Page 157 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

“Fuck it all to hell.” Malar threw both swords down. The clatter made no impression on Arpix and the others, but Livira looked up from hugging Volente.

“What is it?”

Evar shook his head, fearing to tell her.

“Could you possess one of them?” Malar asked. “That’s what the soldiers who went to Durn said. They said in the marshes there’s spirits that’ll take hold of a man and make him do their bidding. Some’ll walk you into the sucking pools, but others’ll take your mouth and speak in dead languages.”

Livira said nothing but flew up. The cry that escaped her a few heartbeats later would have made Evar think she’d been wounded if he didn’t know better. He’d heard the same from the mouths of men on Crath’s walls as they took an arrow to the guts. She fell back down, making no effort to resist gravity. Still unspeaking, she went to stand behind Arpix, her hands reaching out to either side of his head.

“Don’t...” Evar couldn’t see what good it would do. They would know that they were trapped soon enough.

Livira froze, arms trembling, then let them drop. “It might hurt him. Twist him up in time. Like my book.”

Malar exchanged a quick look with Evar. A look that said the fire would soon undo any problems of that sort.

“You couldn’t tell him anything that would help.” Evar went to stand as close as her tension would allow. “He already knows you’d burn yourself to save them if you could. All your friends do.”

Livira’s chest hitched as a sob tried to break free. She pressed her hands to the sides of her head as if trying to crush an answer out, and Evar braced himself for the inevitable scream. It didn’t come. She whirled on Malar with fierce eyes, her face tear-streaked and determined.

“Are you ready for the fight of your life? Are you ready to bleed?”

“Fuck, yes.”

“Follow me.”

“We’re not our bodies, Simon.”

“We’re not not our bodies. You can’t pretend we’re some sort of angelic intelligence tied unfairly to our flesh. We are our flesh—it shapes our needs, our desires, our hunger—”

Sam conceded the point by silencing him with a kiss.

Fireman 6: Lust in the Ashes, by Miranda Lovegood

CHAPTER 67

Livira

Livira ran. She stormed headfirst through shelf after shelf, trailing the stories of a hundred authors behind her, shaking off the temples to logic built by philosophers, the scientists’ careful arguments, the inventors’ instructions, the laments of historians. She ran until the smoke’s black wall loomed above her like one of the rolling storms that the Dust had thrown up so often, blanketing her childhood in silence, darkness, and fear.

Evar and Malar drew up at her shoulder. The aisle led away ahead of them, the advancing smoke a hundred yards off, the flames’ hunger an unknown distance behind.

“What are we—”

Livira silenced Evar with a raised hand. “Listen.”

Nothing.

Malar moved his lips but thought better about it and kept silent.

At first it might be imagination. Hope even. Hope can be cruel like that. Clunk-clunk-clunk. Louder now, definite, a promise. Clunk-clunk-clunk. It even sounded as if Livira had picked exactly the right aisle.

Malar raised his swords. Livira hadn’t seen him pick them up but maybe ghosts didn’t need to.

“Whichever one comes out first is yours,” she told him. “I’ll go in after the other.”

“You can’t touch them...” Evar said, frowning.

“It’s Malar’s idea. We’re ghosts. We’re going in,” Livira said. “We just need to wait until the Escape in charge leaves one to go to the other. Then we take possession.”

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