Call of Fire Rocks the Foundations of Alt-History

But let’s rest for a moment, and take stock of this interesting world: though the earthquake’s devastation plays out the same way in Cato’s alternate history as it did in our own, the social and political history is much changed. In this world, several decades prior, the United States and Japan merged to form the Unified Pacific (UP). By 1906, the UP invasion of China, and the Chinese people’s persecution throughout the Unified Pacific, is escalating. This is hardly the only difference between our histories, as all manner of magics also exist in this one: geomancy, Reiki, yokai, kami, and a variety of other mythical powers and strange beasts. This is not an alternate history, but an alternate reality.
It is geomancy that largely fuels our plot. Ingrid is a powerful geomancer, long kept hidden by the Warden Sakaguchi, who acts as father figure in the absence of her shadowy biological father. The Wardens, as these geomancers are called, draw off seismic energy, locking it into kermanite crystals then used to power everything from dirigibles to flashlights. When all the geomancers in San Francisco are killed (excepting Sakaguchi and Ingrid, thanks to a flare of her untested power) at the beginning of Breath of Earth, it is only a matter of time before the seismic devastation becomes inevitable, literally and metaphorically. Not only does the earthquake destroy much of the city, but it stresses fault lines between the Japanese, American, and Chinese citizens.
In Breath of Earth, Ingrid was often dangerously naïve. Though her dark skin makes her ethnicity ambiguous, she is not one of the hated Chinese, and is therefore exempt from a fair amount of casual violence. (Which is not to say she doesn’t face constant belittlement due to her skin color and gender.) Still, she was protected by a white mother and a powerful Japanese man from much of the world’s ugly prejudice. In Call of Fire, she’s begun to wake up to the hard politics that shape not only her life, but those of the people around her. There’s an illuminating sequence in which Ingrid and Lee—a dark-skinned woman and a Chinese man—venture into the tinderbox of Seattle, where a mob has just burned out a section of Chinatown. Lee passes himself off as Japanese, and Ingrid must play nanny. The way they are treated, and the way they must behave to keep up the charade, grates at Ingrid—but this is the world they inhabit, not the careful cocoon of her upbringing. The place she grew up was razed to the ground.

It’s not entirely fair to castigate Ingrid for her naiveté; sometimes, it is her best quality. She reacts with purpose and power when she sees the plight of the Chinese in the UP—blamed falsely for everything from the earthquake in San Francisco to the death of geomancers in the Seattle—in a way that someone more cynical and hidebound never would. She throws herself into the business of righting injustices, often at the expense of her own body, and just as often when the rewards are pyrrhic, at best. Though she knows now that joining the fray isn’t always the smartest course of action, she often can’t help herself—it’s in her nature. The tension between what she knows she should do—politically, tactically—and her first instinct drives much of the conflict. Call of Fire is an exploration of Ingrid’s past, and how it will inevitably, geologically, resonate with her future. She is a geomancer, after all, and the strata of her life, laid down in one sedimentary layer at a time, informs the changing social landscape she finds herself in. In order to bring about the future, she must understand her past.
Though Call of Fire is action-driven, Cato knows when to slow down and give her characters a moment to breathe and converse, finding each other and themselves in the small moments between the big ones. Though there are large, empire creating and destroying events going on around her, Ingrid enjoys small moments of friendship, kindness, empathy, and love. In many ways, this middle volume is the calm before the storm, the moment to breathe before the inevitable. Cato does a beautiful job of sucking it in and breathing it out, slow, so you’re right there on the edge. I can’t wait for the next inhale.
Call of Fire is available now.