Ruby’s Fire by Catherine Stine
Chapter 1
I slide under the red-tinged leaves in the cave garden and wait. Try not to flinch as their warm, scalloped fronds brush my cheeks.
A streak of yellow flits across the edge of my vision, and is followed by a tiny fin. When I see the mottled tail my hand darts out and pinches it tight. The Dragon Lizard arches back and hisses at me. Its golden-ringed eyes glare fear and hatred.
“Save your venom, little one,” I whisper as I throw a cloth bag over its head and gingerly pack in the rest of its tail.
Sliding back from under leaf cover, I try not to catch my hair on any Fireagar thorns. Instead, one snags the bag’s drawstring. I curse as I unhitch it. This lizard’s a fighter, flipping the bag left to right on my hip as I rise. “I’ll take you back as soon as I extract your medicine. Promise.”
A whoosh of scorched air catches me as I near the cave front. I slide my burn mask over my face and inch out into the searing air toward the compound. Today, it’s hot as ever—a rousing 165 degrees, yet life is timidly returning. It’s only been a few years since these Dragon Lizards peered out from the caves. “A sign from Fireseed that the desert is slowly coming alive again,” pronounce the elders. Fireseed is the mythical red crop that Professor Teitur planted all those years ago to feed the desert folks. The flower with a five-pointed star, and a five-foot stalk. The flower we never found, except as a god in the sky.
Everything is a supposed sign from Fireseed.
For me, Dragons Lizards are for one thing—sleep.
I’ve learned how to squeeze the golden elixir from their cheeks and mix it with flakes from the sand caves. Leave it to dry and then pound it into powder. This Oblivion Powder is how I attack my sleepless nights and the waking nightmares that come—always the same. A dark man comes for me under the new moon, the same moon that will creep up the walls of the sky tonight.
I need to make extra strong powder and bring it along.
For someone’s long, long sleep.
Tonight the moon is a blood orange that oozed over the horizon even before the setting sun. All day I dreaded its rise, because tonight is my initiation into the Founders’ Ceremony.
Three young ladies every month.
I see the man who will lead me away with him from the Fireseed alter to our gazebo. He’s the head of the Initiation committee. Stiles. He has a bristly beard and a back like a dried, curled up beetle. His eyes are sunken yet glinting out with an oily sheen as if he’s peering into my private pool of emotions. He’s hideously old—forty-one—a full twenty-three years older than me. I won’t survive his spongy lips on mine, or his bony arms pinning me down.
But I didn’t come unarmed.
The men tip their torches to the fire columns, and it explodes upward, crackling and popping from three giant pillars in the shape of Fireseed stalks. I sneak a peek at the two other girls down the row, friends of mine—tall, lovely Freeblossom who tirelessly reads to the young ones, and chubby, rosy Petal who always has a kind word. Like mine, their crimson cloaks have been freshly pressed. Under their hoods, their long hair has been freed of their braids and washed. Under their heat masks, their eyes are wild and fearful. I press three fingers of my good hand to my heart in a secret message of support. They do the same to me and then quickly look away.
The head of the ceremony clears his throat and speaks through the amplifiers set in his heat mask. “The Founders will take their maidens to their private gazebos now, while the chorus sings the Founding song. It is a sacred duty and gift that we bestow on our Fireseed God.
Not my Fireseed God. My god would shelter me, wrap me up in its winding, red branches and hide me from Stiles.
As if Stiles can sense my silent criticism, he lurches for my hand and grips with fingers that are cold paper and flint.
The group begins the song about the original planting day, and how Professor Teitur, the founding saint, planted the first crop to save the world. Never mind that we still don’t have Fireseed. At least we have a hybrid to feed us—the red-tinged Fireagar sent from up north that now grows in our caves. My own pounding heart, and Stiles’ low, husky voice drown out the rest of the song.
“Move along, sweet Ruby,” he urges as he tugs me along the path freshly raked for us. I imagine drool sliding down his lower lip as he says it.