Chapter Thirty-Nine. Red Sky Descending #2
She could almost hear her mother’s voice, too: Keep it small, keep it hidden.
She could hear a stranger, a shriek somehow packed into a whisper: Do it better than I did.
She could hear a third woman, who’d also died in fire, who’d lost herself and then her sister, because in this path there were no easy exits and the only sure futures were written in ink on your skin, claiming you, and it kept going and going—she heard no sorrow, only the single-minded focus Pek Mun had had in life: Make them pay.
So she did. This was how it felt when fire burned through skin.
This was how it felt when it met the soft jelly of an eye.
This was how it felt when it touched flesh, caught hold of veins, spread like lightning: ancient, divine, ruination.
She had always thought of fire as something that grounded her, reminding her of who she was.
But in this form, fire was so light. Fire was like flying.
The goddess hadn’t been allowed to stretch like this in decades.
Soon the Steels were twists of black and red and silver smoking at her feet.
There would be more, but for now she had precious minutes.
She walked through the burning barricade, only faintly registering the horrified faces before her.
Why would they be horrified? She had saved their lives.
Didn’t they see that was what mattered? Would they rather be dead?
How could they see her save them and still be horrified?
Didn’t they know what the alternative was?
“Adeline?” Christina said. Whatever she saw, it rewrote her. “Tian?” she whispered, realization in the stretching vowel. Adeline turned away, bidding her to follow.
Inside the laboratory, the blood was congealing, turning the air a thick copper.
Adeline shut her eyes for a brief second, inhaling the scent, letting it turn her lungs corrosive.
Christina, who had run after her, turned aside and retched at the sight.
Adeline felt emptied of everything already.
She picked Tian up under the arms with a strength that wasn’t hers and dragged her out.
“Take her upstairs.” Adeline’s voice didn’t sound like her own. Still, red-eyed, Christina and Mavis took Tian’s weight and pulled her out of the lab.
As they left, Adeline turned a slow circle, taking in the pictures, the apparatuses, the chemicals. She snapped her fingers. A single pure white flame blossomed on the tip of her nails. She touched it to the wall.
The plaster caught and began to burn.
It spread like it had been waiting. She dragged her hands over every surface she could reach as she walked through the room. Wood, metal, paper, plastic—it all kindled in a way that it shouldn’t have, and by the time she reached the door, she was walking through an inferno that parted at her feet.
She climbed the stairs, setting the balustrades alight. She didn’t need to touch the half-constructed hall. The fire from downstairs was already rapidly following her up, chasing the oxygen. The whole building was still unfinished wood beams and strewn tarps, kindling waiting to happen.
Christina was waiting for her at the perimeter.
Adeline rejoined her wordlessly and focused on dragging Tian’s body away as the fire rapidly grew louder, but when the first muted explosion went off she looked up.
The second one went off in short succession, louder and larger, catching the sawdust clinging to the air, and suddenly the entire building was alight.
It seemed impossible, the speed at which the fire was growing, the sheer roar of it consuming any other sound. It was like the sun, like all the paper flames that connected earth to hell, and it had come from her. She had never set a fire like this. But she had always known she could.
The blare of a horn made her twist around. Likely summoned by the flames, Khaw’s car pulled up in a screeching halt on the other side of the fence. The window cranked down a sliver. “Hurry!” he shouted. Mavis was already bolting for the car, dragging Hwee Min along with her.
There were sirens in the distance. Adeline wasn’t planning on staying around to meet them.
She made for the car, hauling Tian’s body in first. Hwee Min let out a terrified sob.
Khaw was watching over his shoulder as Adeline and Christina piled in and slammed the door, and for agonizing precious seconds he was a statue in the backwash of his headlights, face white, a living image of his god. “Drive,” Adeline snarled.
His eyes flashed up to her, twin lances of pain and fury. There would be time for it once they survived this. “Drive.”
His heel slammed on the accelerator like he could grind it into the tarmac.
They were gone before the fire brigade’s headlights fell upon the blaze Adeline had left behind.
When she looked back once in the rearview mirror, however, she thought she saw two figures rising from the flames, a woman in red and a man in iron armor weeping molten metal from his eyes.
The fire unfurled into the sky, making the night meet itself.
Orange and yellow like beating wings—but then, for a moment, striped by black smoke, it was a tiger, devouring—and then it was nothing but fire.
The gods embraced, and then the smoke and the night swallowed them whole.