Infinite by Jodi Meadows

no one is getting reincarnated anyway. Not even you. The next time someone dies, they’re gone forever.”
    A heavy silence descended on the lab, this simple and terrifying truth a smothering snow. I should have said it more gently. They all knew the truth, but they probably didn’t appreciate being reminded any more than I enjoyed being reminded about my newness.
    After a moment, Sam took a seat across the table from me. “We keep talking about Janan ascending and returning and how it will destabilize the caldera enough that it erupts, but what does Janan’s ascending actually mean? Will he stay here? Go somewhere else? Be corporeal or not? You said he doesn’t have a mortal form anymore. Will he be just a soul flying around?”
    “If you can say he even has a soul,” I muttered, but Sam’s words struck something else inside me. No mortal form. Just a soul flying around.
    Like sylph?
    “He was human once.” Stef leaned against the wall, her arms crossed. “He must have had a soul at some point.”
    Less sure, but unwilling to argue, I turned back to Sam’s question. “I don’t know what will happen, or how. That’s why I’ve been trying to translate these books.”
    “Then let’s do that.” Sam picked through my notebook, finding my potential translations of strings of symbols from the books. “This symbol means Heart, city, and prison?” He pointed at a circle with a dot inside.
    I nodded. “That’s my best guess. You’ve mentioned the wall in the north before.”
    Sam hesitated. “Yes. I remember the wall.”
    “Cris told me about another white wall in a jungle.” I’d repeated this story to Sam already, and Stef knew it, but Whit hadn’t heard it. “He said he was collecting plants and came across crumbling white stone. When he climbed on top of a tall piece, he realized the stone had once been a huge wall, which circled a collapsed tower. There was enough rubble around the tower to indicate it had once been as tall as the temple in the center of Heart.”
    “But there were no other buildings,” Stef added. “It was like Heart, but without our homes and the Councilhouse, if you looked at it from above, it would look like a circle with a dot in the middle.”
    “Right. And I’m guessing they were all prisons, like the temple inside Heart originally was for Janan. Cris told us that all the warriors with Janan were imprisoned separately so they’d never join forces again. That also begins to explain why Heart is built over a caldera that size, even though it’s entirely impractical.”
    “Why?” Whit asked.
    “Because it was a prison. It was meant to deter people from coming to rescue him. The other prisons we know of are in the frozen north, and in the jungle where not even the water is safe to drink. Who knows where the others are?” None of my friends would be able to remember the locations, even if they’d seen them. Not without a lot of prodding and leading questions, and I could only offer leading questions if I had an idea of where to start. Like Sam’s death. Or symbols Cris might have seen. “Maybe under the ocean, or in deserts, or high on a mountain where the air’s so thin you can’t breathe. They could be anywhere.”
    “To be fair to us, though, Heart didn’t look dangerous at first.” Stef frowned. “Except for the geysers and mud pools and fumaroles . . .”
    I nodded. “You were on a quest to find your leader, anyway. You believed he’d been wrongly imprisoned, because that’s what you were told.”
    “Who told us?” Whit asked.
    “I’m not sure. Cris didn’t mention.” I frowned and tried to recall everything he’d said, but those hours in the temple were a blur. I’d been so afraid and depressed.
    “And how’d we get the key?” Stef asked. “Someone must have taken it, because otherwise, Janan never could have gotten out to speak to us, and we never could have gotten in.”
    I doodled spirals in the margins of my notebook. “If phoenixes