by L. B. Carter
Once settled on the seat, the other door opened on the opposite side, and Professor Tate clambered in. The woman named Barb shook her hand while Sirena and Nor froze.
Beyond them, through the open doors, Ace could see flames snapping at the treetops towering over the roof of the SUV. He willed the helicopter pilot to lift off, taking all his problems with it. He’d be solo again. Almost.
His brows lowered watching the plume of smoke seep further toward the bridge as the fire expanded. He felt trapped, stuck on the bridge, helplessly on the wrong side while Henley was on land, in danger. Ace understood the impact that this scene would have on her. It was a scene he never wanted to see himself.
Bodies moved in front of his view, an argument ensuing in the back of the chopper. The pilot decided then that he needed to lift off. The faint sound of a police siren added to the mess, perhaps explaining the rapid departure while the occupants were not comfortably and safely seated.
A few feet off the ground, Nor shoved Sirena off. She stumbled but retained her feet. She turned and looked up, backing away.
Nor was there, braced in the doorway, rising above her head.
“Nor—” Sirena’s voice was almost inaudible. Ace doubted Nor was capable of hearing her warning.
The Professor pushed him aside, about to leap out after her escaping experiment. Nor tried to wrestle her back, but it was clear he was holding back, trying not to hurt the older woman.
The threat to Sirena shifted, in any case, as Stew came barreling at her. Ace didn’t have time to warn Sirena before she was tackled and dragged in Ace’s direction, away from Nor. The kid was unaware of the barrier he was about to reverse into… or would have if Ace wasn’t already moving, the chopper having lifted enough now for him to dart underneath.
◆◆◆
Only a few feet in, Ace ran up against a wall of heat like standing in front of an oven or walking into the bathroom after his sister had taken a very long, very hot, water-wasting shower. It was spreading quickly. He squinted, shielding his eyes from the bright blaze with a forearm as he searched frantically.
“Hen?” he called and coughed from the smoke inhalation as he inched his way closer.
Something smaller combusted in the loudly crackling flames, sending sparks and embers shooting outward.
Miraculously, a small cry reached Ace’s ears, his poor hearing worsened by the dull roar of the fire consuming everything around it.
Ace turned that direction, treading carefully over glowing cinders as the fire greedily licked further across the floor.
There. Her back was pressed against the bark of one of the more massive trees, making her appear minuscule as she faced off against the fire, its glow glaring across her face, lighting it up golden. Her eyes were wide, unblinking, reflecting the scene in front of her—small trees and bushes, forest litter on the floor, all disappearing in the sharp luster and glow that seeped across leaves and skittered up pine needles, hungrily inching like an electrical spark along a wire.
Ace was sucked back seventeen years.
◆◆◆
“No, please don’t go. Don’t leave us,” his mother begged, both hands wrapped around his father’s as he made his way to the door.
“I have to. This is my job, Marissa. There are people out there, in danger, trapped in that inferno. Do you want me to just leave them there?”
“If it means you stay with me, yes,” she whispered, tears streaking down her cheeks. “We already put out an evacuation. They should have left.”
Ace was crouched in the corner, terrified, his eyes bouncing from one parent to the other, his mom’s fear oozing into him. His father’s pager had gone off like normal, but this time, instead of being proud that Ace’s daddy saved people, his mom had immediately panicked.
“Marissa,” his dad sighed, his eyebrows pulling down on the outsides. He stopped tugging and moved to clasp both of her hands in his. “I’ll come back. I promise. I always do.”
“It’s different this time, and you know it.” She hiccupped like Ace did when he drank his juice too fast. “This is dangerous.”
His dad pulled her into a tight hug, kissing her hair like he did when Grandma had died. She’d cried then, too. Ace’s sister tightened her grip on Ace’s shoulders, holding him where he was. He wanted to go hug his mom, too. She looked so sad, so worried, like the time he had left the garden when she had told him not to.
He’d come running back at her frantic calls, all smiles, ready to show off the discoveries from his new stomping ground, only to find her perched on the edge of the lawn, her dress twisted in her hands, her face equally twisted, distraught.
“Don’t be sad, Mommy.”
His parents looked over at their children then. His dad’s face softened, and he came over to them, but his mom gave another sob and looked away, a palm over her mouth.
“Hey, bud.” He crouched in front of Ace whose shoulder was in a vice under his sister’s grip. His dad looked at Ace then up at the girl behind him. “Don’t you worry, okay? Your daddy is going to help. There’s a very big fire in the forest, and its threatening a town a little ways down south.”
“Are you going to go help them, Daddy?”
“Yeah, bud. And I’ll tell you the number when I get home. It’s going to be big—more than ever before.”
Ace’s eyes rounded. “More than ever before? More than…” He thought back through all the totals his father had told him after each rescue. He had a journal in his room in which he kept tally of all the people his dad had saved. There had been that restaurant fire. Seven? Or, no, the apartment when someone left a candle on, which was why Ace wasn’t allowed near matches. Eleven. “More than eleven?”
“I hope so. I’m going to try my hardest. Be good for your mom, okay? I’ll be back soon.”
From behind him, Ace’s mom gave another sob. Ace couldn’t understand why she was sad. His dad was a hero. Ace wanted to be just like him someday.
“When’s soon?” the little voice behind Ace piped up, sounding as worried as their mom.
“As soon as we can get it contained. We don’t want the fire to spread to more people’s houses, right? We don’t want people’s things destroyed.”
Ace shook his head, knowing his sister did, too. “That would be sad,” Ace said thinking of all the treasures in his room that he’d collected—a bird feather, a shiny rock, the toy cars he and his dad would race along the banister between the downstairs and upstairs and the bathroom and bedroom when he got ready for bed every night.
“Exactly. So I’m going to go stop it.”
“You can do that?” Awe filled Ace’s high-pitched voice. He knew his daddy saved people, but he didn’t know he stopped the bad fire.
His dad smiled. “That fire is hurting the Earth as well as the people.”
Ace’s mouth formed an o-shape. “It’s hurting the outside?”
“The trees and the animals.” He nodded.
“But you’ll save them too, right?”
“I will, bud. I will.” He gave Ace’s head a gentle rub, reached behind to touch Ace’s sister’s face, then pushed to a stand.
He didn’t look at Ace’s mommy as he strode past to the door, pulling on his coat. He didn’t have his fireman coat here—it was at the station, a place Ace had been taken once and had found magical. There had been so many heroes, who all called his dad ‘Dan the Fireman’ and made him laugh.
“Dan,” his mom called, pleading.
His dad didn’t look around, his hand around the door handle. “Take care of the kids, Marissa. I will be back,” he said with conviction. Then he was gone.
Ace ran to his mom who had crumpled onto the couch, crying heavily. “Don’t worry, Mommy. Daddy is gonna save people.”
She nodded, but the tears didn’t stop as he stroked her hair with his small palm.
Ace’s sister carefully climbed onto the couch, too, curling up behind their mom, her worried eyes on Ace.
“He’s a hero,�
� he told her proudly.
“He’s not a hero if he leaves his family behind,” Ace’s mom said, angrily. “Promise me, Ace. Promise me you won’t ever do what your daddy does. Won’t become a fireman.”
“Why?” Ace was baffled. Why didn’t his mommy want him to be a hero? “He’s helping people.”
She shook her head, one hand going to his cheek. She frowned at him, but Ace hadn’t done anything wrong. “He’s not helping his family,” she corrected. “Promise you’ll always think of yourself first, okay? It’s not selfish. Leaving is selfish.”
“Why?”
“Because—” She hiccupped again.
“Because he might not come back,” Valerie said to her brother, turning her face into their mom’s shirt, her little fingers clutching it tight, her wide, wide eyes terrified.
◆◆◆
“Henley!”
Her eyes darted to Ace, widening impossibly further. She stepped away, distrustful of him now, fleeing his grasp, her hands coming up to ward him off.
“We need to get out.” Ace reached out to grab her and yank her away from the hungry embers, while her eyes darted around behind her, looking for another way out.
She was moving closer to the fire.
Another pop from dehydrating branches emitted a little shower of sparks over her. They weren’t big, they weren’t many, but instantly, those seeds latched onto Henley and, as if she were a wick, enveloped her entire frame from feet to hair with a whoosh, in an incendiary swallow, as if climbing right up her frame.
Her screams pierced through it all.
Ace reacted.
He dove toward the ball of flames that was Henley, reaching his hand into the blistering heat and biting his lip hard against the shout that wanted to release as the pain seared his hand and etched into his arm. He scooped her over his shoulder as he’d done at the motel, as his father would do, turned and ran, stumbling under the girl whose cries of agony spurred him faster, even faster than he had sprinted in the cornfields, the side of his body broiling.
Arriving on the bridge, Ace saw only in passing that the helicopter was now high overhead and rising, Nor had Sirena wrapped in his arms right underneath, keeping watch above and on the sporadically placed BSTU staff who’d come with the professor and now seemed uncertain if they should do anything. The kid with glasses was now standing on top of the car Ace had stolen, fiddling with something.
He rushed by, blurring all those problems, keeping his directive on quenching the pain smoldering and slicing through him. Flames licked in front of his vision. Henley had gone quiet, and that worried him more. Her pain would be orders of magnitude greater than his as his momentum and the sea air beyond the forest brought fresh oxygen to feed her roiling, hellish parasite. Ace whipped past it all, pausing not a second as he hoisted himself and Henley onto the balustrade.
Then, they went over the side of the bridge, plunging into the cold water.
The difference in temperature shocked his system and sluiced a fresh kind of wrath through his damaged body, making his hands clench around Henley’s body.
Air shoved from his lungs in a thunder of bubbles, and his eyes rose to the light of the surface above as they rolled back, the wafting fan of her singed hair that floated across his face fading to black.
Chapter Thirteen
The impact with the water was awakening, revamping Henley’s system like an electrical jolt from a defibrillator in a hospital room. Her ears remained muted, a mixture of residual ringing and the dampening effect of water. She opened her eyes to find only murky blue and bubbles—lots of bubbles, as her body turned over, and she tried to get her bearings.
Surface, she needed the surface.
But movement was a sharp stab of agony. Even the water was ruthless, cooling as it was after the heat that had faded as it burned through her nerves, and her adrenal gland thrust a blanket over it with an urgent and potent dose. It had all faded at that point.
She peered around, acknowledging gratefully that her eyes still worked. The smoke and fire had not destroyed that sense. Henley finally noticed light and, with horror, watched it darken. It was not a rapid sunset. She was sinking, stiffness from reluctance to move and, simply, physical damage to her body were limiting her ability to swim.
She willed her arms to move, but they didn’t respond. No, that wasn’t true. She peeked over, sight blurry, almost afraid to look. She lost a few more bubbles at the relief of seeing her hand there though the coloring was bright like a tomato, and her skin was already bubbling, even missing in some places. That hand was making a meager attempt at circular motions, her crisped fingers splayed wide, doing little to propel her upward. The other hand was unresponsive to her brain’s triggers.
That wasn’t right. With her new invention, its workings were protected from water damage. It must be that the little charge had worn out. Perfect timing, Henley thought sardonically, humor coming in to give her gallows horror an ungentle pat to the head like a child, new to interactions with dogs.
Wait, where was Buster? She knew he’d grabbed her. The Bus would plow through something as inconsequential as a fireball to get what he wanted. Why it was Henley she didn’t know. He’d come back for her, chased her down, directly into a raging forest fire. Oh God—
No. She was not thinking about that yet.
Henley twisted her body around in the water column without moving her joints or limbs much. The currents dragged the ragged scraps of her clothing across raw flesh. She didn’t dare look down to appraise that destruction. Before all rational thought had shorted out, her brain had made the connection of her grand mistake: she had still been wearing her dirty shirt from the past several days of travel—the one she’d been wearing while hidden under Jen’s totaled car, staring at Reed and Nor’s feet as the ruptured gas line dripped into the cotton.
There. Dark material swirled just below and to the side of Henley, sinking much more rapidly than she, either due to his increased density over hers, or else her pitiful limbs were doing a better job of keeping her afloat than his.
Why wasn’t he swimming? Even if he didn’t learn, he was smart and could figure out how to traverse in any fluid medium; he knew about buoyancy and friction and fluid dynamics.
She moved to reach for him with the hand that didn’t hurt, remembering as it stretched limply, almost in parting rather than rescue, that it was not functioning.
A glint caught her eye as her brain started to send more urgent requests for oxygen to her lungs, and she clamped sore lips tighter. Drifting her hand closer to her face, she made out several little holes in the black material through which wires and metal workings peeked.
As if she’d swum into a pocket of iced water, she realized her hand hadn’t run out of juice. The fire had eaten through her waterproof coating, and she’d electrocuted him.
Buster was unconscious, and she was handicapped, just like seventeen years ago.
Because, even with four years and eleven months of some of the best schooling, she had not taken into account her own experiences, having shoved them so deep in her mind when designing her project’s functionalities. BSTU’s newest, thinnest, most flexible, and cheapest waterproof material, in which she’d managed to add nerve receptors to give their tech safety and improved capabilities, was, in fact, just like any human’s skin.
Humor had wandered off, as did her resistance to death, while depression leaked in at the irony. In reality, she’d matched her design to her original hand. Her goal had always been to eliminate her handicap. Well, she’d done it, and in so doing, proved that her fabricated ‘skin’ was just as susceptible as her organic flesh at deteriorating under the vicious bite of fire.
Just like seventeen years ago… except this time, she’d hurt someone else, too.
◆◆◆
Henley was roused with the sudden rebelling of her insides, her eyes flashing open to see bright sky before spit and regurgitated saltwater leaked across her face, and she shut her lids again as she
coughed and choked on her lungs’ rejections, trying to heave oxygen into her body and instead re-inhaling her spit-up.
A hand roughly turned her head to the side, and she vomited and coughed up water a few more times, edging in short, quick inhalations between that cleared the dizziness in her head but scraped up her esophagus like knives, shredding her organs from the inside while on the outside the rough ground on which she lay scratched acidly on her charred skin.
Finally, she stopped expelling and managed to gasp a few shallow breaths that scorched her windpipe like the air was being dragged down into an abyss and using fingernails along the walls to fight the pull. “Wha—” she croaked, the word a hoarse rasp.
“Don’t talk. I can assure you that inhaling saltwater does a lot more damage to your throat than you’d think, even if my kiss of life roused thine lady like sleeping beauty. If only we had a notebook.”
The words were faintly muffled, but Henley’s hearing was returning. Henley tilted her head slightly. Blue eyes.
Nor was kneeling next to her, looking worried even as he joked, more his brother than he’d like to admit, probably.
“Not sure she’s up for writing either,” Sirena’s voice pointed out from somewhere on Henley’s other side.
Her hands! Buster. “Bu—” Like squeezing glue through a semi-solidified opening, she shoved just enough air through her larynx to get half his name out.
“Where is he? Is he in the water too? I didn’t see him.” Nor spoke fast, too fast. “I didn’t even know you had gone in. It’s lucky Stew decided to try to blow the chopper and failed miserably, forcing us all to dive off the bridge.”
Henley ignored his ramble. “Un—con—shu’.” Henley closed her eyes again, not wanting to see Nor’s face. She weakly lifted her hand.
There were audible gasps.
“I didn’t know—” Sirena cut herself off.
“Shock,” Henley explained hoping they understood that she meant he was shocked, not that they were likely shocked to see her hand without the glove that hid her secret. She painfully swallowed down the urge to cough, knowing it would be even more awful. She was trying to move as little as possible.