Ninth City Burning (35 page)

The Kid strolls up beside me, smacking a baseball into the palm of his glove. “Looks like that guy's worn out his welcome,” he says. “He sticks around much longer, people are gonna run him out of town.”

I'm winning. It doesn't seem possible, but that's really what it looks like. Charles is in big trouble. My mijmere has built up this little neighborhood and turned him into someone the whole town's against. People are coming out of the houses now, gathering on the street, all staring angrily at Charles. Kids from the baseball field are walking slowly toward him, holding bats over their shoulders. I can't believe it: I might actually beat Charles. This world is almost mine. All I have to do is go for it.

But I don't. I'm about to, but then I think, I can't really be winning. Maybe it looks that way to me, but I must be wrong. This is
Charles Cossou
, one of the best fontani in the Legion. And who am I? Just Jax. I'd never actually do it. No way.

Right as I'm thinking all this, a huge raindrop falls right in front of me, so big you can almost hear the
sploosh
. Where it hits the ground, the grass
turns yellow and brittle, like the water is making things dry instead of wet. A second later, another drop falls right beside it, leaving another dry patch behind. Then another falls, and another, each one drying up more of the grass, and suddenly my big green field is turning to gravelly dirt. Rusty dust fills the air like a fog, and suddenly there's a rumble from the sky and a big crack of red lightning, and rain comes gushing down.

The rain now is real, wet rain, and everything is soaked in seconds. It washes the dust from the air, and I can see that my little town is gone. Where it used to be, there's just a flat plain filled with slippery mud and a few dead trees, going on forever. Charles is right there in the middle of it, watching from beneath a big black umbrella.

All that's left of my baseball field is a small patch of muddy grass. Most of the kids are gone, and the few that are left are dashing to get out of the rain.

“Wait!” I call, sprinting after them. “Come back! Rain delay! It's just a rain delay!” If I can stall them long enough, maybe I'll be able to bring the sun back, but as I'm splashing toward home plate, the kid who'd been waiting around for the next pitch lets his bat drop, and it lands in the mud, and with that my mijmere is gone and I'm way up in a big blue sky, thousands of meters above the ground.

F
or a few seconds, I sort of float there, then the wind presses my hair back, and I start to fall. I can see the ocean far below, the shadows of clouds moving slowly across the waves and the sparkle of sunlight on the water. Charles and I always spar in places like this, places far away from anything we might damage.

The whole fight might have felt like a dream to me, but while I was in my mijmere playing baseball, I was also here, over the ocean, swirling through the sky. When you're fontani usikuu, you're really in two places at once: your mijmere and the actual real world where everyone else lives. And you're doing two things at once: whatever you do in your Theme and tearing around as a big hurricane of thelemity. With practice, you can learn how to control the hurricane, to aim it and get it to do what you want. When you're in a mijmere, the real world shows up in a million little ways, like if you're dreaming about a train whistling, then you wake up and find it's really your teakettle going. But until you start to see how the two worlds fit together, it's a lot more like sleepwalking.

That's one reason why new fontani are so dangerous, why we take them to Area 22-53 to activate—because while they're dreaming in their mijmere, they might also be ripping through mountains and knocking over entire forests. I'm not joking: Fontani usikuu can really do that. So if we're going to practice fighting, it's best to do it where there's nothing around that we don't want to wreck by accident. The first thing your mijmere wants to do is protect you, and it doesn't care how it makes that happen or who else gets hurt. It's one reason why new fontani are so strong: They're just trying to defend themselves, and there's nothing to distract them from doing it. Charles says if you can put your whole mind to a single purpose, your
mijmere will take care of the rest, but I haven't quite figured that part out yet, which I guess should be pretty obvious from the way I just got my butt kicked.

Close by, there's a cracking sound like a falling tree, and when I look I see something in the sky. Really, it must be falling as fast as I am, but it looks like it's hanging by a string, swinging slowly toward me. It's a person, and I know who it is way before she's close enough to see clearly: Naomi.

We were supposed to be taking Charles on, two against one. According to Charles, two fontani should almost always be able to defeat one fighting alone, as long as the two are working as a team. So that's what Naomi and I are trying to learn. We're supposed to be getting our mijmeri to meld together, which would make us way stronger than we would be on our own. But we haven't quite gotten the hang of it, and so here we are, both our mijmeri broken, falling through the sky.

Naomi glides past, the wind kicking her braids around, and even though we're falling straight toward the ocean, she's still able to give me a long, scolding look. She's mad at me, probably because she thinks it's my fault Charles beat us again.

I put my hands up in a shrug, which is supposed to mean,
I don't know what went wrong.
She doesn't look convinced, but it's hard to tell because we're falling so fast. Neither of us is scared of hitting the ocean—this isn't the first time we've lost to Charles, and we know he's just letting us feel what it's like to end up without your mijmere to protect you.

Sure enough, I'm only in the air another second or two before I'm swallowed up in a cloud of rusty dust, then I'm standing beside a long black road as some gigantic, combustion-powered truck roars past. When it's gone, I see Naomi on the other side, wearing a blue-checkered dress and black shoes and holding her fiddle case in one hand. I reach up to feel my head, knowing there'll be a baseball cap there. This is how we usually look when we show up in Charles's mijmere.

I check the road to make sure there are no cars coming, then run across to Naomi. In my own mijmere, I'd be completely safe, but here I could get flattened for real, so I need to be careful. Naomi has already started walking, and I run to catch up. “I guess the plan didn't work,” I say.

Naomi doesn't say anything, only looks at me with her serious brown eyes, obviously still annoyed. That's something I've learned about Naomi: She won't talk just to make conversation, and if you say something obvious,
like I just did, she won't say anything back. She'll just glare at you in a way that makes you wonder why you opened your mouth in the first place.

Most of the time I feel like an idiot around her, but once in a while it's kind of awesome. Like one day in Section E. After Bomar got put in “alternative corrective education” for the lazel incident, they gave Naomi his desk. Probably the Academy decided it would be convenient, since we're the only two fontani in Sixth Class, and the whole School of Rhetoric for that matter. Anyway, Naomi's sister, Rae, ended up in Section B, but since she's revenna, she has afternoon classes with some of the cadets from E, and one day Naomi overheard Elessa telling some of the other kids how sad and pathetic it was to have this big dumb noco girl hanging around in Sixth Class, and how the Academy should just send her off to the Front so she could at least do something useful.

If Naomi was like Bomar, someone who liked to show off and bully people, it might have been really bad. I could tell she was mad by the way she narrowed her eyes, focusing in on Elessa. But instead of doing something crazy, Naomi just walked up to her and stood there, very close, looking her in the eye. For a long time, she didn't say anything, and everyone froze to watch. And then, in a voice so low you had to lean in to hear, Naomi said, “You do not know what you are talking about. I suggest you shut your mouth unless you want to demonstrate yourself an even greater fool than you already have.” It was like Elessa just shriveled up. Nobody has said anything bad about Rae since, and the best part is Naomi didn't use any of her powers. But I bet being on the wrong side of that stare was no fun at all.

“Did you go after Charles like we planned?” she asks finally.

I wish I could do Naomi's
that's obvious why are you asking me?
look, because I'm a little insulted. “Of course I did!” I say.

“Then where were you while I was fighting him?”

“I was fighting him, too! Or didn't you see me falling out the sky with you after? I wasn't doing that for fun, you know.”

She gives me another long look and says, “How can he beat us that easily?” She sounds angry but not with me.

We're walking by a lonely little building pushed up close to the road, and I decide to study that instead of looking at Naomi. It has tall windows with cans stacked inside and big signs everywhere written in what I think is English. Through the window it's dark and empty. The only sign I can read says, “Gas 10¢/gal.”

“I don't know,” I say. “Experience, I guess. We need more practice.”

That's pretty obvious, but Naomi doesn't do her staring thing. She's actually been getting better pretty fast. She can already navigate her mijmere well enough to travel around without wrecking everything in sight and has even gone on a few legionary maneuvers. I'd been training with Charles almost a year before I had enough control to be around anyone else. “Our enemies will not wait for us to learn,” she says, her voice quiet and hard.

She's right, of course. Romeo isn't going to leave us alone just because we're not ready. I feel like I should say something encouraging, even if it gets me another Naomi glare, but she's looking ahead, toward something coming down the road.

It's an old man, shambling angrily toward us. He has a fat gray beard and long, matted gray hair covering most of his face; all you can really see of him is a lot of crooked teeth. “Hey! You kids!” he shouts, waving a walking stick at us. “Get off my road! Go on now, no one wants you here!”

I'm a little startled at how loud he is, but I'm not scared, and neither is Naomi. The old man is Charles's Genius. Like the Kid, he doesn't have a name as far as anyone knows. Charles just calls him the Tramp. Genii are probably the weirdest part of a mijmere because they act so much like real people, unlike the rest of a mijmere, where everything's always changing. Pretty much everyone agrees mijmeri are more than just whatever's inside fontani coming out—how else could I end up playing baseball when I'd never even heard of it? So maybe Genii are like that, too, things from somewhere else that somehow find their way into our dreams. But sometimes I think it might be the other way around—like maybe when I go to my mijmere, I'm actually in the Kid's dream. Or maybe the mijmere is just where we happen to meet up. Genii are always looking out for their fontani, but they're usually not very nice to other people visiting their mijmere. Charles says the Tramp has a good heart and a great sense of humor, but he totally creeps me out.

A little way down the road, I see Charles walking slowly toward us. He's wearing an old suit, a bit like the one he had on in my mijmere, and an old, roundish hat. “It's all right, they're with me,” he says to the Tramp.

The Tramp glares back at Charles, then looks at Naomi and me suspiciously from beneath his long hair. “Arright, arright,” he mutters to Charles, and goes shuffling past, grumbling to himself something that sounds like “Damn kids . . . damn cheeky kids . . .” I almost laugh because his grumpiness reminds me a little of Naomi.

“So,” Charles says, tilting back his hat so he can smile at us. “That could have gone worse. Room for improvement, true, but at least you're moving well.”

“How were you able to fight us both at once?” Naomi asks.

Charles sets off walking in the opposite direction from the Tramp, and we follow. “The same way I fight one of you alone,” he says. “I turn you into something I can deal with, something my mijmere gives me power over. You, Naomi, were a bird sitting on a roadside fence. Jax, you were a stray dog. It's about focus—you have to be able to pour yourself toward your goal completely. And confidence.” He looks over at me. “Jax, you had an opening that would have let you hold me off at least a little while longer. Why didn't you take it?”

“I don't know.” My face flushes, and I can feel Naomi glaring at me again. “My mijmere just kind of broke down. It wouldn't do what I wanted.”

“It did exactly what you wanted,” Charles says. “You weren't sure you could take me on, and so your mijmere tried to pull away. Made it easy for me to wash right in.”

“I still wanted to
win
!” I say. Charles is always saying how understanding yourself is one of the most important parts of using your mijmere, but he's had like thirty more years' practice. “You're just way stronger! What was I supposed to do?”

“That's why I'm teaching you to cooperate,” Charles says. I think he's pleased I asked, though I don't know why. “Even if your enemy is far more experienced and powerful, working together can turn the battle to your advantage.”

“You seemed to have little trouble with the two of us,” Naomi says.

“That's because you weren't working together.”

“Yes we were!” she says fiercely.

“Yeah!” I say, glad we're on the same side. “We had a plan!”

“You coordinated your movements,” Charles says. “That's different from working together. From my perspective, each of you was alone. Think about it like this: Did either of you see the other in your mijmere?”

I don't have anything to say to that. If Naomi was close by, she should have shown up in my mijmere, even if she was just something small and insignificant, like how to Charles she was a bird, and I was a dog. But I wasn't even thinking about her—I was too busy with Charles. I'm guessing things were also like that for Naomi because she doesn't answer, either.

“I thought so,” Charles says. “Attacking at the same time may give you an edge, but it won't make any real difference unless you combine your strength.”

“And how do we do that?” Naomi asks.

“You have to share your world, learn to exist side by side. Make a place for each other within the worlds you've created for yourselves.”

“That is a very vague answer,” she says.

“Well, it's a very vague concept, and an even vaguer skill,” Charles answers. Somewhere in the distance, car horns begin blaring. Charles tilts his head, listening. “And unfortunately we'll have to leave today's lesson there. Something has come up.”

Wind gusts over the road, enveloping us all in a cloud of red dust. When it clears, we're back at the Academy, in one of the big courtyards at the School of Rhetoric. The place is totally empty, and I immediately know why: The incursion alarm is screaming all around.

“I've got to go,” Charles says. “Jax, you'll be expected at the Forum. Take Naomi with you. I'd rather the two of you stick together.”

“All right,” I say. By now I'll be able to shade again if I have to.