Burning Night: A Tale of the Everburning City

Chapter 24, Part 3: Adrian

The tapping metal sounded like spattering sparks as they struck a sheet of tin. Dozens of salamanders, many of them pointed directly at him from across the trench, and all of them clanged impotently.

Adrian then saw, for the first time in his life, the red coat up close.

The woman who stepped past him was tall, possibly as tall as lamp-post, and had a head of hair as red as the immaculate coat she wore. She walked through the field with the same imperious gait that Adrian remembered from the gang's enforcers.

Only, Adrian had to admit, more so. There was a sense of confidence that saturated her posture and poise; an air of absolute self-reliance so unshakeable the City itself could have been built upon it.

Adrian took a slow breath and coughed in surprise to find the air hot and still as if he were working in front of a forge.

"Do you feel how the wind stopped?" The tall crafter asked, shouting as if she were bellowing to be heard over a crew of workers. "Do you feel the air scalding your lungs?"

Everyone, including the soldiers on the opposite side of the trench, stopped to stare at her.

"You are inside my heat haze," the tall crafter announced. "Within it, there isn't a single person in the City who would live through my decision to kill them. Do you understand?"

"I have decided that this fight is over. The first person to disagree with me is hot ash in the wind," the woman said.

In the back of Adrian's awareness, he could see himself picking up his sword, currently lying in the mud near Farah. He saw himself make a single step, only one short step. After that step, nothing.

He couldn't even see how he would die, if he made a move to attack her.

"It's over, Farah. It's definitely over," Adrian said, looking back to his friend. "That crafter, she's something else."

"They're not all the same, Keates," Farah said, clutching at his arm. "Don't hate them."

Adrian choked, hearing her. Her grip on his arm was strong, and the gaze she fixed him with, even with the ruin of her face, was watching him with concern.

"Farah," Adrian said, choking a little on his tears. "Don't talk like that. Don't worry about me. I'll be okay."

"Who else would I want to worry about?" Farah asked.

Adrian watched her other hand slowly, shakily, rise to his face. Her fingertips rested on his cheek.

Somewhere ahead of Adrian, a world removed from anything he wanted to notice, the soldiers on the other side of the trench were dropping their guns, throwing up their hands and leaving a wide berth between themselves and Colonel Cavilla, who appeared to be raging impotently at the Crafter.

It made Adrian smile when he saw Cavilla's own soldiers knock her to her knees and tie her hands behind her back, as the crafter and Sergeant Varnell began giving orders that were finally being heard.

Adrian felt a hand rest on his shoulder. A gloved hand, black as the unlit caverns of his life before this, gripped his shoulder and gave a short, gentle squeeze. Adrian looked up, at a tall man dressed in black, his face shrouded in the shade beneath his hat.

But the man's words weren't directed at Adrian. "I saw your lunge, from up on the cable car," the tall man said to Farah.

"I, I missed," Farah managed to say in response. Her hand fell from Adrian's face, and her next breath was a desperate wheeze; an agonizing struggle between suffocating and the blinding pain Adrian knew his friend was feeling.

"You prioritized putting that sword into him over a killing blow. You put it above using the sword to shield you," the shadow said. His voice was kind, as he slowly stepped past Adrian, to Farah's other side. "You did that exactly how a shadow should have."

"My sister," Farah managed to say, with a weak cough that nearly split open the ruined flesh holding her lungs in place. "Abag..."

"Abagail Respelli," Adrian finished for Farah.

"I know her. She'll hear about this from me, long before the usual channels," the tall man in the hat said. In his left hand, somehow without Adrian even seeing him move, a knife appeared in his hand.

Adrian's own hand went for his sword, and his mind launched into a series of battles with the man in the hat.

He saw himself swinging as he unsheathed his sword, saw himself take a step back first, strike with his other hand, a dozen other choices. He saw the battle play out a hundred different ways in little more than a few heartbeats.

And all of them ended in Adrian's death.

Adrian's hand was well on its way to drawing out his sword anyway when someone caught his arm by the elbow and pushed him up to his feet. He was very nearly thrown off his feet, caught only by the surprisingly strong arms of his old teacher, Sergeant Varnell, as she embraced him.

"Don't you dare do something stupid, Keates," Varnell said to him. Stunned, his mind barely able to process what was happening around him, he was surprised by the shame that swept over him like a bucket of ice water.

There were tears in Varnell's eyes.

"He's here to do what shadows give for their own. We can't help her, and you can join me in hating myself for that. But right now, be brave. Like she was when she faced down a burning crafter for you," Varnell said.

Adrian nodded, and swallowed. "Aye, ma'am."

Adrian saw Caitlin standing nearby, looking like she had lost half the blood in her body.

Numb, unable to even express the sorrow tearing at his heart, he saw the shadow rest his knife on Farah's chest.

"I'm sorry I can't do more for you," the shadow said.

Farah exhaled once, slowly, as the knife slid inside of her. Knowing better, he still waited with his breath held for her chest to rise again. For her eyes to move, for her mouth to slip into that smile of hers that made it difficult for him to breathe.

He waited, even after Farah didn't flinch as the knife left her body.

He waited, even as the shadow scraped the blood off his knife and moved away.

He waited, even as a Crafter marched off into the field, and the strange heat in the air vanished.

He waited, until a speck of dust, carried from the breeze, landed on her open eye, and she didn't flinch.

He waited, even as minutes marched past, and the cold morning air bit at the last of the warmth in his heart.