Rise of the Phoenix novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Four Floors

Emmi and Garth fight up through the bunker and free nine prisoners; outside in the snow her fire dies and Garth begins to freeze.

I pulled the fire back in, and it hurt.

Garth's whole body leaned after it.

"Don't stop," he said. "Please."

"I can't do this," I said. "I'm going to hurt somebody."

"You already did. He'll live." He took my wrist in his bare hand, and it did not feel like a hand.

It felt like holding a handful of snow.

"Backup generators come on in ten minutes," he said.

"After that, every door in this place locks again. We have to be on the fourth floor by then."

"Why do you know that?"

"Because I've been counting for a year."

That was an answer, and I didn't have time for a better one.

The corridor outside my cell was dark except for the red glow of my own hand.

I had walked it only on a gurney, looking at the ceiling.

Now I saw the doors.

Cells ran down both sides, numbered in white paint, with a slot at the bottom for a tray.

Behind every one of them, somebody was banging.

"Thirty-one to thirty-eight, and forty-one to forty-three," Garth said. "Nine people. They're coming."

"Are they safe to take?"

"They're not safe to leave."

I put my palm on the first lock.

It went orange, then white, then ran down the door in a bright drip.

The door swung open on a woman about my mother's age, pressed in the corner with a blanket over her head.

"Out," I said. "Now. Stay behind the tall guy."

She stared at my hand.

"Is that real?" she whispered.

"I'd love for it not to be."

We did it eight more times.

Garth handled the steel that wouldn't melt for me, touching the lock until it frosted and then tapping it with one knuckle.

Each time the metal shattered, and each time he swayed a little afterward.

When we reached the end of the corridor, we had nine people behind us in grey lab clothes, holding on to each other.

Two of them were barefoot.

One man was crying without making any sound at all.

Then the stairwell door opened, and a flashlight beam hit my face.

"Contact!" a guard shouted. "Vessel's loose, Cell Forty, she's burning!"

Four of them, in black body armor, with long tranquilizer rifles.

A dart hit the wall by my head.

Another struck the stone at my feet.

I put out my hand and the fire came up with a roar I felt in my teeth.

It went across the stairwell as a sheet of orange light and took the four rifles out of their hands.

Plastic stocks bubbled and went black.

The guards shouted and ducked.

I wanted to burn them all.

I felt it so clearly that I almost stepped forward.

"Emmi," Garth said, very softly, at my shoulder. "Look at me."

I looked at him.

He stood in the middle of my fire with his arms down and his eyes closed, and he was warm.

I could tell by the sweat on his forehead.

"Just the door," he said. "The door, not the men."

I burned the door.

The steel frame glowed and sagged and fell off its hinges, and the guards scrambled backward down the stairs.

We ran up through the gap with the nine behind us.

Four floors.

With every landing, the climb took more out of me.

By the third, my knees shook.

By the fourth, the fire was coming out of my hands in thin ragged ribbons, and I tasted copper.

The old coal under my ribs said something I couldn't hear.

Garth pushed open the last door with his shoulder.

Cold hit us.

We stood on the edge of a gravel lot at the mouth of a mine.

The stars were so thick they looked fake.

Snow lay a foot deep.

A row of trucks sat under a floodlight, dark, with their windows glittering with frost.

The nine people spilled out behind us, gasping in the cold air.

One of them dropped to his knees and put his face in the snow.

I laughed.

I couldn't help it.

Fourteen months, and there was a sky.

Then my fire went out.

It didn't fade.

It just stopped, and every bit of warmth I'd ever had went with it.

My legs folded, and Garth caught me before I hit the snow.

He was shaking again, hard, so hard I could hear his teeth.

His lips had gone the color of a bruise.

"Garth," I said. "You're blue."

"I know." He tried to smile, and his face cracked on it. "It was nice. While it lasted."

"What happens now?"

"I keep walking until I can't." He looked down at me. "You should go with the others. The red truck, the one with the plow."

"You'll die out here."

"Not tonight."

He was lying, and I knew it.

For fourteen months I had listened to that voice through a wall, and it had never once lied to me before.

I closed my fingers around his wrist.

His skin was so cold it burned.

"Don't let go of me," Garth said, and his voice broke on it. "Please. Don't let go."

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