chanted, Gus walked forward, the flames dancing in his Coke-bottle-thick glasses.
Whatever he was doing was now pulling the power out of me. I wasn’t even pushing anymore, just letting Gus work his mojo. He used us as fuel, pulling so much strength that my physical shields wavered as all my strength was poured into his. Luckily, my friends were so distracted by Gus’s suddenly snapping back to life that they didn’t try to rescue me again.
The bone-fire, meanwhile, had gone almost entirely blue it was so hot. Gus kept approaching it, his hands held out in front of him in supplication. His chanting grew more excited and even louder as he neared.
When he was standing right in front of the fire pit, he raised his arms up to the stars and shouted one last series of grunts into the night air.
Then, to our horror, he walked into the fire.
My friends rushed forward, and the creature extinguished its power. The sudden absence of all that force left the glade eerily quiet, except for the strange crackling sound of the supernatural fire. But without the force of the creature’s magic, the enormous conflagration quickly began to die down.
And when it did finally extinguish itself, there lay Gus, huddled in a fetal position in the center of the fire.
Ryu and Caleb were first to reach him.
‘He’s untouched!’ shouted Caleb, causing me to sag in relief. I was slowly coming back to myself, the creature very carefully restoring my body’s functions to normal. Quietly, so that no one would notice and they could focus on Gus, I gasped in pain as pins and needles sprang up all over my body. It was agonizing, and I tried to keep the writhing to a minimum as I also tried to pay attention to poor Gus.
‘Gus. Gus. Can you hear me?’ Caleb was saying. I heard a small groan from the stone spirit, and my heart soared with relief even as other parts of my body started to come to life, quite loudly and angrily.
‘Gus, come back to us, c’mon,’ Ryu said, trying to shift the stone spirit, who was knotted up, clutching his stomach, like he’d turned into stone himself.
Finally, causing more gasps of relief from my friends, Gus righted himself. He hadn’t been holding his stomach, it turned out. He’d been holding a baseball-sized, grayish-brown stone. It was gray and looked totally innocuous, but I could sense its power even from here.
‘Here’s the stone,’ Gus said, totally unaware of the panic he’d caused by walking into the fire. ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’
That’s when everyone remembered me.
‘Jane!’ Iris shouted, spinning on her heel and running toward me.
She found me also clutching my stomach, my legs crossed as tightly as they would go.
‘Bathroom. Now. Please,’ I managed to choke out.
Grabbing me under the arm and hoisting me up, Iris sprinted with me to the toilet. It wasn’t the most heroic of endings to an epic sacred ritual, but I’d like to see anybody sit for three days and not have to pee when it was over.
Chapter Thirteen
After being awake for three days, falling asleep wasn’t difficult. It was staying awake long enough to strategize with Ryu and the rest of my friends that was the hard part. But I’d managed it, and we’d come up with a good plan. Actually, we’d come up with three plans, depending on some of the answers I got from Anyan.
All these plans, however, hinged on the hypothesis that my dream Anyan was the real Anyan, and that he actually had an idea of what was happening outside that little mental space he inhabited, prisoner in his own body. We had to make a lot of assumptions and run with them, but I guess that was what war was all about. And at least we were only risking our own lives, although that was bad enough. I thought about the generals of wars, acting on intelligence they couldn’t know was accurate, and sending hundreds, even thousands, of men into battles based on what could be lies.
I was glad I wasn’t a general.
I was also very glad to be able to sleep after what had felt like eons spent drawing little flowcharts and making lists and arguing over exactly what I should say under which circumstances. It had only really taken us a few hours, but it didn’t feel like that by the time I took a shower to relax, and then curled up in Anyan’s big bed.
Minutes later, at least to my dreaming