An Ember in the Ashes

“No,” I rasp. “Not Helene. Not Helene. Not Helene.”
I chant it like a madman with only two words left in his mind. Helene’s ghost comes closer.

“Elias.” Skies, her voice. Cracked and haunted. So real. “Elias, it’s me. It’s Helene.”
Helene, on my nightmare battlefield? Helene, another victim?
No. I will not kill my oldest, best friend. This is a fact, not a wish. I will not kill her.
I realize in that moment that I cannot be afraid of something if there’s no chance it could ever occur. The knowledge releases me, finally, from the fear that has consumed me for days.
“I won’t kill you,” I say. “I swear it. By blood and by bone, I swear it. And I won’t kill any of the others, either. I won’t.”
The battlefield fades, the smell fades, the dead fade, as if they had never been real. As if they had only ever been in my mind. Ahead, close enough to touch, sit the mountains I’ve been staggering toward for five days, their rocky trails curving and swooping like Tribal calligraphy.
“Elias?”
Helene’s ghost is still here.
For a moment, I don’t understand. She reaches for my face, and I flinch from her, expecting the cold caress of a spirit.
But her skin is warm.
“Helene?”
Then she’s pulling me close, cradling my head, whispering that I’m alive, that she is alive, that we are both all right, that she’s found me. I wrap my arms around her waist and bury my face in her stomach. And for the first time in nine years, I start to cry.
***
“We only have two days to get back.” These are the first words Hel’s spoken since she half-dragged me out of the foothills and into a mountain cave.
I say nothing. I’m not ready for words yet. A fox roasts over a fire, and my mouth waters at the smell. Night has fallen, and outside the cave, thunder reverberates. Black clouds roll out from the Wastes, and the heavens break open, rain cascading through lightning-edged cracks in the sky.
“I saw you around noon.” She adds a few more branches to the fire. “But it took me a couple of hours to come down the mountain to you. Thought you were an animal at first. Then the sun hit your mask.” She stares out at the sheeting rain. “You looked bad.”
“How did you know I wasn’t Marcus?” I croak. My throat is dry, and I take another sip of water from the reed canteen she’s made. “Or Zak?”
“I can tell the difference between you and a couple of reptiles. Besides, Marcus fears water. The Augurs wouldn’t leave him in a desert. And Zak hates tight spaces, so he’s probably underground somewhere. Here. Eat.”
I eat slowly, watching Helene all the while. Her usually sleek hair is matted, its silver sheen faded. She’s covered in scratches and dried blood.
“What did you see, Elias? You were coming for the mountains, but you kept falling, clawing at the air. You talked about...about killing me.”
I shake my head. The Trial’s not over, and I have to forget what I saw if I want to survive the rest of it.
“Where did they leave you?” I ask.
She wraps her arms around herself and hunches down, her eyes barely visible. “Northwest. In the mountains. In a spire vulture’s nest.”
I put down my fox. Spire vultures are massive birds with five-inch talons and wingspans that clear twenty feet. Their eggs are the size of a man’s head, their hatchlings notoriously bloodthirsty. But worst of all for Helene, the vultures build their nests above the clouds, atop the most unassailable peaks.
She doesn’t have to explain the catch in her voice. She used to shake for hours after the Commandant made her scale the cliffs. The Augurs know all this, of course. They’ve picked it from her mind the way a thief picks a plum off a tree.
“How did you get down?”
“Luck. The mother vulture was gone, and the hatchlings were just breaking through their shells. But they were dangerous enough, even half-hatched.”
She pulls up her shirt to expose the pale, taut skin of her stomach, marred by a tangle of gouges.
“I jumped over the side of the nest and landed on a ledge ten feet down. I didn’t—I didn’t realize how high I was. But that wasn’t the worst of it. I kept seeing...” She stops, and I realize that the Augurs must have forced her to face some foul hallucination, something equal to my nightmare battlefield.
What darkness had she borne, thousands of feet up, with nothing between her and death but a few inches of rock?
“The Augurs are sick,” I say. “I can’t believe they’d—”
“They’re doing what they have to, Elias. They’re making us face our fears. They need to find the strongest, remember? The bravest. We have to trust them.”
She closes her eyes, shivering. I cross the space between us and put my hands on her arms to still her. When she lifts her lashes, I realize I can feel the heat of her body, that mere inches separate our faces. She has beautiful lips, I notice distractedly, the top one fuller than the bottom. I meet her gaze for one intimate, infinite moment. She leans toward me, those lips parting. A violent throb of desire tugs at me, followed by a frantic alarm bell. Bad idea.
Terrible idea. She’s your best friend. Stop.
I drop my arms and back away hastily, trying not to notice the flush on her neck. Helene’s eyes flash—anger or embarrassment, I can’t tell.
“Anyway,” she says. “I got down last night and figured I’d take the rim trail to Walker’s Gap. Fastest way back. There’s a guard station at the other end. We can get a boat to cross the river and supplies—clothes and boots, at least.” She gestures to her ragged, bloodstained fatigues. “Not that I’m complaining.”
She looks up at me, a question in her eyes. “They left you in the Wastes, but...” But you don’t fear the desert. You grew up there.
“No use thinking about it,” I say.
After that, we are silent, and when the fire burns down, Helene tells me she’s turning in. But though she rolls over into a pile of leaves, I know sleep won’t come to her. She’s still clinging to the side of her mountain, just like I’m still wandering lost in my battlefield.