Vahn shivered in his cell. The cold had long seeped past his skin and into his bones, and if he moved too quickly his cartilage would crack. Whoever had built the Tower’s prison was a creative sadist, and Vahn took comfort in the fact that they were long dead, gone to the gods and rotting with them. The thought did little to warm him, though.

He curled his legs against his chest and wedged his arms between them. Shutting his eyes, he leaned his forehead onto his knees and thought of the east gardens. It wasn’t the landscape that gave him comfort, as picturesque as the area was. The trees there were dense, and the sun slanted through the leaves in long dappled lines. The ground underfoot was rocky and scattered with branches that dug into the soles of his feet, and it was nothing like the soft grasslands and open skies of his Atarrabi homeland.

But he was grateful to that area of the Palamidia’s compound. It was one of Kanna’s haunts, and where she had found him. She had been the first person he met who had been kind to him. After the trading ring that held him was broken apart by the Palamidia, he was taken to Lugos and shoved with a few others into the newest group of Prospects due to his abilities.

The former slaves didn’t do well in training. Vahn and those like him had spent their lives barely flirting with survival while the other Prospects prepared to enter the Palamidia. In a way, they had all been raised to understand that kindness was weakness and brutality led to greatness. For the Solarians, that meant destroying the competition, as feeble as it was. For Vahn, bruised knuckles and broken noses meant he may get a chance to eat or a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.

Vahn hadn’t been a good fighter. He was tall but too lean and gangly. His skin wrapped tight against his bones and there was little weight behind his strikes. At least he was hard to pin down, the joints jutting from his skin giving him sharp edges to jab into muscle and exposed curves. He often found himself cornered outside of training areas by the others, the ones who enjoyed inflicting pain, those that saw him as a dark spot on a shining canvas and set themselves to the task of ripping him from it.

He had run to the trees in the east garden to hide from another attack, hoping the area would give him a place to hide, when Kanna dropped from the sky in a hail of cracked branches and crushed leaves between him and his pursuers.

Vahn had been young, but Kanna was a child. The top of her head was chest level with the others that surrounded her, but it made little difference to her. While his pursuers paused in their shock, she’d taken him in. Cold steel eyes studied the white of his hair, the violet of his eyes, and paused at the slave bands tattooed on his wrists. When she reached out he flinched away, but her fingertips were soft against the black lines on his skin. He couldn’t remember the last time a touch wasn’t meant to bruise or take. 

She stepped away from him without a word, then turned to his pursuers.

Vahn had never seen anything move like she did. She looked small, seemed almost fragile before him, but when she attacked there was no quarter and no mercy. She was smooth, sharp and honed from a life of violence.

Sometimes he wondered how things would be different if she hadn’t dropped from the sky like his own personal feral saviour. Maybe he would have followed the others who had fled this fate. More than likely, though, he would have ended up in a grave, just another tally in another book.

Not that freezing in Irkalla was a better option.

Vahn lifted his head and shook it. He shrugged his shoulders and stretched them out and back before uncurling his legs. Thinking about Kanna wasn’t going to get her back if she didn’t want to be. 

While Haru had insisted she was alive, he was unmoored without her. His limitless drive and devotion was directionless, and all he had been good for was slamming himself into walls at every opportunity. Which left Osawa to make sure he didn’t knock something loose that couldn’t be put back. 

Vahn had kept his head down and his eyes open. Every missive that came through he scanned, looking for evidence of Haru’s hunch. Any trace of things tilting sideways and he’d look a little closer.

After all, Kanna had never been subtle.

Most of the trails he followed staggered into dead ends until recently. But he had to be sure. He’d needed more time before he was willing to open his mouth. She had been a captive of the Palamidia, just as he had been to other cruel masters. He understood more than anyone the vicious need to escape a leash.

He paced in the frigid cell to keep his blood moving, hoping the feeling in his feet would return at some point. He cupped his hands around his mouth and blew out, but even the heat from his breath had been stolen.

He wouldn’t last much longer. 

And what a stupid way to go this was.

Vahn tightened his hand to a fist and pulled back to slam it into the blank door of his cell. He wondered if he would feel it, or anything, ever again. Before he stuck, though, he heard something.

The walls of the cell were thick, insulated, and freezing. He pressed his ear against it and was rewarded with the muffled clash on the other side. 

Then, the click of metal and the brush of flint.

Then heat. Not just heat, but pure flame. Everything in his body screamed for it and it ignited on the other side of the wall, igniting its source fuel and then expanding, burning hotter and angrier until it filled the hall. 

The guards screamed, but their cries were short lived. From inside his cell, Vahn fed the flames his rage, his hunger, and his wrath. It devoured the guards, spread to the stone walls, and Vahn pressed his body against the metal door, needing to feel the heat again. It crawled against the walls, melting the hinges of his cage. 

He stepped back before it scorched his skin. Finished with his work, he shut his eyes and pressed the anger down, locked it deep within him where it belonged. He calmed the inferno in the hall, left only a single flame to flicker against the stone.

When he opened his eyes again, the door of the cell shuddered once. Then again, and the melted hinges loosened. The third time the door fell open, wrenched and hanging from the lock on the opposite side.

Haru stood on the other side of the door, dusting the ash from the shoulder he had used as a battering ram. He rolled it back and forth, and his piercing blue eyes narrowed on Vahn.

“You didn’t have to melt the keys,” he said.

“Maybe.” Vahn stepped into the soot-filled hall, admiring the black scorches on the pale grey walls. “But then you wouldn’t have the chance to bust through my door like a fairytale prince.”

Vahn stopped next to the single flame that he had left in the hall and unfurled his hand. The fire snaked upward to him and he cradled it between his hands, admiring the dance at the heart of it, before pulling the heat inside of himself. Warmth seeped through his veins, the color returning the tips of his fingers.

Behind him, Haru unbuckled one of the sheaths strapped across his chest and held it out to Vahn.

Vahn turned to claim his knives, though he didn’t ask how Haru had acquired them. The wood was warm against his palms as he flexed his hands around them, his sense of touch coming back with a thousand pricks of needles against his skin.

“Weird that Os isn’t with you,” Vahn said, his eyes on the slim curve of his blades. “I’d think he’d have to convince you to come for me.”

“You were easier to find,” Haru said. “You were thinking about her.”

Vahn felt his body tighten before he could stop it. He shrugged off the momentary lapse.

“Nah,” he said. “Doesn’t seem like something I’d do.”

“Of course not,” Haru replied, his voice flat. Then, he stared at Vahn.

“What?”

“Your turn,” Haru said.

Vahn sighed, dramatically he hoped, before shutting his eyes. It had taken a sadistic mind to think up ways to keep the loas in check, and Vahn knew the type. It wasn’t hard to think like one. Didn’t take much trying, either. To keep a water loa from using their powers, all they needed to do was dry them out. 

Deprivation worked in his favor. Having been ripped from the fire, all it wanted was to have him back. The borrowed heat from the flames in the hall weren’t enough to assuage the hunger. His body tuned in to any hint of warmth, any promise of fire. 

Drying things out took heat. Heat meant fire. And keeping a loa like Osawa in check would take an inferno.