and she barely recognized it. “I can feel it, but I can’t reach it. Can’t call it out. It doesn’t listen to me.” He touched the candle flame and it danced on his fingers like it should, then he blew it out. “But I can still manipulate it.”

A great wave of realization crashed into her. “When? For how long?” When he didn’t answer she lifted her voice to the level she used to use as general. “Was it gone when you denounced me for inciting a false war in front of the whole clan?” Still no answer. “Was it gone when you sent me down to the Common House and made Bane general?”

He held up a hand, but the gesture was weak. “The day . . .” his voice cracked and he cleared his throat to get it back. “The day Cat Heddig came here and exposed your affair with that Ofarian was the last day I used it. The last day . . .”

Two months ago. And all this time he’d been commanding the Chimerans. Pretending that he was still the most powerful one of them, still the most respectable. Playing the hypocrite as he stripped her of title and pride.

“Did you know something was wrong then? That something was happening to you?”

“Yes.”

Keko whirled, snatching a vase holding a mostly dead flower from a nearby table. She hurled the vase against the wall, just to the right of the ali’i’s head. It exploded into a million pieces, water shooting across the plaster. The acrid odor of decay plumed around them. Chief didn’t budge, didn’t even flinch.

“How have you hid this?” Her throat stung with the volume. “How?”

He swung the matchbook around from where he’d been hiding it behind his body, looked at it for a moment, then tossed it to the couch. “I’m not the only one.”

Keko blinked. “What?”

“I mean”—and the harsh, slow tones of the ali’i returned—“that I am not alone. There are other Chimerans like me. Others whose fire has died.”

She glanced at the matches, thinking that some other Chimeran would have had to have smuggled them into the valley. Someone else had to have known about the ali’i.

“It’s some sort of disease, Keko. I don’t know why it strikes, or who it will hit, but the numbers are . . . growing.”

She pressed the heels of her hands to her forehead. “A disease. And you’ve been able to hide this how?”

He looked to the candle, and then down at his fingers that had held the flame. “There are some Chimerans, healthy ones, who know and who . . . help us. Give us flame when we need it.”

“Cover for you.” A subtle, secret passing of fire from one hand to another. And it had worked. “Who else? Who else is afflicted?”

He shook his head. “You can take me down, but I won’t betray the rest.”

What a fucking deceiver. “So you’ll protect and hide others exactly like you, but throw your general, your own family, into the Common House.”

“Two completely different things. You made a terrible mistake. And you broke kapu.”

“I know what I did. But at least I’m admitting it.” She advanced toward him. One step, then another. “Who. Else.”

Chief just shook his head.

“I see. So in keeping their secret and by not sending them to the Common House, by not exposing their ultimate weakness, they protect you, too.”

His silence was answer enough.

“It doesn’t matter.” She waved a hand. “I don’t want them.”

I want you. I want to be ali’i.

“It’s been going on longer than you think,” he said. “Longer than I’d imagined. Maybe going back to the Queen. This thing . . . it’s not new.”

It was horrifying information.

It was useful information.

She started to back toward the door, her bare feet going toe-heel, toe-heel on the tile that now felt like ice.

“What will you do?” Chief started to follow. When she did not respond he cried out, much louder, “What will you do?”

She looked to the bank of smudged windows overlooking her aunt’s dead garden. The moon hadn’t risen yet and it was so very dark outside. It was the same within.

“I came here,” she said, “to actually beg you to give me another chance. That’s not what I want now.”

“What do you want? Do you want me to accept your challenge? Do you want to be ali’i?”

Her life’s most precious dream, wrapped up and handed to her.

Except that Chimerans never wanted anything that couldn’t be fought for and won with sweat and power and magic, and this, to her surprise, was no different.

Her gaze found the small black lava rock that he wore on a rope around his neck—the very stone that the great Queen had picked up the day she’d grounded her canoe on Hawaii and declared it her people’s new home. Keko had wanted to wear that rock her whole life, to feel its scratch on her skin and its weight against her chest. To know the Queen’s power and hold her blessing.

Looking at it now, Keko thought something entirely different, and she stood there for a long time, trying to wrap her head around it. Trying to figure out what it meant.

The great Queen had had a purpose in bringing her Polynesian people to this string of islands over a thousand years ago—a worthy purpose. A heroic purpose. The first Chimerans had loved her for it, and had followed her willingly across the ocean. Keko knew now that she, too, needed a purpose. She wanted her race to look up to her not because it was required, but because it was desired. She would not get that through begging. She would not get that through blackmail or trickery.

The only way was to earn it.

Yes, she could challenge Chief right now, and she would win his position, but it would be false. Yes, she could expose his lies, but that would also expose other innocents who would in turn be cast out, and where was the honor in that? She would assume power over a stricken people, carrying with her this terrible secret of their affliction. How would ascending to ali’i now do anything to help them?

When she was ali’i, she wanted power and glory for all her kinsmen, not less for others through no fault of their own. She wanted strength, not scandal.

The lava rock moved on Chief’s chest as he breathed. Waiting for her to speak. To decide.

Every night since Keko’s fall, she had prayed hard to the great Queen for her blessing, for answers, for explanation, for a way out. And tonight, it had finally been given.

“What will you do?” Chief pleaded.

Personal revenge was a single sentence away. Except that rash, emotional decisions had destroyed her in the first place. She’d done enough damage. Now she needed to heal.

The Queen—through the events of this night—had finally given Keko the answer. And Keko embraced the sacrifice that it required.

She lifted clear eyes to the ali’i, feeling absolutely sure of herself for the first time in months. Maybe years. “Thank you, Uncle.”

Turning, she went for the door.

“For what?” he shouted at her back. “For what?”

He couldn’t come after her, she knew, or he’d risk the clan knowing he’d allowed her audience. Let him wonder. Let him fear. It was powerful fuel.

She slipped back into the night, the answer she’d wanted and all Chimeran power in her hands.