Burn

By Courtney Rene

Four Extraordinary Teens, each cursed with a corrupted gift from one of the four elements: Water, Earth, Wind, and Fire. Coming together to fight a common enemy and trying to learn who they really are, the teens have opted to stay with SanCorp, the genetic engineering company that created them. But things are not quite as they seem at SanCorp. It is more of a prison than a home, and there are dangerous secrets permeating the place. The four begin to find that their gifts are more than just an offshoot of the elements. They are more.

Burn is Ash’s story. Fire is destruction. It burns and eats anything it comes in contact with. It has been used as a weapon, as a means of demolition, and even as a method of death. That does not mean it always has to be evil and used to destroy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rogue Phoenix Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781624206993

Book preview

Burn

The Elements Book Two

Courtney Rene

Published by Rogue Phoenix Press, LLP for Smashwords

Copyright © 2022

ISBN: 978-1-62420-699-3

Electronic rights reserved by Rogue Phoenix Press, LLP. The reproduction or other use of any part of this publication without the prior written consent of the rights holder is an infringement of the copyright law. This is a work of fiction. People and locations, even those with real names, have been fictionalized for the purposes of this story.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Chapter One

I’m dreaming. I know I’m dreaming, but no matter how many times I have had this dream, it still feels real when I am inside of it. I’m little. I would guess four years old, or at least close to four. Time frames as a child are hard to figure out when I look back. All I know is that I feel very young. I’m standing in a park, in a small grove of trees. Their branches are full of yellow and red leaves. The colored leaves are also floating in the air, drifting down to my feet, where they are beginning to form piles of crunchy debris.

I glance over at my momma, checking that she’s right where I left her. She is. Not that I expected her to disappear, but it’s nice to make sure. My momma sits on a colorful quilt a few feet away from where I stand in the leaves. She’s reading. A small, barely-there smile is on her face as she concentrates on the story within the pages. The book is a soft, floppy type book. On the cover are a hugging man and woman. My dad hates those books. I don’t know why, but he gets mad when she reads them. He calls them smut and usually grabs them out of her hands and throws them in the trash. I asked my mom once what ‘smut’ meant. She didn’t answer me. She just said to shush.

The breeze blowing the leaves around my feet is also tossing her hair about her face. The brown locks dance and swing around her head, lifting and falling with the moving air. She looks so small sitting there.

I turn back to the leaves and try to catch a yellow one as it flits about on its journey to the ground. I smack my hands together but miss the bright yellow leaf altogether. My hands, on contact, make a loud clapping sound. That sound is not what drew my undivided attention, though. When my hands connected, white lightning streaks shot out from around my hands to light up, only long enough for me to see them before they faded to nothing once more. The falling leaves are quickly forgotten. I turned my hands, palms up, to inspect them. I see nothing out of the ordinary there on their wrinkled surface. I lift them closer to my eyes. I didn’t see anything but for the lines and calluses that were always present. I lowered my hands away from my face and then, with a small amount of hesitation, clapped them together again.

I jumped back in surprise and maybe a little bit of fear. The lights were back. The same as before, just a quick blink of bright, then gone. Momma! Come look at this, I yelled over my shoulder, never once taking my eyes away from my hands. A small part of me thought that if I looked away, the magic would disappear.

What is it, honey?

I heard rustling, and then a moment later, my momma stood at my side.

Watch what I can do, I said.

My voice was little more than a whisper. I felt my mother lean in closer as I leaned a little away. I clapped my hands, unintentionally harder than I had before.

White sparks shot out from my hands in a show that made me think of the Fourth of July and the sparklers I was allowed to play with just that year.

The sparks were bigger than before and lasted a moment longer as well. I felt my momma jump in surprise. I quickly glanced at her face.

The small smile that she’d had while reading was nowhere to be seen. She looked scared. Her eyes were wide and big, and the blue in them seemed larger than I’d ever seen them. Her mouth was open in a small circle. Was it awe? Was it fear?

Momma?

I don’t know what I was asking. Maybe it was a bit of worry about what I’d done. Was it okay? Was it bad? Was she mad at me? What would my dad think? Would he be angry? Would he call it smut? All these questions were heavy on the single word I’d spoken.

Only a moment had passed, but it felt like forever before my momma finally looked away from my hands and turned to face me. She pulled me around to stand in front of her. She knelt before me, so we were eye to eye. She stuttered around a moment as if not sure what to say. Then she finally whispered, Does it hurt?

I shook my head in answer.

Can you do anything else?

I shrugged.

My momma gave me a little shake and said with a harsh tone, I’d never heard her use before, This is serious, Cash. Can you do anything else?

She was scaring me. Her grip on my shoulders tightened. I felt my eyes burn and fill with tears. I wasn’t sure why she was upset or even why I was crying.

I don’t know. Is it bad what I can do?

She let go of me then and used her hands to cover her face. I don’t know what to do, she said.

It didn’t seem like she was talking to me, though.

I looked down at my hands again, expecting to see something more than I had a moment before, but there was nothing extraordinary about them. I put my palms against each other and rubbed them together as if to warm them.

I wasn’t cold, not really, but I felt a chill of fear in the air.

When I rubbed my hands back and forth, sparks of white shot out in a bit of an arch and dropped toward the ground. I watched fascinated as one little white light stayed bright, as it fell on the edge of a red autumn leaf. Before mine and my mother’s fearful eyes, the little light ignited into a flame, as red and as yellow as the leaves on the ground.

My mother jumped to her feet and stomped down on the flames, effectively putting them out quickly and with little smoke and fanfare. One moment there was a small, barely-there fire, and the next, there was nothing to show for it but a few blackened and curled leaves.

She grabbed my arms again and, this time, shook me hard and ferocious. Don’t ever do that again! Don’t let anyone see what you can do. Do you hear me, Cash? This did not happen.

She didn’t even wait for me to answer her, which was probably good, as I was frozen in shock from what I’d just done, as well as my momma’s reaction.

She dropped to her hands and knees and began swiping left and right and making circles of the leaves.

She was very effectively erasing any evidence of the fire that had been there moments before. My mother jumped back to her feet and inspected her work. There. That’s looks normal, right?

My momma took my hand, and we marched back to the quilt. Together, we crammed all our stuff back in the bag she’d brought it all in and hustled us to the car. The whole way home she talked. Not so much to me, but to the air around us.

We have to keep this a secret. They can’t know. We can’t tell anyone. What are we going to do? Your father, he can’t know. Oh, God. It’s a secret, Cash. You have to keep it a secret. Do you understand?

She swiveled her head around to look me dead in the eye and said, Do you understand Cash? No one can know, ever, what you can do.

Chapter Two

I sat up. The fuzzy dregs of my dream quickly faded away. It was a memory as much as it was a dream. I’d had it many times. What always stuck with me was the fear I’d seen on my mother’s face and the fear I felt in my own body. That fear stayed with me even to this day. I hated that dream, and yet it came more often lately. What was setting it off? What was it trying to tell me?

Once the sleep started to drift away, my first real thought was that I was alone. Where was Eve? She was always my first thought upon waking and my last before drifting to sleep.

I looked around the small room as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. It was a plain room. It held only our bed, which was bigger than a twin but didn’t seem like by much.

There was a small table on the side of the bed that held one small lamp that I use to read with at night so that it wouldn’t bother Eve as much as the overhead lights did. That was it. There were no chairs to lounge in. There were no dressers for clothes. No mirrors. Just the bed and the one table.

The walls had a transparent jelly-like, rubber-type layer on top of them. The entire room, even the ceiling and door, were coated in the stuff. It didn’t burn. It’s didn’t freeze. It was pliable, but it was also some strong stuff. There was one single window. It was not made of the same material as the rest of the room. The window, however, didn’t open. It was thick and kept out the heat and the cold from the outside. It was industrial-grade glass or something similar. All it did was allow you to see through it, out into the nothingness that surrounded the building.

That was where I found my Eve. She was leaning almost her whole body against that glass. Her cheek was pressed hard to it. Her eyes were closed, but she must have known I was awake and watching her as she said, I can’t feel the earth.

Her words were spoken so softly I had to concentrate on understanding. Even so, I wasn’t sure what she meant. Eve?

Her eyes opened and impaled my heart with the pain I saw reflected there. I can’t feel the air, or the earth, or water, or anything in here. I’m dying inside here. I have to get out, Ash. Help me get out.

Eve is different than anyone in the world. She needs to be outside. Eve needs to have the dirt on her hands and under her feet. She needs to feel the air as it passes by. She soaks up the life and moisture in the world and turns it into something more. In that room, full of fake man-made material, she was cut off from the world. She didn’t have any of those things that she required.

Several months back, we’d taken down Dr. Dain and what we thought was the heart and body of SanCorp. We were wrong. Dr. Dain was only a piece of the whole. Cornered and confused, the four of us, Nora, Reed, Eve, and me, had been faced with a choice. It wasn’t a great choice, but we had to decide on the spot to either keep running or stay and work with SanCorp. We’d all chosen together, unanimously, to stay. It was not to help them. It was to give us a chance to stop running. To understand what the point of us was. We wanted to know why we were created. We wanted to understand why they wouldn’t leave us alone. So, we stayed.

I hadn’t realized how much the choice would affect Eve. That was on me. I should have. I should have thought about her and her needs before we’d made a deal with the devil.

I stood from where I sat on the bed and went to her. I pulled her away from the window and into my arms so I could hold her close. I could feel her heartbeat against my chest. It was erratic at best. I wanted to call it chaotic, but that seemed scary to put to words and say out loud. Tell me how I can help you?

She didn’t look at me or even move from the small cocoon she had created against my body. Her words were muffled against my chest when she said, Get me outside. I need to feel the real living world around me. This air is fake. The floors are fake. The windows are fake. The life is fake. Everything is just wrong. I’m dying in here. I can feel it. It’s not right.

I can’t say she is incorrect. Everything in that room was created. From the air pumped through the vents, to the walls and ceiling, down to the very sheets on the bed, there was not one natural substance in the room but us. Maybe even the entire building for all I knew.

I looked at the glass in the window. There was no way to open it, but maybe…maybe I could break it. I guided Eve toward the bed. Go sit for a second. I want to try something.

Hands-on my hips, I really inspected the make of the window. The frame was coated in that rubbery stuff, but the window looked like it was just glass. I tried hitting it. Not hard, but hard enough to see if it would give under my strike. My hand bounded back at me like I’d hit a ball. So, it wasn’t glass. I hit it harder. A firm thwack of sound echoed around our room. My hand ricocheted back at me again, but there was not a single waver to the windowpane.

How could I weaken it? I stepped away from it a few feet.

I snapped my thumbs and middle fingers together on both hands and drew the fire from within myself. A small ball of red and yellow, flickering waves of fire filled my hands. They waited for me to do their bidding.

I controlled the flames, and they gave way to my dominance. I pushed the fire and its heat to the window. I wanted to try to melt the pane. I blasted it again and again, but nothing changed. The window didn’t even turn smoky and black. Even under the heat of the flames, it stayed clear and unremarkable.

I pulled the flames back and let them fade and then go out entirely. I immediately put my hand directly upon the window to feel it. The window wasn’t hot. It held warmth, but not much of it.

I was getting annoyed. We weren’t prisoners. Not really. I wasn’t going to be kept in, and I wasn’t going to be treated as if I was. We’d decided the four of us, Eve, Nora, Reed, and me, to stay here.

I turned on my heel and headed toward the door. Stay here. I’ll be right back, I said on my way into the hallway and straight across to the door on the other side. I knocked. Maybe I hammered on the door a bit on the loud and hard side, but I was getting angry.

A sleep tousled, Reed yanked the door open and scowled at me. He didn’t say anything. He just waited for me to get on with what I wanted. Is Nora awake?

No, he snapped.

Yes! Nora yelled from within the space of the darkroom. I’m up. A moment later, she came into view. Her hair was going all directions. The white roots and streaks were getting more and more prominent every day. She rested her chin on Reed’s shoulder, ignored his growl of unhappiness, and said, What do you need?

Reed spoke before I had a chance too. You do know it’s the middle of the night, right?

Nora pinched him and said, Be nice.

I tried not to laugh. I