by J. R. Rain
Once the AATM reader gem glows purple, I hold my crystal in the cloud of shimmering blue light it projects upward. The magic confirms my aura, the computer chirps, and my bank account gets lighter by $4.38.
“Thanks, Mr. Kwan. You might want to call the police.” I wave at him, smile, and walk out. “Guy must’ve been on e-meth to shoot himself in the head like that.”
I kinda feel sorry for him. Death freaks most people out.
Maybe it should freak me out too. Is it bad that it doesn’t?
How warped is it that I’m ready to twist someone’s head off because the asshole next door made that kid cry, but watching Moron One’s head pop like a ketchup packet under a car tire is borderline funny? Okay, it wasn’t so much the explosion of goop, but the look on the guy’s face.
Yeah, I guess I am a little messed up in the whole empathy department.
Sigh.
Even in this part of Philadelphia, a gunshot will trigger Transpresence calls to the police. And I’d rather avoid the hassle―especially with a bullet in my arm. Well, a bullet hole. I’m pretty sure it came out and kept going into the wall. Speaking of which, I need to get home and clean that out. Maybe I ought to dig my DNA out of the wall, but that slug could be anywhere. By the time I found it, the cops would be everywhere. Besides, I’m sure Kwan has cameras, plus he’s seen me. Not to mention, as far as anyone knows, one guy offed himself and the other guy… well, that’s a bit harder to explain, but he did shoot me first. Self-defense, right? Maybe it would wind up working out for me if they did dig that slug out of the wall with my blood on it. If anyone comes trying to bust my ass, I’ll be like ‘no, I’m the victim.’
Speaking of. I’ve never been shot before, and it surprises me how little it hurts. Nothing like the sheer agony they show in the movies.
I hurry down the block, managing to evade the notice of the small crowd that’s formed around the PEPTA bus. The Philadelphia Enchanted Public Transportation Authority’s safety stats for the year are going to take a hit. Oops. Suppose I’m doing okay. It’s been thirteen years since I’d killed anyone. On the upside, I didn’t really miss it, and I didn’t get any sort of thrill out of it this time. In fact, dragging my trash out to the curb gives me a stronger feeling of having accomplished something. And I hadn’t intended on Moron Two finding a bus. I guess that’s karma in action.
Yeah, okay, they were human beings too, and they might still have parents, friends, or relatives who care about them, but they should’ve thought of that before they shot me. I have a mother and one friend who care about me too. So, poo. And hey, maybe the guy lived. The bus wasn’t going that fast.
I give nothing in particular a raspberry as I scurry across the alley. Damn. I really hope the neighbors have settled down. If not, I will need to rely on the calming powers of sugar and coffee. A short woman with dark brown skin and a frizzy explosion of hair coming the other way gives my bleeding arm a long stare, but doesn’t risk saying anything. I guess I finally look adult enough. Then again, they did that experiment three blocks away from here a few months ago where they set a little girl loose dressed up like a lost child and filmed people’s reactions. Everyone ignored her, even when she tried approaching strangers to ask for help.
What the hell is wrong with this city?
I’ve got myself fuming again by the time I reach my building, but six flights of stairs saps my anger back to mere annoyance. I boot the door at the top, and it swings out of my way with its usual squeak. The stairs connect to the middle of a corridor around a corner from mine. I head to the right and round a ninety-degree left.
The kid from next door is out in the hall. She’s wearing a cartoon-print oversized t-shirt for a nightgown, and sitting on the floor with her back against the wall opposite her apartment, swishing her bare feet side to side. Straight brown hair covers the characters on her chest, almost reaching the floor. She swivels her head toward me and looks up, staring.
I can tell she’s frightened. The intention wafting off her is to not get hurt. She’s out here because she feels safer, less afraid of some random stranger walking by than being in her own home.
Grr.
A scowl forms on my face as I trudge over.
The closer I get, the more the girl’s fear shifts origin: me. Another feeling rises in her head. She wants help.
This is so not my problem. I just killed two men, well, definitely one. Maybe two. My night doesn’t need to get any more complicated. After giving the girl a pleasant ‘hello’ smile, I sidle up to my door and try to hold the donut bag and coffee in my left while shaking my keyring around one-handed with my right.
“You’re scary, but not bad scary,” says a small voice right behind me.
I almost drop my honestly-gotten loot. Wow, it still feels weird to actually pay for things. It’s amazing how easy it is to get away with shoplifting as a telekinetic. Collecting myself, I spin on the little kid who’d snuck up on me. “What?”
She fidgets at her t-shirt, pulling it tight around her legs, letting go, doing it again. “You’re kinda… you know, scary, but I’m not as scared of you as I’m scared of Frank.”
That must be Asshole. “Why are you out here in the hallway? It’s almost eleven. You should be in bed.”
“Frank’s gonna hurt me,” says the child to her feet. “He always looks at me bad. You’re scary but nice.” She peers up at me with a cowed posture, as if she expects me to take a swing at her. “I’m Ashley.”
I sigh, and squat down to eye level. Maybe that’ll make her less frightened of me. “Hi Ashley. I’m Brooklyn. If that man is hurting you, you should Teep the Police.”
“I’ll get in trouble. I’m not allowed to use the Transpresence machine.” Ashley bites her lip and stares once more at the rug. “He hasn’t like hurt me yet, but I hate the way he looks at me.” She shivers.
We stand in silence for a few seconds. The guy probably resents having a kid around when he’s trying to get Tracy naked.
The child lifts her gaze to me again, a nervous smile on her face. “You wouldn’t be scared of Frank.”
“No, probably not.”
She stares at me with an odd intensity, almost awe. “What will you―?”
“Ash?” The kid’s bottle-blonde mama sticks her head out the door of apartment sixty-five. At least she’s managed to avoid a facial bruise this time, though she didn’t quite get all the dried blood out of her nostril. “What are you doing out there? You scared me to death! Come on, get in here.”
“Bye,” whispers Ashley, waving to me.
“Sorry about that. I hope she wasn’t bothering you,” says Tracy.
“No. She wasn’t. What’s bothering me is how in need of a decent meal she looks.” I stand from my squat and fix my dear neighbor with a stare. Her thoughts swim with worry and shame. The look on my face must be hot enough to melt steel, because she ducks out of sight as soon as she tugs Ashley inside.
Why was that kid staring at me like that? Oh, probably mystified by the bullet wound in my arm. And dammit. My coffee’s getting tepid. I duck inside my unit, lock the door, and kick my flops into the corner. After padding into the kitchen, I enjoy my self-treat while there’s still some heat left in the brew. Screw it. This apartment came with a rune oven. A minute on purple, and the java will be steaming again.
I stick the coffee in the little oven above my stove and tap the violet crystal on the console before hurrying to the bathroom. They say the kind of magic those things throw off will cause phosphorescent skin mold if you stand too close to them, but I don’t believe the conspiracy nuts.
In the bathroom, I fish a box of adhesive bandages and some alcohol out of the medicine cabinet. How much can it hurt to clean out a bullet wound? Oh, drat. The stick-on bandages are probably not going to be enough for this. Sigh. I’m going to be pissed if I need to go to the hospital. They get so invasive about gunshot wounds. After removing my sweatshirt and dropping it on the floor, I lea
n my arm up to the mirror… and blink.
Blood smears in trails down to my wrist, but I can’t find a hole. A twist gives me a look at my tricep, where the shot hit me, but there’s no wound there either, merely more smeared blood.
Whoa. This is too tweaked.
Oooh, wait. I bet, Mr. Kwan’s a Lifemage, and what I assumed to be stunned staring had been meditation. Yeah. That has to be it. I protected him so he healed me. Great. What the heck is a Lifemage doing managing a convenience store? Well. Enough with that.
I have a date with a doughnut.
the call came in at 1:07 p.m. the next afternoon.
A fifty-two-story hotel built almost a century ago decided to go all Roman candle. Is it bad of me to welcome the escape from a crew of guys telling me for an umpteenth time how striking my dark sapphire eyes are against my paper-white mug? Or that I’m too delicate and pretty to be a firefighter? At least the catcalls stopped a year ago after I threw Lamar out of his chair while arm wrestling.
By 1:12 p.m., I’m suited up in full regalia and humping it up the stairs behind my fire-buddy Jason Dunn. He’s been with the brigade seven years now, signed on soon after turning eighteen. His stationhouse is across town from mine, but we run into each other often enough. I suppose that’s a bad thing since us meeting technically means someone’s shit is burning to the ground.
There’s still a bit of ‘protect the girl’ going on, as the lieutenant has sent us to the twenty-ninth floor to do room checks and make sure none of the guests are sticking around. The flames are chowing down on hotel between the thirty-first and thirty-eighth, advancing toward the roof. Fire tends to burn upward much faster than it goes down.
Being under the burn leaves the stairwell relatively clear, though the stink of burning plastic and wood is strong. A handful of civilians scramble down past the line of yellow-coated firefighters. Pair by pair, we break off and enter floors. Most of these guys are from other station houses; this burn’s pulled in every engine within eighteen miles, plus a few Hydromancers providing helicopter support.
A surprising percentage of victims tends to ignore alarms. I’m not sure if it’s excessive fire drills at work that get them thinking of the flashing lights and bleeping as an irritation instead of ‘get the hell out so you don’t die.’ Maybe humanity has simply reached the point where large numbers of people really would rather snuff it in a burning building instead of miss five minutes of reality TV―or whatever else someone inside a hotel room at one in the afternoon would be doing.
Word comes over the radio in my helmet that a group is trapped on the fortieth floor, close to the top of the fire, like sausages in a frying pan. Three lieutenants and a handful of chiefs direct firefighters by name, arranging a coordinated attack to push the fire away from a possible rescue point. They’ve got three Hydromancers on site now, all of them redirected to hammer the floor directly under the endangered civilians in an effort to buy time.
Since our names aren’t mentioned, Dunn and I continue heading for our assignment at the twenty-ninth. I hate being coddled. Of all the responders on scene, I’ve got to be the least nervous in here. Almost all of them are terrified inside. Any human being would be. It’s natural. What sets us apart from the average citizen is we’re willing (and able) to set that terror aside and charge into an inferno to get as many survivors out alive as possible.
Only, for me, it’s different. I’m not the least bit scared. I’m more scared of not being scared, if that makes any sense. Being in a burning building gives me the eerie comfort that I’m exactly where I am supposed to be. That whole permanent sense of unease I mentioned before? Yeah, it’s gone inside a fifty-two-story inferno. Then again, I only get that gnawing irritation in silent calm, and those two words don’t exist in a place like this. Nothing about a burning hotel is silent or calm. Between the constant bleep-buzz of the alarm, the distant roar of the conflagration a few floors up, the thunder of helicopters, and random breaking sounds, it’s a chaotic mess.
The radio’s an unintelligible chorus of firefighters and bosses trying to shout over each other. Dunn and I have a buddy channel. If we talk on it, it’ll auto-mute the general broadcast so we can hear each other. Critical for life-and-death reactions, especially when two lieutenants are angling for captain next year and trying to be Commander General Hero over the open channel.
For the most part, idiots like that tend to get ignored. We do what we need to do when we need to do it, and if Lieutenant Big Head gets too far out of line, there’s usually a captain around to knock them down a peg.
Jason ducks through the door at our floor. The air inside is hazy. He hesitates a second. Hmm. The fire’s picking up speed.
“Uh oh. Guess it’s not as clear as they thought,” he says on our channel before switching to the broadcast and yelling, “We got smoke on twenty-nine. Heads up on Thirty.”
“Roger,” says another man.
“I got left,” I say.
We advance down the corridor, booting open doors one by one. The hotel’s system has released all the magnetic locks with the fire alarm activated, but every so often, there’s a malfunction or an idiot tenant who’s tripped the deadbolt. My third door has such an idiot.
A good, solid punt bashes the door in.
“Holy shit,” mutters Dunn.
“What?” I send over the radio before yelling, “Fire Department, get your ass out of here, now!”
Bed’s unmade, wisps of black smoke puff out of gaps in the drop ceiling. Shit, the fire has to be on the thirtieth by now. I can feel it chewing right overhead. We don’t have a lot of time before this floor becomes a broiler.
“Fire’s moving down,” I say over the radio. “Black smoke seeping out of the ceiling on the twenty-ninth.”
“Copy that. Yeah, we see it,” says the same man who’d ‘rogered’ Dunn before. “Fireball moving up the hallway. We’re not going to be able to get to the east side.”
“Come on, Amari, move your ass,” yells Dunn.
I spin to check the bathroom. Naked fat guy lying in bloody water, wrists slashed. “Got a body here,” I say over our private channel. “He’s already checked out.” While hoofing it to the next door on the left, I add, “Suicide, not fire.”
“Poor fuck.” Jason’s five rooms ahead of me since none of his doors wound up bolted.
Yeah. This poor guy’s first day as a ghost, and the place he chose to haunt is probably going to be torn down. While wondering what becomes of ghosts when their buildings are demolished, I make short work of a few doors before a heavy thud comes from the hallway outside.
“You okay?” I yell, rushing out of another empty room.
Jason punts a door again. “Bolted.” He pounds on it, yelling, “Fire department. You have to get out!” He kicks it a third time, but the door holds.
“Move!” I run into a stepping side-kick that almost takes the door completely off its hinges. It flies open and embeds in the wall.
“Mother of fuck.” Dunn stares at me. “How did you do that?”
“Uhh, Taekwondo classes?”
Before I can steal his room, a woman’s scream comes from a good way down the hall.
“Shit,” I say. “I got it.”
I sprint toward the shouting woman, sailing past a four-way intersection and an elevator area. Copious billows of inky smoke swell out from the seams in the metal doors. Shit twice. That’s not good. We’ve got minutes before this floor’s glowing.
“This is Drake. The thirtieth is gone. Fire everywhere. Twenty-nine, stay alert. It’s about to get warm down there.”
“Copy,” I say over the radio.
The screaming leads me to a door on the left three-quarters of the way down the length of the post-elevator hallway. Heavy, sooty smoke seeps between gaps in the drop ceiling tiles. The door opens with ease, and I barge in on a bone-thin woman tied down to the bed with bright red nylon straps. She’s topless, and it’s hot. Not that kind of hot.
The kind of hot where her edible panties have melted and patches of wall are blackening.
A man lays face down beside the bed with a syringe still sticking out of his arm. Drug paraphernalia is all over the table between the two beds. As soon as I look at Mr. Needle, I can tell he’s dead. Zero whispering of any sense of thought in that head.
She screams, thrashing at the restraints. “Help!”
Yeah no shit, lady, why do you think I’m here? “Stay calm. You’re gonna be okay.”
I rush over and grab the sex-shop tie-down. Tiny padlocks secure wrist cuffs, but a good yank rips them away from the part that goes around the mattress. Geez, cheap. As panicky as the woman is, I’m shocked she didn’t get loose already. Then again, she’s maybe eighty pounds. Meth’s a shitty way to meet your maker. If you’re gonna buy a ticket to hell, don’t go coach. I rip the chintzy restraints off and scoop her up. She’s probably a user as well, prominent ribs, looks thirty going on fifty, and I barely register the weight of carrying her.
“Luis!” she shouts.
“Sorry, ma’am. Luis is already gone.” I pivot to carry her feet-first out the door, and haul ass to the stairwell access at the end. “Dunn, where you at?”
“Be there in a minute, checkin’ all the left side rooms you slacked off on.” His voice conveys a grin, so I don’t bite his head off.
“Got a live one here. We need to get her out.” I set the woman on her feet.
She streaks down the stairs as soon as I let go. Shit, lady. I don’t know what’s down there… I’m about to yell at her to wait, when a tremendous crash comes from behind me, shaking the floor. It feels like the entire hotel sways from the impact. I raise an arm to shield my facemask from a brilliant orange flash.
“Ugh,” says Dunn over the radio. “Fuck. I’m hit.”
“Jason!” I shout.
A second or two later, the flare fades, revealing a good portion of ceiling has caved in. Huge blocks of concrete slab decorate the hallway, and fire glows from most of the open doorways. The world above me has become a scene straight out of Dante’s Inferno. Luminous clouds of fire shimmer from bright to dark orange, swimming around each other like living creatures. I stall in my tracks, mesmerized by the danger, the beauty. Only the rasp of breath in my mask reaches my ears; the rest of the world has become silent.