The Fire and the Sky (Book 3 of the... - Chapter 60: Chapter 60

Em was playing a dangerous game.
Any perceived act of rebellion was risky, and the last thing she wanted to do was put May at risk again. But the Loyals wanted to study her abilities. It wasn't her fault that she was too strong for their equipment.
They had been at it for hours, and Em was exhausted. The Loyal researchers had run her through a seemingly endless cycle of test scenarios: extreme heat, painful cold, perfect darkness, gale force winds. At one point they pumped some kind of gas into the room that left Em reeling through a psychological nightmare that took her hours to come down from. For every scenario, they told her to use her powers. They were trying to collect data on what she was doing on both a physical and psychic level to manipulate the world around her.
Unfortunately for them, the moment Em activated her power, their systems would overload. Even when she was flying high, she was still able to function just enough to overpower their machines. They tried changing the pressure in the chamber, but Em's body was built to soar — only when they removed the atmosphere completely was Em unable to obey their commands, and that was only because she passed out.
The data was useless.
She sat on the floor and leaned against the glass, watching the increasingly frustrated researchers brainstorm around a white board. The speaker system that allowed them to communicate with her and her with them was off, but even without the sound, Em could tell things were growing tense. Whatever it was they were trying to learn from their relentless torture clearly wasn't paying off, and Wyndam was losing patience.
Sober but exhausted, Em barely had the energy to keep her eyes on him as he paced the floor in front of her chamber. She could see that he was shouting at the researchers but her brain wasn't processing fast enough to read his lips. All she had to go on was context, like the sheepish flinching of the researchers, and the reluctant way they answered his barking, like they knew that no matter what they said, it would never be what he wanted to hear.
With gargantuan effort, Em raised her hand and rapped weakly on the glass with her knuckles. Wyndam was close enough that the light sound got his attention, and he turned to scowl at her.
"Hey," she said and watched him huff. He signalled to one of the white-clad researchers to turn the speaker system back on.
"What?" he snapped. His voice boomed in the sealed and confined space after so much perfect silence.
"What are we doing here, dude?" Em asked. "What do you want from me?"
Wyndam's eyes narrowed. "You don't get to ask questions."
"Well, someone's got to ask." Em shifted back so she wasn't pressed against the window and held her head up with as much poise as she could muster. "Because from where I'm sitting it doesn't seem like you've got a clue what you're trying to accomplish here."
"A pretty brazen statement from someone in your position."
Em sighed. "Listen, maybe if you actually talk to me instead of just barking orders, we could..." she hesitated. The words she was about to say brought an uncomfortable desire to vomit. "Maybe we could work together."
There was a beat of incredulous silence, and then Wyndam laughed. It was a dark and cruel sound that made Em feel dirty. Every so often she remembered that this man was supposed to be related to Jeremy, and her brain had trouble processing that fact. This was one of those times.
"Tell me, Starborn — if I told you I was endeavoring to understand your powers so I could, say, weaponize them, would you still be interested in 'working together'?" Wyndam made air quotes with fingers as he sneered the words working together. Em wet her chapped lips and forced herself not to look away. This was what she had been assuming he was after. It would be a lot easier to maintain his cult leader status if he could wield the power of the Stars. It was a power he didn't deserve — that he had no business having control over.
But Em was tired. Every inch of her was in pain. She was coming apart.
So, she swallowed her dignity. "I just want to go home."
She expected Wyndam to laugh at her again, but he remained eerily composed. He took slow, deliberate steps toward the window and placed his palms on the glass in front of her. It took every ounce of willpower she had not to flinch away.
"Alright then, Starborn. I'll tell you what I want from you." His voice was icy, his words clipped. With the index finger of one hand, he tapped the glass. "Inside of you in the essence of the divine. You, somehow, are made of the same ethereal material as the Stars themselves. And someone as ill-gotten as you has no business having something so pure inside of them."
Em trembled. It burned her to show such weakness, but she couldn't help it; what Wyndam Aviar was implying was too terrible not to strike her with fear.
A hateful smile pulled at his lips, stretching his mouth like a gash across his face. "That is what I want from you. So, are you still interested in working together?"
Hot, angry tears spilled from Em's otherworldly, crystalline eyes. She had been right: he had no intention of letting her leave this place alive.
"Fuck you," she snarled.
Wyndam considered her for a moment. Then, he turned back to his people who stood watching the exchange in breathless silence.
"I've changed my mind," he announced. "Flood it."
Within seconds, the sound that indicated the release of gas—the immobilizing agent Em had been doused with more than once already—filled the chamber. She barely had the time to let out a single, furious scream, before the world went dark.
May jerked the SUV onto the shoulder of the highway without slowing down first. Only then did she hit the brakes. Fargus let out a resentful screech as his fern jostled. The car that had been following laid on the horn as it screamed passed them.
"For fuck's sake!" Jeremy cried, gripping the panic handle above his door. "What are you doing?"
Hands shaking, May put the vehicle in park. She twisted in her seat and stared at Jeremy with wide eyes, but she couldn't seem to reach the words needed to convey her discovery. Her brain felt as though it had expanded, blowing out the walls of her skull and stretching out to join the rest of the universe. That's how monumental this was — if she was right, it changed everything.
Jeremy's gaze darted from her to the road and back again. He still hadn't let go of the panic handle. "Uh... are you okay?"
But words were still letting May down, so she held her right hand out to him instead. He looked at it with uncertainty, then slowly reached up to give it a weak shake.
"Nice to meet you?"
May scoffed, her thoughts lurching back into action. "The ring, Jeremy. It was my birth mother's."
A befuddled expression fell over Jeremy's features. He pulled May's hand to his face and squinted down at the ring as it glinted in the mid-day sun.
And then he screamed.
"Are you fucking kidding me?" he cried. He wrestled out of his seatbelt, kicked open the door, and stumbled out of the SUV onto the side of the road. May sat blinking in the silence that followed his departure. She wasn't really sure how she had expected him to react, but it certainly wasn't like this.
Another beat passed and then the passenger door wrenched open again. Jeremy's head, with his flaming hair looking even more chaotic than usual, poked back into the vehicle.
"What are you doing?" he whisper-hissed. "Get out here!"
May jolted and scrambled out of her seat, locking the doors behind her. By the time she rounded the SUV, Jeremy was already stalking away from the road and into the trees that lined it. She hurried to catch up.
"Where are you going?" she asked, glancing over her shoulder nervously. She didn't like being out in the open like this.
Jeremy didn't say anything until the highway was out of sight. He spun around so quickly that May jumped back, alarmed. His eyes were huge. His mouth was a tight line across his face. "Did I have a stroke or did you really just imply that you've been carrying the wishing star around on your finger this whole damn time?"
May drew back defensively. "I don't know for sure! I didn't even consider it until you asked whether my parents left me anything."
"And they left you that ring?" he asked, pointing at the hand she now held curled protectively against her chest. "Are you sure?"
"Yes, I'm sure," she snapped back. "Mama held onto it until I turned sixteen — she said my birth mother left it for me as a memento. But I thought it was her wedding ring or something like that." When Jeremy raised an eyebrow at her, she bristled. "What? It's a totally normal thing to do!"
Jeremy huffed a breath and regarded her in silence. He didn't seem angry, but his heel bounced with nervous energy. He reached out to her. "Let me see it."
"No!"
"Yes! Let me take a closer look."
"Would it kill you to use your manners?"
"For fuck's sake, May," he growled, tossing his head back in frustration. "Can I see your ring that might actually be the key to ending this decades-long conflict, please?"
Though she still wasn't comfortable with the idea, May twisted the ring from her finger and dropped it into Jeremy's waiting palm. He lurched forward with surprise, nearly dropping it into the grass in the process.
"Holy shit!" he gasped. "This thing is heavy!" Carefully, he lifted the ring above his head so its stone caught the sunlight drifting through the canopy of leaves overhead.
May watched as his face changed, softening into a look she had seen before. It was the same captivated expression Em wore the night she and May met, when they sat drinking on the couch and May flashed the ring — the only piece of her birth family that remained after their abandonment. It was as if the ring was emitting a siren song no one else could hear, memorizing its beholders into a dream-like state. She put a hand on Jeremy's shoulder and gave him a gentle shake until he blinked.
"How could you not know?" he whispered, dragging his gaze from the stone. "I mean, look." He pointed to the rich earth at their feet, where the sunlight glinted off the gem, casting constellations of light onto the ground when he tipped the ring just so. May gasped and rubbed her eyes. No, it wasn't the illusion of constellations — the ring was projecting an actual star map through its facets.
She let out an incredulous laugh, one that sounded high and on the verge of hysterical. "How should I have known? Until I met Em I thought I was the most unremarkable person on the planet — how was I supposed to know I had a fallen star on my finger?"
Jeremy blinked again and gave his head a shake. The spell seemed to be fading. "How did you not accidentally make wishes on it? And, how did Welkin not recognize it when they saw it?"
"Welkin had no idea what the wishing star looked like on Earth," May explained, tapping her lips thoughtfully. "And according to them, the star has rules."
"Like what?"
May reached back in her memories and tried to recall what they had told her. "It can't be used for or against a Star, a person has to knowingly wish on it and... There was a third one— oh! Each person only gets one wish."
They stared at the ring in silence. Uneasy, May shifted — she could tell the wheels in Jeremy's head were turning, and she wasn't sure she was going to like what they churned out.
"What are you thinking?" she asked.
His eyes darted up to meet her gaze. "I'm thinking if we're right and this is actually the wishing star, then it changes everything. It could change everything, but we need to know for sure."
She chewed her bottom lip, wrapped her arms around herself. "How do we do that?"
"Stand back," Jeremy said. "I'm going to see what this thing can do."