Chapter 119: FIFTEEN YEARS

So what does it need?

Aiden let go of the bond and looked up.

He had spent the whole night staring at his own chest. At what he could pull out of it. At why it would not come.

He had not looked around the shelter since the frost came through the door.

He looked now.

There were no golden motes left near the entrance.

The Frost Wolf had eaten them all. Its cold had gone through the shelter and stripped the air of everything Cinder could have used.

Aiden looked past the entrance, out at the slope.

The gold was still out there. Thick, endless, the whole mountain breathing it.

It stopped forty feet from the entrance. That was where the Frost Wolf’s cold began.

The Sap is not the fuel. It’s the key. The mountain is the fuel, and it’s right there. And Cinder can’t reach it.

She can’t even stand up. The mountain has all the fire in the world. The cold is sitting between her and every bit of it.

He turned and looked at her.

The light in the back of the shelter had dropped again. Her coat had gone from gold to orange. The flares along her spine were half the height they had been an hour ago.

She was burning down to nothing, in a room with nothing left to burn.

Except.

Aiden stopped.

He went back over it slowly. The cold had slowed his thoughts, and he could not afford to get this wrong.

Three weeks ago I poured fifteen years into her on a frozen hillside.

She was dying. There was no key, no fuel, nothing to shape them. They went into her raw.

They did not disappear. They stopped her dying.

Which means they’re still in her.

He looked at the dimming light. His eyes widened.

She doesn’t need more of my years. That’s why the system refuses to take more. She’s carrying fifteen of them right now.

That’s enough fuel to steer her evolution. She absorbed enough motes for those fifteen years to carry her through.

His eyes narrowed.

She’s not burning them.

Aiden dragged himself two feet closer along the wall. He stumbled, almost crashing to the ground.

His legs felt like someone else’s. The skin of his forearms split on the stone, leaving a red smear over the harvester’s cracked boot.

His throat hurt just from breathing. He spoke anyway.

"Cinder."

The light did not change.

"Cinder. Listen to me."

His legs buckled.

He put his hand flat on the warm glass and pushed the words down the bond because his voice was too weak.

You have my fifteen years. You’ve had them since the hillside.

Burn them.

The light flickered. Once. Then again.

It did not brighten. Cinder shook her head, refusing to spend them.

There it is...

He sighed.

He wanted to be angry, to scream that they’d all die if she kept refusing.

The anger just wouldn’t rise in his chest.

He remembered her on the frozen grass. Her legs shaking under her. Her eyes finding his face, then his white hair.

He remembered her jaw trembling against his coat in the kiln-belt. Her tears soaking through it. How she would not let him stand up.

You’ve been holding onto them for three weeks.

You watched me get old giving you those years. You haven’t forgiven me for it yet.

And now you’d rather burn out than spend a single one of them.

The light stuttered again, harder.

"I know," Aiden said out loud. His voice came out cracked. "I know what they cost. I was there."

He pressed his palm down on the glass.

They’re not mine anymore. I gave them to you. They’re yours.

And you’re about to die holding them like they’re still in my chest.

Burn them, Cinder. Every one. I didn’t spend fifteen years of my life so you could keep them tidy while you die.

Come on, girl. Do it, and get us out of here.

He smiled. His lips cracked. Blood filled his mouth. He smiled anyway.

Cinder’s orange eyes stayed on him. Tears trailed down her face, vanishing in the heat before they reached her trembling jaw.

Then she burned.

The light went up so fast that Aiden had to turn his face away. The stone slabs cracked. The glass under his hands went soft.

Fifteen years of a man’s life went into the evolution all at once, and the evolution took them.

The dimming stopped.

The light climbed.

For the first time since the frost came through the door, Cinder was not losing.

Then she started winning too fast.

The light went past steady. Past bright. It turned white.

Cinder was burning through herself faster than her body could change.

No. Slow down.

Aiden crawled a step forward. A lock of his hair caught fire. He rolled back. He couldn’t stop her.

The Hearth Cat meowed. It had been on her shoulder. It was now in front of her.

It reached a paw toward her. Its fur blackened. It kept the paw there. It meowed again. Cinder’s fire pulled back around it.

The cat was making her slow down. Making her choose slow over all at once, as it always had.

The white blaze receded into gold.

The gold held.

The smallest thing is holding the biggest fire anyone in Sewer Row has ever seen to a pace she can survive.

Marsh is never going to believe me.

Six feet away, the Frost Wolf felt the change.

It had been drinking heat all night without hurrying, certain of how this ended. Now the fire it was draining refilled faster than it could pull.

It pulled harder.

The fire refilled harder.

The Frost Wolf lowered its head and drew in a deeper breath.

The Ice Heart behind it answered and filled the slope with cold.

The cold gathered around the wolf’s body, covering the black glass in crooked frost spikes.

The wolf pulled everything into itself, then released it in one wave toward the shelter.

Everything it had, aimed at putting out the fire in front of it.

Aiden watched the wave blast into the shelter, frost spikes erupting from everything in its wake.

He pressed himself against the wall and watched Cinder’s light swallow the wave before it reached him. Her light stayed steady.

The frost began to retreat.

Its edge melted back a finger at a time, toward the door where the Frost Wolf stood, its eyes fixed on the fire it could no longer drain.

Feeling came back into Aiden’s hands.

And forty feet out, at the edge of the entrance, the golden motes started drifting back in.

The cold was losing its grip on the air. The mountain was pushing its fire back into the shelter.

There. Now you can reach Tier Three.

Twenty feet out, the sentinel stood up.

It had lain still through all of it. The men. The cold. The man on his knees in the door.

Now it came three steps closer and stopped. It looked at Cinder.

Aiden turned his head and looked at it properly for the first time.

Plates the length of his arm. A ridged spine running back into the dark. Wings folded flat along its sides, the membranes glowing dull orange between the bones.

He had seen that shape once. In a book, in a hall he had been allowed into once.

Third case on the left, dirty and filled with cobwebs. Legends nobody reads in the children’s waiting room before the array assessment. Two hundred years since anyone had seen one close enough to draw it.

A dragon.

But... the book said they were extinct in the west. Stories everywhere else.

There are twelve of them on this mountain. One of them is eight steps from my boots.

The dragon didn’t look at him.

It watched the fire in the back of the shelter. Its head tilted. For the first time all night, it was not just waiting to see how this ended.

You have been lying there since dusk deciding whether we were interesting.

You just decided.

Aiden got one knee under himself and pulled himself upright against the wall.

For a moment, he forgot about the sentinel.

Behind him, Cinder’s golden light grew too bright to look at.

Her body disappeared inside the blaze as the evolution pushed her toward Tier Three.

And her body began to change.