Cameron

Firelight and screams. That was what Cameron's job always came to, when someone made a mistake. Firelight, and screams.

The people around Cameron threw themselves backwards, hopping back in fright or turning to run. People were thrown down, shoved forward by someone else with quicker feet looking to flee. The mob seemed to congeal as it shrank away from a single point. Ripples in a pool, as the water fled from the boulder dropped inside.

In the middle of this growing space was Vincent. Except, in every way it mattered to Cameron, Vincent was gone.

To Cameron, Vincent was a boy. An apprentice clinging to the hem of his master's red coat. He hesitated to put himself forward; the most reluctant member of Valen's squad. He quailed before the anger of men who had no hope of threatening him, reacted to violence the way a watchman might react to seeing smoke, and readily deferred to people who might not know any better.

Vincent was not someone Cameron was afraid of.

But as the air changed around him, now hot, dry, still, and a completely different smell, Cameron was afraid. He was more afraid than in any day he worked with the City's rejects, no matter how close to the madness the flame brought on. More afraid than when he fought those mobs of Gloamtaken and spent hours a heartbeat from death. More afraid than in any hour in his life. Except the hour Cameron stood on the wall, while Vincent's master fought the Golem.

The expanding rush of hot air whipped the dust off the streets, and flung it to the edge of town. Dust and smoke was thrown to just beyond the line of torches that held back the Gloam, forming a wall of glimmering dust and heat that Cameron knew was just as much a barrier to the Gloamtaken as one of the walls.

"You are in my heat haze." Vincent had said those words to Mackaroy, a little while ago. With the implication that being within a Crafter's protection also meant being within their power. And with that power now reaching to the edges of town it meant that every soul inside was within Vincent's will, where nothing more than a thought would see them turned to ash.

Every soul. All twenty thousand of Barleybarrel's residents. All of the Rangers. And every single Gloamtaken.

People around him screamed, even as Cameron watched, wide-eyed and paralyzed; a child on the tracks seeing the oncoming train too frightened to step off. Behind him, people were climbing over each other, scampering away, children burying themselves into parents' clothes as if to dig themselves under and hide. So many people ran to find cover, others falling to the ground and covering themselves, as if they were too close to demolition charges. Thousands of people, now trying to put themselves as far as possible from where Cam now stood. All of them hiding from Vincent.

Specks of fire swirled around Olivia's apprentice, glimmering as brightly as the sparks made from metal striking metal. His hair glowed like metal in the forge, and his eyes — staring at something no one else could see — shone like the open door of a furnace. The air around him shimmered, and the air thrummed when he raised his hand.

"Shadow."

The word, the title, pulled Cameron out of his paralysis like being yanked off those tracks. Cameron turned to see Sergeant Lorec had a hand on his arm. His other hand was pointing at Vincent, and the man looked as frightened as Cameron had when he first saw a Golem. "What am I looking at?"

Cameron wasn't sure. Vincent wasn't a reject. Not yet, and with power like that, perhaps he should never be. There was no room in the City for a power like that to be allowed to run free in madness. Someone like Vincent would either have to be given the coat, or enough steel quickly enough to keep his power from harming anyone else.

And Sergeant Lorec was waiting to know which.

"Vincent has taken Barleybarrel's defence into his own hands," Cameron said.

"Burn me. That could mean they've been overrun," Sergeant Lorec said, and a different fear began to turn the Ranger pale. Cameron found it odd that the man could see such small, dim threats, when one as bright as the Spire was right in front of them. But only for a moment, as the sergeant looked back at Vincent and shuddered. "But can we leave him, like this? Is he still with us?"

"He is," Cameron admitted. "He's here. He's also with the captain, and the rest of the Rangers. Did you notice how the air changed just a moment ago?"

The sergeant nodded.

"To wield the Flame, a Crafter becomes it. Right now, Vincent isn't just flesh and blood. He's the air around us, the torches guarding Barleybarrel, all of it," Cameron said.

"Can we talk him down?"

"Might as well ask the wind to change direction," Cameron said, and he gripped his knife. The new one, the one they plundered from Crafter Saval's luggage. The one made to give to a shadow. The one meant to kill people like Vincent. "He can probably hear us right now, but he's also miles away, all at the same time."

"I don't understand," Sergeant Lorec admitted, as he stared at Vincent as if he had never seen the man before.

Cameron understood that look. He shared it. "Neither do they," Cameron said, and pointed to the people behind him. When he turned his head to point, he noticed a few people, instead of fleeing the way most of Barleybarrel now ran, were pushing their way through the crowd towards them.

One of them, in particular, was Milanie. "Cam? What's happening? What is he?" And he knew that when she spoke, it was with the voice of everyone now huddling as far from Vincent as they could manage. "I told some of us that you're a shadow, as well as a Ranger. It's helped a little, but Cam, I think..."

Nothing good could follow. As the cold of the dagger bit into his hand, as he stood and watched fire set alight by single man's will, Cameron realized he couldn't leave who he was behind. "Cam," Milanie continued, her words broken as she wrestled with her fear. "A lot of people have been hurt."

Cameron already knew as much, on some level. It wasn't his first time seeing a group of people flee in one direction, at the expense of the slow and unfortunate. But it was the first time that mob included anyone he cared about, and the pain on Milanie's face suggested she held back the worst news.

"Was anyone burnt?" Cameron asked.

If Vincent had crossed that line, there would be no forgiving him. Cam would put the knife in himself, and call it a kindness.

"Burnt? No," Milanie said, to Cameron's immediate relief. "But the Cartwrights are hurt, and I think the old train engineer, Mister Uvel, I think someone stepped on his neck when he fell in the panic. And that's just what I saw around me."

People were hurt. People had likely been killed. It was hard to keep Vincent's guilt on the matter in any sense of context, to remember that no one had been harmed with his power. But it had to be remembered. "The Craft is frightening, especially to people who don't see it being used much. But he hasn't hurt anyone yet, he's still okay. And we still need to evacuate."

Sergeant Lorec agreed. "Especially with injured people, it's best if we get everyone on the other side of the wall as quickly as we can."

The sergeant cupped his mouth with his hands, and took a deep breath. But whatever the sergeant was about to shout was stifled by another explosive roar. Behind them, dozens of massive sparks flew from Vincent's hands into the air, almost as quick as the flash of a Salmander as they swept into the air and flew out to the north. The air immediately around Vincent took on an orange glow, with specks or embers swirling around him like a haze of fireflies. Vincent's hair took on a furnace's orange glow, growing brighter when he took a breath in, and dimmer as he let that breath out.

And then Vincent raised his hand, and it looked like sun began to rise at the edge of town.

The torches at the edge of town, the ones holding the Gloam back, turned into a bright yellow imitation of the wall, linking together into a solid line of light a hundred feet high. From the wall, all the way around Barleybarrel, and back to the other wall, the fire stood higher than any building in town, as rose like a wave and pushed out into the Gloam.

The howl of explosions shook the ground beneath Cameron's feet, even before he heard them coming from beyond the town. Plumes of flame as large as buildings flew across the air and smashed into the fields, tornadoes made of fire whirled about in the distance, and the sky above their heads had taken on an eerie, frightening glow, as if it hummed with energy.

Milanie hugged him close. Sergeant Lorec gaped, stunned into statuesque silence. Cam's right hand shook at his side, the cold almost unbearably painful as he squeezed his knife.

And beneath Cameron's fear, dredged up as he looked behind him at hundreds of people huddling in whatever cover they could find, at thousands more staring at the sky as if it was about to turn red hot and come down on their heads, and he found the old anger. The familiar, contemptuous rage that helped him do his job ever since he joined oversight. The contempt buried his fear, shoved it aside, and the rage pushed him into motion.

Towards the fire. Towards what Vincent had let himself become.

Cameron managed two steps before someone grabbed him by the arm. Surprisingly strong, and surprisingly steady. The grip wasn't tight, but it felt like being held in a vice that had only begun to tighten. He turned to see who owned that hand, to find a vaguely familiar face looking at him intently.

Familiar, Cameron realized after a moment, because it was one of the people his new lieutenant had helped escape the Gloam earlier. He remember Emily using the man's name. "Best leave him to it," Douglas Raeth said, as the man stepped into Cameron's path.

"Out of my way," Cameron said, as he stepped forward to brush the man aside. One hand reached out, when faster than Cam would have expected from almost anyone, the man's left hand seized his arm by the wrist, and something pressed into the underside of his upper arm, between the muscles.

Cameron looked down, and nearly shivered when he saw a knife pressed against his arm. Douglas Raeth leaned forward, pulling Cameron by the arm to keep him off balance. "From the elbow to the armpit, most of the arteries are pretty close to the skin. Even with your coat in the way, I don't need to be good with a knife to leave a wound that could kill you."

"You're suggesting I don't do my job?" Cameron asked, as he assessed the threat. He knew if he leaned back, Douglas Raeth would need to lunge forward or depend on his wrist strength to make the cut, but the man was right about the damage even a shallow cut could manage.

"Exactly the opposite," Douglas Raeth replied. "I suggest you help get us moving through that gap in the wall."

The suggestion smothered Cameron's anger so quickly it felt like someone had dunked him in the river. "Get them to safety."

"Yeah," Douglas said. And only then, did the man pull his knife from under Cameron's arm.