I glowered out at the fog shrouded lake of lava while Deamar put entirely too much energy into his explanation of what we doing in Steamer’s Fall and why we direly needed to leave. The man who had come out of the fog, drenched and suspicious, had gone stock still as he listened. I didn’t pay him much more attention than that, just like I ignored the way Jika awkwardly shifted toward Deamar and then me, as if she wanted to break into his one sided ramble or my rumination and couldn’t quite bring up the courage to do either.

Prevna said she wanted me to go back to the village. The village was supposedly safe from the fire dancers and would have the drink we needed to resist the fog’s effects. All good reasons to step onto the villager’s craft once he broke free of Deamar’s word induced stupor and escape.

I knew I wasn’t as observant or thinking as clearly as I normally would be from the severe lack of sleep, just like Prevna said, even if I didn’t want to admit it out loud. I knew Prevna would be livid if I abandoned the others and went after her, if I even managed to find her between the fog and unfamiliar terrain. I had managed to let her go, gave her the trust she asked for, and it’d be idiotic to ruin that at the last moment because floating off to safety seemed to easy.

But it was true that the thought of escaping, of waiting at the village, felt wrong. Like I would be tearing something vitally important at the heart of me if I stepped onto the floating box and allowed myself to escape. Dramatic, but not untrue.

If I went to the village I’d be trapped with no way to help, no way to get anywhere important in time if things went wrong. Perhaps the same was true here at Steamer’s Fall, but it didn’t feel the same.

“Deamar, shut up. If he doesn’t get what happened by now you talking more won’t help.” Deamar whirled to face me, ready to dive head first into an argument, but whatever he could see of my expression shut him up like I wanted. “You and Jika will go back to the village with him. I’ll stay here in case Prevna and Tike show back up. You can come back to pick us up once the fire dancers are done, bring us the fog resistance drink.”

He crossed his arms. I’m sure it was supposed to be intimidating but I was still put in mind of a toddler putting up a pointless, mutinous protest. “Why should I do that?”

“You want to prove yourself? I’d suggest doing at least that much.”

Deamar muttered something under his breath before he said, louder, “Fine.”

He motioned to the villager and they both grabbed a barrel to load up the floating box hidden in the fog. Then further protest came from an unexpected quarter.

Jika drew herself up so she could stare down at me. “I’m not going either.”

She had been eager enough to keep out of danger before. It didn’t make sense that she’d deny escape now, especially when I doubted she had the same qualms I did about leaving—unless she was more guilty about leaving Kuma to Prevna and Tike than I thought.

Still, it’d be simpler if she left. I rolled my eyes at her. “Yes, you are.”

She looked like she wanted be doing anything but be in a confrontation with me but she held her ground. “No, I’m not. I’m not going to be the only woman in that place and if you’re staying then I can too. I’ll help.”

I had the sudden urge to shove Jika all the way to the floating box, tie the door shut with all three of them inside, and somehow compel whatever crocodiles pulled it to take them all away. Even when we had fought together I don’t think I had ever considered Jika in terms of being helpful. She was an annoyance and a burden and entirely unwelcome.

I made a shooing motion at her. “Go. Hide in a tent if the village is so scary.”

“No.” Her voice cracked a little bit, but I was slightly impressed she hadn’t given in yet.

Deamar appeared back out of the fog. “The floater is ready. Let’s go.”

Jika huffed out a breath and shifted to face him. “I’m not going. We only need one person to go and get reinforcements.”

Deamar looked at us both like we were stupid before he shrugged and turned to go. My sluggish brain had a sudden burst of inspiration before he completely disappeared. “Wait! Tell me what you use the plants here for before you go.”

He glared at me before seeming to decide that he could spare a moment to prove he was better than me by showing he knew something I didn’t. “Violet lace, Dancer’s Path, and fuzz leaf. Papa calls them the Watcher’s Bouquet. They’re what we use to help make the Nullifier more potent so we don’t have to drink it to resist the fog every day. Among other things.”

I neglected to point out that he likely just spilled one of his village’s bigger secrets and sent him on his way. He was more than happy to leave us behind. Likely he thought I wouldn’t be able to do much with the information, and perhaps that was true, but it also meant I might be able to make a makeshift fog resistance drink without grounder grass and some of Jika’s fire.

We heard more than saw Deamar and the villager leave us behind. The cooled lava crackled and crunched as the crocodiles dragged the box away behind them. I did see Jika’s regret about her decision immediately intensify when she realized she was now all alone with me. A small part of me was viciously glad to see it.

And just as glad to have her turn to me and ask, “What now?”

She might have been older and a Picker, but I was the one who had taken control of the situation and I wasn’t about to relinquish that now.

I gestured to the colorful plants covering the wall behind us. “We pick some herbs, make a fire, and I see about making a last resort in case we’re still stuck here when our resistance wears out.”

My old healer’s instincts rebelled against the idea of using plants when I didn’t have to proper knowledge of what were the best parts use, when was the best time to pick them, or what was the best way to handle them, but my beads were gone and I needed to keep my hands busy.

I went with Jika to quickly scavenge some grass and twigs from the top of the cliff. We didn’t dare to go farther than that looking for larger branches in case we lost our way back to Steamer’s Fall or accidentally walked into the fire dancers path. Then we carefully made our way back down the thin, pitted path to the bottom of the cliff and I picked the plants. Jika had tried to help but I slapped her hands away as soon as I noticed her grabbing fistfuls without a single thought apparently in her head. Making the mixture with ingredients that were destroyed before I even started was just asking for it to go wrong. After I finished collecting what I needed we set up on a patch of the thin walkway that was wider than the rest.

I tested each plant against my skin to check for any reactions rather than just rely on the way I had ran my hand through them earlier. Once that was done I placed a single piece of each part of each plant in my mouth at a time before spitting it back out in a simple test of their properties. Jika watched with some mixture of discomfort and worry but she didn’t say what she was thinking despite the way her eyes strayed to the spot healer’s beads would have hung in my hair if I still had them.

The names of the plants made it easy to figure out which was which but in the end their properties seemed to be similar. They were all stimulants from the way my focus and energy increased after I held them in my mouth. The violet lace seemed to have the most immediate effect while the root of the orange Dancer’s Path plant had the strongest effect when I chewed it. Fuzz leaf was a little different in that it had a sweet flavor and a filmy, powdery texture. I almost wrote it off as not having any stimulating effect on its own despite holding it in my mouth longer than the others until I realized my urge to close my eyes and sleep had lessened.

I crushed the seeds that I had been carrying since I found them in the hidden supply outpost with the side of my eating knife. Then I used the knife’s hilt to grind them down further before slicing the plants I had gathered into the smallest pieces I could make them. The fire we could make wouldn’t last long and smaller pieces would need less time to cook. I based the ratio I used for the seeds and plants on other mixtures I had made for a single person but since I couldn’t know how much of each ingredient the villagers used or how grounder grass might have changed things I prepped even amounts of each.

Jika set up the fire and I placed my ground up mixture in the hole we had left in the middle. There was a strong chance it burn instead of roast but I didn’t have a good way to separate it from the fire and still have the pitiful fire have any effect. Jika snapped her fingers and I noted she was a Candle as she held the small flame above her finger to the pile of grass and twigs.

We watched fire flare up, fall into a smolder until Jika prodded it. My mixture did burn but I figured that was as close to roasting it as we were going to get. Once the small fire burned itself out I scrapped up the burned remains of my mixture and put it into a small spare finger sized pouch. I didn’t have a fully waterproof pouch except for my waterskin and that meant I had to wait to mix it with water until I was ready to test it if I wanted safe water to drink.

Jika wasn’t at all convinced that the mixture was safe to ingest but since I wasn’t planning on giving it her unless I had tested it on myself first that didn’t matter. We went back up the path to listen for the others but after hearing absolutely nothing promising for what felt like an eternity we made our way back down again and all the way to the waterfall.

It burst from the cliff above us and missed the path to land directly on the lava, but the boiling hot water from where the waterfall splashed against the lava splattered back towards the path when it didn’t just burst into steam. Standing near it felt like you were being cooked alive. We had the bright idea to explore the other side of the cove but instead we had to quickly give that up so we didn’t scald ourselves just for curiosity. However, I did have to give the villagers some credit when I saw the small channels painstakingly carved into the rock so that cool water from the waterfall would run down the cliff’s side into little nooks that the barrels we had seen before could be tucked. They caused some water to splash down onto the path and run off from the channels when the barrels weren’t there to catch it and the slippery footing wasn’t encouraging either.

We retreated back to where we had done our experiment. I stared out into the fog again as I tried to think of something else I could do to keep my hands busy, to pretend I wasn’t waiting like I would have been back at the village, to make my decision worth it when Prevna might be disappointed I couldn’t bring myself to go to the village like she asked.

That was when we heard the singing. The high and whisper-sweet voices of the fire dancers. Jika and I pressed ourselves back against the cliff wall, eyes wide. No embers floated past our faces but the wind likely wasn’t blowing in the right direction to carry them down here to us. Tike had said they didn’t have anything to do with the lake after they started their dance but that didn’t mean they couldn’t skirt close to it, couldn’t be as unpredictable as he made them out to be.

Worst came to worst, we’d have to flee back to the waterfall and hope the water protected us from their touch even as the water itself burned us if they trapped us here. Second to worst, we’d have to leave Steamer’s Fall and hope that their route didn’t line up with wherever we decided to hole up in order to avoid any injuries. The question was: were the fire dancers just passing by above or would we draw attention to ourselves we wouldn’t otherwise have gotten if we tried to sneak away?

The singing got louder. Closer.

I wondered if our little fire had drawn them to us as I started to hear the pop and crackle of plants burning. I glanced down at what remained of the fire but it wasn’t even smoking.

Jika was trying to tell me something her eyes but I wasn’t getting much beyond panic. I motioned for her to stay put. Better to stay here for now—

Singing came from directly above us. And embers cut through the thick fog—but not all in one direction like they had been before. They were spread in an arc like something had flung them like a child with flower petals. All of the embers landed in the lava but it wasn’t long before more lit up the fog.

Too close for us to chance moving, especially when our escape route might already be cut off. Jika and I both pressed ourselves even harder back against the cliff wall, hoping that the angle and fog might protect us from the creatures’ notice.

I certainly couldn’t see them.

But the singing was clear.

It was odd because at first I could have sworn they weren’t singing actual words, just notes full of emotion and trills, but the more we stood there listening the more meaning seemed to resolve from the song. It wasn’t anything like the dialects I had heard but I understood it all the same.

It was a call to follow and burn and burn and burn. Burn away the abundance, burn away grief, burn just for the simple joy of creating flame. A call to enjoy the moment and be free. A joyous challenge to all who might get in their way and try to ruin the dance.

Jika and I ignored the call and the challenge. It could have been an eternity or a couple minute later that the embers stopped falling through the sky and the singing became more distant until it faded back into silence. Jika slumped down onto the path like all the strength had gone out her legs. I lowered myself to the ground a little more elegantly.

Jika whispered, “That was too close.” When I didn’t answer she scowled at me. “We should have left when we could.”

I looked at her sidelong and didn’t let my voice waver from exhaustion or fear. “You were welcome to.”

She didn’t have answer for that so we fell into silence.