Garnet

Lina shook her head.

And the stone would feel, for the first time in three hundred years, that it had finally met someone who wasn’t trying to become a god. Just a girl. Just a fire that had learned to warm, not to burn. garnet

It was called the Heartfire—a rough, fist-sized crystal the color of dried blood steeped in honey, pulled from the scree of an abandoned mine in the Carpathians. A geologist would call it almandine, a common species of garnet. A poet would call it a frozen ember. But Lina, the girl who found it, simply called it a lucky break. Lina shook her head

She had touched the garnet while thinking of the mining company that had shuttered her father’s livelihood. She had thought, I wish they would burn. Just a fire that had learned to warm, not to burn

“What do I do?” she asked.

They arrived in a black sedan with diplomatic plates, speaking in a language Lina didn’t recognize but somehow understood. Their leader was a woman with silver hair and garnet earrings that matched the stone. She called herself the Collector.

“Sit,” she said. “You’re carrying a piece of the earth’s heart. It’s heavy.”