Chapter 18

They stopped the “training” at Second Bronze; Scorio simply couldn’t get up any longer, no matter how he clenched his jaw and shouted at himself to stand.

The last time he fell, he lay sprawled out on his back, arms outflung, drenched in sweat, unable to focus on the burning sun-wire, not caring about how the ragged edges of stone bit into his back.

Naomi had moved to stand over him, her gaunt, alien body out of focus, her hands on her angular hips, her tail lashing pensively back and forth.

“We’re done,” she’d said at last, and turned away.

“No,” he rasped, trying to turn onto his side. “One more…”

One more what? He didn’t even know. He sensed more than saw her drop out of sight, leaving him alone on the rooftop, and with her gone he could finally allow himself to stop trying, to unclench his muscles, and just lie there, sweat and blood stinging his eyes.

It had all been a massive exercise in frustration. She’d not simply beaten him for hours on end but showed him how inept he was at even trying to land a blow on her gleaming black hide. For long periods of time, she’d simply evaded his every blow, his every clumsy punch and staggering kick. Then she’d pelt him with light punches, keeping him perpetually off-balance, reeling from one hit to another, unable to block or get his bearing. Just when he’d be about to cry out in fury and frustration, she’d level him with a toppling blow.

Only to ask him if he was ready to quit.

He’d lie there, just as he did now, gasping, raging, and force himself up. One last time, he’d swear to himself. The next time he fell, he’d give up.

Just not this time.

But now she was gone, and he had nothing left to prove.

He couldn’t catch his breath. He’d already vomited several times, and the sour taste of bile was thick in the back of his throat. The sun-wire blazed at his unfocused eyes, so that with a groan he closed them and turned over.

What had just happened? Was that training? If so, what was he supposed to have learned? Was this literally the way to power, being beaten for hours again?

But no.

She’d said you couldn’t thrash a Great Soul to greater glories.

So…?

He eventually sat up, just as the sun-wire darkened to Second Rust, and in the ruddy light descended painfully to his own chamber, climbing slowly down the cyclopean blocks to his window, then falling inside as much as anything else.

To sprawl out across the shadowed floor.

With great effort, he crawled over to his water bucket. It took all of his remaining willpower to not just pour it over his face. Instead, he took it up in shaking hands and carefully, oh so carefully, raised it to his lips.

Nothing had ever tasted so sweet.

Closing his eyes, he rested his head back against the wall, allowed the warm water that had filled his mouth to seep down his throat, then took another swallow, then a third.

It was only when he set the empty bucket down that he realized he wasn’t alone.

Naomi sat against the far wall in her human form, an arm draped over a raised knee, other leg curled around, her hair thick and tousled about her face, her gaze thoughtful, her lips curled into a pout.

Scorio just sat there, heart pounding, too weak, too sore, too brutalized to do more than stare back.

“Tomorrow will be worse,” she said at last. “You sure you want to continue?”

He answered without thinking. “Yes.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Why?”

“Why?” The question didn’t make sense. Or perhaps he simply couldn’t parse it. “Because I want power.”

“Why do you want power?”

Such a simple question, but he found himself unable to come up with a quick response.

“You said most Great Souls figured that out later.”

“Sure,” she said. “But you’re not most Great Souls. You’re alone and weak and without a future. You’re asking for unrelenting pain and abuse. Pain and abuse that will allow you to crawl over the starting line, but not get much further. You’ll be left in the dust by your peers. You’ll be a joke if they ever learn about you, with your Coal-trained Heart and your shallow reserves. So why bother?”

His voice was just a croak. “There’s nothing else for me.”

“Not good enough.” Her voice wasn’t cruel, just matter-of-fact. “You saying the moment you find an alternative you’ll take it?”

He frowned, head still leaning back against the wall, feeling wrung out, a throbbing mass of pain and bone bruises. “No.”

“No. Then?”

He tried to put it into words. To understand it himself. The deep anger he felt, the simmering rage that he barely noticed. “I want to prove them wrong.”

A slight nod. “Better. But very limited. You can’t base your growth on other people’s opinions.”

Frustration caused him to curl his hands into fists, but only loosely. They hurt too much to truly clench. “It’s a start.”

“Fine. You want to prove them wrong. About what?”

“About me.” His words were terse, his anger filling them like empty vessels. “They threw me away. Sent me into the dark to die. Like a rabid animal.”

“Sure. So you want to—what? Get revenge?”

He didn’t know. Hadn’t thought that far.

Her sober hazel gaze seemed to pierce deep into his soul. “They threw you away like a rabid animal because you’re a Red Lister. Now you want to get revenge on them. Haven’t you realized that by doing so you’ll be proving them right?”

“Proving them right?” He forced himself to sit up. “They started it!”

“Now you sound like a child.”

He glared at her, his anger mounting. She held his stare without difficulty, and for a long while they simply sat thus, the silence aching between them.

Until she waved her hand, as if parting the tension, and sighed. “Scorio, I’ll level with you. You know I’ve been trying to get you to quit. I was sure you would. But somehow, you’re still sitting there across from me, more determined than ever.”

“Wait. So the training we just did…?”

Her expression turned impatient. “A little rougher than it needed to have been. Perhaps not as directed, either. But I told you. A trainer needs to get a sense of their student’s threshold.”

“And?”

Her expression soured. “I’ve yet to find it. Which is surprising. And annoying. It means I might have to take this oath more seriously than I intended.”

He was about to spit out something caustic when she raised a hand.

“But first I’ll level with you so that you know where I’m coming from. You’ve earned that much.”

“Fine,” he said. “Start leveling.”

“I wasn’t reborn into the Academy.”

And like that anger just sluiced away to be replaced by shock. “What?”

“You heard me.” Her tone turned defensive. “I was born the natural way in Bastion. My father was a high-level bureaucrat in House Kraken. I grew up in Ward 6, well provided for. Tutors, groomed for House duty, the works.”

“But… how?” Scorio shook his head. “You’re a Great Soul, right?”

“I have an Igneous Heart,” she said, and he couldn’t tell if it was a correction. “But everybody does. Everyone out there, from the lowest beggar to the richest plutocrat. But they’re raised in Coal and told they can’t do better. Nobody tries, and most of them have Hearts with such low reactivity that nothing would happen even if they dedicated their lives to ignition.”

“Wait,” he said, clasping at his brow with both hands and staring through the floor at nothing. “You’re saying that anybody can become—”

“No. I’m not.” Her tone was sharp. “I’m saying that with weak Hearts and nothing but Coal or Copper to burn, nine hundred and ninety-nine in a thousand would never amount to anything unless they were given huge resources and dedicated their lives to training.”

“Which you were?”

She leaned back against the wall, thick hair flowing forward as she lowered her chin to partially hide her face once more. “Which I was. My father is an angry man. He never accepted being worth less than the Great Souls who were given ten times as much for ten times less work. So he used his considerable resources to acquire elixirs for me, condensed mana of high quality, all kinds of things.”

“This was allowed?”

Her lips twisted into a sneer. “It’s not strictly illegal, though it ruined his career. Fortunately for him, I was born with an especially reactive Heart. I prospered, and against all odds, ignited my Heart at the age of nine.”

“Nine?” Scorio forgot all about his aches and pain as he stared at her. “Nine? You’ve been doing this for –what—ten years?”

“Something like that. And yet I’m just an Emberling. You know why?”

A test. Not an innocent question. “They didn’t admit you to the Academy?”

“They admitted me all right. Better to pretend I was one of their own than a rogue element they couldn’t control. But though they called me a prodigy, they never treated me like one. My training was neglected. I was told to develop character by being part of the cleaning crew. I served the other Great Souls, each and every year that a new cohort was reborn. In time, I think they even forgot I was meant to be trained at all.”

“And your father?”

“He grew furious. But his protests only ruined his career further. Just as I was informed that making too much noise would hurt my family. So for long years I stayed quiet and mopped, and cleaned, and peeled, and walked in the shadows. A Cinder that nobody paid any mind to.”

Scorio listened, fascinated. “But something changed.”

“It did. I grew older. Made friends that I lost, and even had the gall to fall in love.” Her smile couldn’t have been more bitter. “And for a while, even my little world gleamed with gold and seemed enchanted. Until I realized what a fool I was, and had enough.”

“What happened?”

Her eyes turned cold. “None of your business. But it was enough to propel me to my first trial. I passed it and manifested my Emberling power. That form you’ve seen that becomes me so… well. Hard to ignore.”

“What did they do? The trainers?”

“I don’t know. I left before they could disappoint me again. I knew my father would never forgive my ‘giving up’ as he’d call it, so I came here instead.” She leaned forward, eyes flashing. “Which is the point of this whole heart-warming tale. I’m about the least qualified person to train you in all of Bastion. I was spoon-fed elixirs until my Heart had no choice but to burn, then ignored and abused till I quit and fled for these ruins. So you ask me why I was trying to make you quit?”

Scorio stared, not knowing what to say.

“Because I have almost no idea how to train you.” She leaned back and crossed her arms protectively over her chest. “Want me to put together a regimen of high-quality treasures to push you past your limits? I can make some excellent if outdated suggestions that you’ll never get to act on. Want advice on the best ways to mop a kitchen floor at three in the morning? I’m your girl. Want concrete advice on how to train and improve yourself to remain on par if not better than those Academy monsters? You’ll have to look somewhere else.”

After which she finally looked away, staring out the sun-wire-lit window at the ruins as he continued to study her profile.

“Thank you for being honest,” he said at last. “But if I have any choice in the matter, I’ll keep you as my instructor.”

“Because there’s no one else.”

“That, and…” He trailed off, trying to fit his emotions into words. “You’re an outsider, like me. Something tells me we ought to stick together. Work together.”

Her smile was sardonic as she looked at him out of the corner of her eyes. “Work together. Toward what end, Scorio? Because that’s the other part of this. I’ve ceased growing in power because I’ve come to accept the wall I’ve run into.”

“Run out of ambition?”

“Become a realist,” she corrected. “There’s nothing but Coal out here. Coal and fiends and endless days in which to brood over the injustices of the world.”

“Doesn’t have to be that way.” He shifted his weight, wincing as some of the pains came back to him. “We’re alive against all the odds. Surely—”

“Scorio.” Her smile was pained. “Save the heartwarming speech. You don’t know anything about anything. I was actually born into this world. Raised in it. I’ve seen how it works. Been broken by the system you’re so blithely deciding to—what? Get revenge on? But what does that even mean?”

Scorio gritted his teeth as he mastered his anger. “Forget the revenge. Success is its own vengeance. Let’s just focus on getting powerful. Once we have power, we can dictate our own terms.”

Her expression was a blend of disbelief and amusement. “You’d be adorable if your ignorance wasn’t so frightening. The Houses run vast operations based out of Bastion but whose enterprises stretch across hell. Each has thousands of Great Souls operating its functions, but the truly talented, the most ambitious, the real power brokers abandon the Houses quickly to make for The Pit. Who exactly are you going to dictate terms to? Pyre Lord Praximar? The Charnel Dukes and Crimson Earls of the far reaches? What terms are you going to set?”

“I don’t know!” His cry rang off the walls. With a grimace, he climbed to his feet, his every muscle protesting, but he couldn’t just sit there. “I don’t know, all right? But I won’t hide out here like some whipped dog waiting for death and nursing my grievances! I’m going to fight!” Again his shout bounced off the walls. “I’m going to figure out what I can do and then I’ll bloody well do it, again and again and again until I’ve got some control over my own life!”

He hobbled across half the room to loom over her. “I won’t let people discard me like trash. I won’t let them decide my worth. I won’t watch as they do it to others, or pull them into these rotten systems while they don’t know any better. I’ll fight!” And blinded by his fury, he hammered the base of his fist into the wall.

Pain lanced up his forearm, sprang bright across his wrist. Grimacing, he shoved his hand into his armpit.

“Maybe it’s pointless. Maybe you’re right, and we’ll get nowhere. But if I had thought that from the beginning, I’d already be dead. Instead, I’m here. With you. On the verge of igniting my Heart, which I’d thought impossible until just a few days ago. So yes. I’m going to keep trying to pull off the impossible until it kills me. Because there’s no saying how far it’ll get me, and I plan to use the entirety of my pathetic life trying to find out.”

Naomi’s eyes were wide, her face pale.

With a curse, Scorio turned and limped over to the window and gazed out over the jumbled ruins. For a spell, they remained thus, in silence, until at last Scorio sighed and lowered his head.

“You agreed to train me for a week. Just do that much. But do it right. Maybe you think you don’t know anything, but you’re a walking encyclopedia compared to me. Teach me everything you know, and when the week’s up I’ll get out of your face, and you need never see me again. Fair?”

“Fair,” she said, voice quiet.

“Thank you.” Exhaustion rose to grip him like a great claw, making his knees feel weak and his head ponderously heavy. His forearms throbbed, his knuckles were raw, and he wanted nothing more than to lie down and let oblivion steal away his mind.

But he couldn’t rest. Instead, he hiked himself up to sit on the windowsill.

“You said that Bastion is mostly Coal, with pockets of Copper and Iron mana. But those blue vials are better stuff.”

Naomi looked to have coiled in on herself, knees pressed to her chest, arms wrapped around her shins. “Sapphire. Very rare.”

“So there’s better mana out there?” He waved his arm vaguely toward the north. “Out in hell?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Coal is the default in Bastion, and Copper the standard in the Rascor Plains. The closer you get to The Pit, the richer the mana.”

“Then let’s get out of Bastion. Let’s catch a ride to some place with the best mana, and train there.”

Her smile was little more than a bitter quirk of her lips. “Would that it were so easy. If it were, don’t you think the Academy would be located as deep into hell as the Houses could place it?”

“Then?”

“There’s a thing called the Curse. You don’t feel it here in Bastion, but the closer to the Pit you get, the stronger it is. If you as a Char went out into the Plains, you’d get a taste of it. Mild impairment of your thinking abilities, your reasoning. A sense of euphoria. That’s what all the regular folk in Bastion have to deal with when they work in the plains. Why there are so many accidents over time. But the farther you go, the worse it gets. Beyond the plains, you’d start having delayed responses to the world, make calculation errors, become fixated on random ideas, become overconfident, perhaps start laughing uncontrollably. If you kept pushing through, you’d develop hallucinations, mental confusion, and eventually fall unconscious and die.”

Scorio blinked. “Damn.”

“Yeah,” said Naomi softly. “It’s why only the greatest of the Great Souls can even attempt to reach the Pit. As an Emberling, I’ve more resistance, but I’d not get far past the Rascor Plains before I started feeling it, too.”

“So then we get out on the plains. Are there pockets out there of Iron and better?”

“Sure. You can even find areas of Bronze mana out there.” Some of the fire seemed to have gone out of her, her voice becoming flat. “But they draw all kinds of danger to them. Danger we’d be hard-pressed to avoid for any length of time.”

Scorio frowned, determined to find an answer. “Then we settle for Copper, for Iron, even. It’s better than working with Coal in these ruins.”

“It’s possible,” she allowed. “We’d have to fake papers to allow us to exit Bastion, and then find a way to both survive on the plains and evade notice from the House overseers.”

“Great. Then that’s a plan we can work on.”

Her gaze sharpened. “But you should ignite your Heart first. You should be a Cinder at the least, or the Curse will slowly but surely addle your mind.”

“You said I’d ignite a weak Heart if I did it here.”

“And you would. But better a weak Heart than a scrambled brain.”

“I don’t know about that.” He drummed his heels on the wall. “But since you’re no longer trying to get me to quit, what’s your honest assessment of my being able to ignite a decent Heart out here?”

“It’s… good.” She rested her chin on her knees. “You’ve got a ridiculous amount of unspecified ambition. You managed to figure out how to work Coal by yourself to the point of activating treasures. Plus you’re an obvious talent; you made Blood Baron in a previous life, which shows you have the capacity for greatness. I’d wager your Heart is naturally deep and no doubt very reactive. With some honest work and training, you could probably ignite within a month or two.”

“All right. A month or two. That’s a doable time frame. And once I make Cinder, what happens?”

“You gain low-level immunity to the Curse for one. The ability to see in the dark—”

“Wait, what? You can see in the dark?”

Her bitter smile crept back across her face. “How do you think I tracked you so easily?”

“I… I don’t know.”

“Darkvision was part of it. But most importantly, you begin the path toward your first trial, after which you’ll develop your first power.”

“Tell me more about that. What does it take to make Emberling? What’s this first trial?”

She raised both palms to forestall him. “No. You need to focus on the basics. The worst thing you can do is start thinking about future steps, and allow that to muddle your training. Trust me on that.”

“Fine. But say I ignite my Heart and become a Cinder. Would you be willing to escape Bastion with me, to find a way to train with better mana out on the Rascor Plains?”

Her expression became inscrutable. The silence drew out, and he was about to ask again when she finally answered. “You don’t know me.”

Scorio paused. “What? You’ve told me all I need to know. We should work together on this. We should—”

“You don’t know me,” she cut in, voice sharp, “and I don’t know you. I only stopped wanting to actively kill you yesterday.”

“See? Huge improvement.”

“You—you know nothing about the world. Your ignorance is terrifying. You don’t even know what you’re asking!”

She’d sat up, her face going pale, then mottled with emotion.

Scorio spoke slowly. “I do know what I’m asking. I’m asking that we start something here. A beginning. And see where it goes.”

Naomi gaped at him, then practically snarled. “Don’t toy with me.”

“I’m not. Damn, Naomi. All I’m asking is that you consider it. If by the end of this week you want me gone, I’ll go. Remember? So what do you say? Will you at least think it over?”

The silence stretched out between them, and then she looked away. “Maybe.”

“Maybe. All right.” He grinned. “I can work with that.”

To which she laughed. “You are one of the most obnoxiously confident men I’ve ever met.”

He grinned. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“You do that.” Naomi stood. “Good. But first, get some sleep. Looking at you in this condition is starting to make me feel guilty, and I don’t like that feeling.”

“Sleep.” He said the word experimentally, easing off the windowsill. “That I can do. And then?”

“Then it’s back to work. I’ll start our week fresh, seeing as I wasn’t working in good faith till now. And I’ll think over how best to help you.”

“So we’re back to a week?”

“For now, yes. At the week’s end, you can make your offer again.”

“You can count on it.”

She patted his cheek. “You have to survive the next week first. It won’t be easy. Best get some sleep.” And with that, she vaulted out of the window and dropped out of sight to the ground below.