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“You know, back on old Earth, people like you would have been burned at the stake, Cally,” Vila said, lazily scratching the skin below his belly button.
“Burned at the stake?”
“People like Avon, too,” Vila went on, with a lascivious grin directed my way.
“I don’t understand.”
Good old Cally – so adapt in so many areas, but so naïve in some ways of humankind. “A method of execution often used against those with… unusual powers,” I explained, tossing my towel aside. “The sentenced person would be tied up and a pyre lit under them.”
Cally grimaced. “That sounds unpleasant.”
“Capital punishment generally is.”
“Sorry I brought it up,” Vila drawled. He always was like a lazy cat on nights like these, stretched out all over the bed in complete abandon.
“Of course,” I teased, “they had special punishments for thieves, too.”
“All right, Avon! I was making a joke! I don’t want to hear the gory details!”
I settled down on the bed, shoving Vila’s feet away so Cally could nestle against me – a slim, but always warm weight.
Vila pouted and sidled up to my other side. “Cuddle pile?”
I had my arm around Cally, but eyed Vila down my nose, not offering an embrace. “You might have been a little more proactive, if you wanted to reap the rewards.”
“Come off it, you enjoyed what I did to you,” Vila shot back, knowing me well enough by now not to take offense. “As did Cally. Didn’t you, Cally?”
“Yes, Vila.”
“I’m a good cuddler, too,” Vila wheedled, turning his charm to the full. If I were to be uncharitable, I would say that Vila’s full charm is outstandingly easy to resists – but I was too content myself to bother.
Cally slipped from my arms with an indulgent smile, manoeuvring so Vila was between us both, with her resting against his chest and his and my flanks pressed together.
I was half-dozing when Cally said: “This punishment – was that a long time ago?”
Vila and I both groaned.
“Lovely. Just lovely,” Vila complained half-heartedly, voice slurring with sleep. “No sense of bedtime conversations.”
“It was you who brought it up,” I reminded, propping myself up so I could look at Cally over Vila’s chest. Vila was holding my free hand. “Yes, a very long time ago, centuries into the old calendar. The Federation’s methods may appear cleaner, but I doubt that they are less brutal. We are a rather brutish species at heart.”
She hummed thoughtfully.
Suddenly, there was a loud bang – mounting pressure, then a flash of light–
When I came to, I was resting across a tabletop, as if I had fallen asleep while working. It wouldn’t have been a first, except that I was certain that I had just been in bed with Vila and Cally and that I had never owned a wooden table.
I ran my hand over the surface appraisingly, trying to make sense of what had happened. It was pockmarked with use, blackened in places, but unmistakably genuine. I looked up to take in the rest – I was in a small, dimly lit room. It smelled strongly of earth, dust, wax, and smoke, far more so than anywhere else I’d been. The window was small and the glass pane so impure that I could not see out of it. I could barely make out the things in front of me – sheaves of paper, something that was probably a cup, though it was made of an unfamiliar material, implements that seemed to be for writing but were otherwise unknown to me – and an antique candle holder with remnants of a candle.
When I stood, I became aware, too, that my clothes had changed. Where I had been wearing my sleepwear, I was now glad in plain brownish trousers and a shirt more like the ones Blake seemed to like – but of no fabric composite that I knew. I had also, somehow, sprouted a beard.
“What the…”
“Avon?!” came a cry from outside the door, in a familiar and very welcome voice.
“Here, Vila!”
The door was shoved open – it was indeed Vila, though it took me a moment to recognise him. He, too, was suddenly sporting a beard and was dressed in clothes similar too mine when I distinctly remembered him being barely dressed at all just a moment ago.
“Oh, thank heavens,” Vila breathed. “We thought something had happened to you!”
“We?”
Vila tugged at his hand, pulling Cally into the doorframe. Her, I barely recognised at all. The dress emphasised her chest and hips, her hair was long and less curly – far longer than I had ever seen it, it fell nearly to her waist.
“Cally?” I asked, rather inanely.
It is I, she said, and at least her telepathic voice was unchanged.
“What happened?” Vila queried.
I looked around – I wasn’t wearing a teleport bracelet, of course. Not that I had had one with me, in bed. “I don’t know. Some kind of flash–”
“A dream? A hallucination?” Vila inched into the room, making it feel even smaller. “I don’t feel like this isn’t real.”
“I know as much as you do,” I told him. “If it is a dream, all we would have to do is wake up, but it seems like that isn’t the solution.”
“What is this smell?” Cally asked, abruptly.
“Dust, mostly,” I mused, “I’m not really sure.”
“No,” she said, and her tone made both of us look up. “There is something else.”
And then it hit me, too.
Vila gasped. “Burning! Wood burning!”
“There is no fire place here. Out – we need to be out in the open–” I ushered them out of the room onto a small landing, and from there on down a frankly terrifying stairway before we burst out through the front door. It was barely dawn, but smoke hung heavily in the air, stealing the feeble light. There was no time to evaluate our surroundings, beyond the fact that we stood in a cobbled street.
“Look!” shouted Vila, and look we did.
Over the dark shadows of the nearby houses, bright red flamed licked up into the sky. A strong gust of wind carried more smoke and a scorching heat towards us.
“Too fast!” I clasped my hand around Vila’s wrist and pulled, drawing him away from his horrified fascination with the spreading flames and trusting Cally to follow. “Run, Vila!”
To his credit, he didn’t need to be asked twice.
We pelted down the narrow street, past rows and rows of strange, wooden buildings.
“Wood and thatch,” I gasped out as we ran. “In a wind like this, everything will be ablaze in no time at all!”
“Where are we going?!”
If you see a big street, turn onto it! Cally instructed – and it struck me then how odd it was that there was no one else fleeing with us. If there had been only a few people, I might have shrugged it off – but there was nobody at all.
The realisation made me stumble and nearly fall, but Vila pulled me onwards with surprising strength. Cally, fitter than either of us, was ahead, but the dress hampered her movements.
There was no bigger road. I glanced behind to see exactly what I suspected – the small road with its tall buildings was acting as a funnel for the scorching hot air, setting the roofs and houses ablaze before the main fire could even reach them.
“Cally!” Vila cried when she stumbled and, suddenly, we’d caught up to her. Cally was keeping pace to my left while Vila and I were still pulling each other on – there seemed to be nothing ahead, just drifting smoke–
–and then, I jerked awake, back in my cabin, but the room was scorching hot; so hot that wood or thatch might already have caught fire.
Vila and Cally were sprawled out on the bed beside me, drenched in sweat but apparently unconscious.
I shook Vila roughly by the shoulders until his eyes snapped open, then moved to Cally. I was gentler with her, but only just.
“What’s happening?” Vila wailed. “It this real?!”
“Assume that it is! We have to get out of here – life system malfunction. We’ll be burned alive!”
Vila immediately darted to the door. “It’s locked!”
“With our normal passcode, fool!” I shouted back at him, pulling a dazed Cally to her feet.
The door opened to an immediate pull of hot air out into the colder corridor – we were lucky, perhaps, that there was nothing out there that burned.
“Go!” I shouted at Vila, pushing him forward. I didn’t pause to slam the cabin door shut.
We ran until the next emergency bulkhead, where I hit the button on a comms grid, nearly breaking it off. “Zen! Seal section C36-1! Vent all oxygen – fault in the life support system!”
My instructions could have been clearer, but Zen was well programmed. The vacuum sealed emergency doors shut, cutting us off at last from the heat.
Muscles and lungs burning, shivering drenched in the sudden cool, we stood staring at each other. Our exposed skin had not fared well in the heat – all three of us were reddened, some sections burned.
“Medical unit,” I rasped.
“What was that?!” Vila asked.
“Some shockwave – local damage.” I shrugged. “It must have stunned us for a moment; I was hallucinating.”
So was I, Cally said, and added, out loud, “No, Vila, don’t rub your face.”
I was almost tempted to ask what she had seen – but first aid seemed more urgent. It had appeared real, that burning, historical town – real enough, except for the lack of people. If I hadn’t woken, we might have succumbed to the heat.
Hit by the shockwave, the autorepair had prioritised other systems – I would have to do something about that, ensure that the temperature controls, at least in crew spaces, were considered part of the life support.
We would be fine, the cabin was fine – but I wouldn’t have described us as unscathed.
“What did you see?” I asked Vila over our game of chess. We’d set up right under the cooling vent. I hated the draft, ordinarily – but a cold breeze was comforting. My skin, though healed, was still oversensitive to anything hot, even physical contact. Even Cally, who had always enjoyed touch more than me, had curled up in a chair of her own, reading.
Vila knew, of course, what I was talking about. “Baked pasta in an often,” he said, “only I was the pasta – and I couldn’t get out. Then you woke me up.” He looked disturbed enough, so I didn’t question or joke about it. I can be tactful – if I choose to.
“You?”
“A burning city.” I didn’t elaborate on the details – the minutia that had made it seem so real – that still made it difficult to believe that it hadn’t been, that we hadn’t actually been there.
“What about you, Cally?” Vila asked, twisting around to her.
She looked up from her reading only then, though she didn’t bother to pretend that she hadn’t listened to our conversation. “A person,” she said, “burning at the stake.”