Rise of the Phoenix novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Cell Forty
The lab moves Emmi to the Pyre Room, the power dies, she burns her way loose, and the man from the next cell snaps her lock; her fire pours over him and he does not burn.
They came for me at 2:09 a.m., and they brought a gurney.
I knew it was bad because they had never brought a gurney before.
Two guards unlocked Cell Forty while a technician in a white coat read my chart off a tablet.
"Tonight's the rising," the technician said. "Warden wants her in the Pyre Room by half past."
"She's not sedated," the first guard said.
"She won't need to be. Strap her down."
I had been in that room fourteen months, and I knew exactly what a strap felt like.
They pushed me flat on the gurney and cinched leather over my chest, my hips and my wrists.
The guard pulled my left arm out to check the tattoo on the inside of the wrist.
It said 40, in black ink, in a neat little font.
"Hotshot," he said, almost fondly. "Fights fires for a living, and now she is one."
He laughed at that.
I did not laugh.
I had spent six summers with a Pulaski and a fire shelter, and I hated fire more than I hated anything alive.
Then the doctors put one inside me.
It lived under my ribs, a hot coal the size of my fist.
The drip they ran into my arm every night kept it banked.
The drip was gone.
They had taken it out an hour ago to get me ready, and without it the coal had been waking up.
I could feel it turning over, stretching, listening.
The lights flickered once over the cell door.
"Hold on," the technician said, frowning at his tablet. "Grid's reading a drop."
The lights flickered again.
Then every light in Station Nine went out.
It was the kind of dark you only get underground, with no window and no crack under the door.
Somebody swore, and a flashlight clicked on and swung wildly across the ceiling.
The coal in my chest rolled over and opened its eyes.
Heat ran down my arms.
The strap on my right wrist began to smoke.
"Hey," the guard said, shining his light on my hand. "Hey, her hand's glowing."
I looked down.
My fingers were the color of a stove coil.
The leather snapped.
I tore my other wrist loose, sat up, and grabbed the guard's sleeve.
His coat went up.
He screamed and slapped at his arm and backed into the wall.
The flashlight rolled across the floor and lit the room in a spinning yellow circle.
The technician dropped the tablet and ran.
I had never hurt anyone before.
I stood on that gurney with my hand on fire, watching a man beat out his sleeve.
I felt only a wild, roaring wish for more.
That scared me worse than the guards did.
"Emmi."
The voice came from outside the cell, low and rough, with no surprise in it.
I knew that voice.
I had heard it every night for fourteen months, coming through a three-inch concrete wall.
I had never once seen its face.
"Forty," it said. "It's Cold Wall. Stand back from the door."
The guard with the burned arm lunged for the hallway.
A pale hand came out of the dark and shoved him sideways so hard he hit the wall and slid down it.
Then the man in the doorway stepped into my flickering light.
He was tall, too tall for the corridor, with black hair tied at his neck and a short black beard rimed white at the edges.
There was frost on his lashes.
Frost, inside a building where I was sweating.
His breath hung in front of his face in a cloud.
His hands were bare, and the steel lock on my cell door had a white crust spreading from the place where he had touched it.
He put one finger to the crust, and the whole lock shattered.
"I've been waiting a year to do that," Garth Oberlin said.
His teeth were chattering.
I did not trust him.
I did not trust anybody, and the coal under my ribs trusted him even less.
"Don't touch me," I said, and I raised my burning hand.
He walked straight toward it.
"Don't," I said. "Stop. I'll burn you."
"You won't," he said.
I couldn't stop it.
The fire jumped off my fingers and went up his arm and over his shoulders, and it wrapped his whole body in gold.
I screamed.
He did not.
He closed his eyes, and the shaking that had run through him since the door opened stopped.
His whole frame eased as warmth sank deep into his bones.
The fire licked at his beard and his shirt and the ice in his lashes, and none of it left a mark.
When he opened his eyes, they were grey and clear, and they were looking at me.
"Again," he said.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend