5. Olivia #4
The drop is short and fast and the heat comes up to meet me before I even land.
A wall of it, the most heat I have ever felt concentrated into a single rising wave — and then I hit the surface.
It is not water. It does not yield smoothly.
The crust is solid and cracks under my weight in dark, fractured pieces that tilt and bob and shift around me.
Through the cracks: the glow. The deep, moving orange-black beneath.
And I fall into it.
The heat presses in from every direction.
And the crown hums.
I feel the magma. I feel the heat of it like the worst summer of my life, amplified, insistent, pressing against every surface of my skin — but it doesn't devour me with pain.
The crown filters it, takes the worst of it, keeps the equation on the livable side of the line.
The crust floats and cracks around my legs and I am floating in liquid fire .
Above me, Varketh at the platform's edge, looks down, an amused smile decorating his ugly face.
He chuckles. "You understand. This changes nothing. What did you hope to accomplish?"
I look up at him.
“You’re right,” I tell him. “You’re totally right. The magma cannot hurt me…”
So long as I wear the crown.
I raise my hands.
I watch his eyes follow the movement. Watch them track as my fingers find the Ember Crown — find Relic 1, find the thing that Kaelor and I won together, the bond made physical, the warmth-beneath-my-skin, the heat pattern at my temples that has been telling me all round that I am not alone — I take hold of it with both hands. A solid grip.
My eyes narrow on his. “So long as I wear the crown.”
His eyes go wide as he realizes what I’ll do.
He starts moving. But he’s not fast enough.
I yank the crown from my head.
Everything the crown was doing — all its protection — stops.
Not gradually. Not by degrees.
Instantly. Completely. The buffer gone, the filtration gone, the quiet hum of the relic against my skin gone, the protection gone, and the magma is right here, it was always right here, I am standing inside it?—
The pain doesn't build.
It smashes into me at its full size, immediately, completely, every nerve ending I have discovering simultaneously and all at once that this is happening, this is real, this is fire ? —
I know about burns. I have dressed burns.
I have held the hands of burn patients at three in the morning and spoken calmly and kept my face neutral while charting things I won't share here, and I knew, in the abstract way you know things that haven't happened to your own body yet, exactly what fire does to tissue, exactly how fast it works, exactly what the stages of it feel like according to the people who survived them.
I thought I knew.
But I did not know.
I did not know at all.
It is not like any other pain. Pain is localized, directional — it comes from somewhere, it points to something. This has no source and no direction. It is simply everywhere, simultaneously, all at once, the entirety of every nerve ending I have concluding the same thing at the same moment:
Burning, burning, BURNING ? —
I throw the crown.
I throw it up and out with everything I have left, watching it arc against the orange sky. It lands somewhere on the platform with a sound like a bell being struck — one clear, impossible note, pure and bright above the roar of the volcano.
I’m not sure if the relic will reset with me or not. And I don’t want to take the risk. I want it here when I return.
With my mate. My true mate.
Varketh throws himself into the magma and wades toward me.
The magma barely registers on him. I can see it, the difference between my reaction and his, his species-deep heat tolerance absorbing what's killing me like a minor inconvenience.
His expression is not angry, it's something worse: determined.
The face of someone who has decided to save me from myself .
I swim.
It's the only word I have for it. Thrashing might be more accurate. The crust breaks around every movement and the material resists and yields in turns and the pain is — the pain is —
As a nurse, I know that burn patients describe a point at which the nerve endings simply stop.
When the damage goes deep enough, the pain messaging system shuts down, and for a short time there is a terrible, merciful absence.
I know this. I am waiting for it. I am cataloguing the stages of what's happening to me with the clinical precision of a person whose professional knowledge is currently the only thing keeping her from complete dissociation?—
He reaches for me.
I pull my arm back. His hand closes on air.
I kick off against the magma's surface. Winding through the cracks.
It doesn't move like water but it moves.
I put two yards between us. The pain is extraordinary.
It fills every available frequency and leaves no room for anything else, no room for thought or strategy or anything except the pure animal certainty that this is temporary —
Please, this has to be temporary.
I will reset, I will reset, I WILL RESET —
His hand closes around my wrist.
He pulls.
God, please no. The only thing worse than burning to death is being dragged from the magma still alive and forced to consent to end it… and to have him use what remains of me any way he likes.
I go under.
Not all the way. My arm and the side of my face and the world becomes orange-black and roaring and every nerve that was screaming goes to something past screaming, something in a register I didn't know existed, and for one long terrible moment there is nothing in me that is capable of language or thought or strategy, there is only the magma and the heat and the absolute, animal necessity of?—
He pulls me up.
I kick him. My heel connects with something and he releases me with a sound of surprise.
I pull away, flailing. The pain is winning, the pain is taking over.
Please, God, please end this! End me!
He reaches for me again.
He is close. I can see his face over the shimmering heat.
And there is something in it — something I didn't expect and don't have the bandwidth to properly process — something almost like admiration, almost like recognition, almost like I see you — but it doesn't matter.
It is too late, the dark is already coming?—
It comes from the edges first.
Please. Yes. Take me.
Like the edges of a photograph curling. The orange-black world narrowing at the periphery, the heat still present but the pain beginning, mercifully, to fall below the frequency I can hear. The nerve endings. They can only carry so much for so long before the system shuts down in self-defense.
The dark comes in.
It comes fast. Faster than I thought. Faster than anyone told me.
The last coherent thought I have is: Oh. At least it's quick.
And the thought after that is: him.
Just him. Just the shape of his face, the gold of his eyes, the weight of his hand in mine. The way he smiles when he doesn't mean to, barely there, something I've had to learn to look for.
And then there's nothing.
And the dark is the most beautiful thing I've ever felt.
Fade to black.
“Ten.”
Cold.
Blessed cold.
That's the first thing. Not the absence of pain — the presence of cold. Pressing against every surface of me as if he knew exactly what I needed.
I press my cheek against the glass.
“Nine.”
The cold moves through my skin instantly. I hold completely still and let it happen — let it reach every place that was fire, let it say that was then, this is now — and I breathe, and I breathe, and I breathe.
My hands go to my arms.
I turn them over in the pod's pale light. Both of them. My wrists, my forearms, the backs of my hands, the insides of my elbows. I examine them the way I examine patients — systematically, clinically, starting with what I expect to find and cataloguing the absence of it.
Nothing.
No burns. No blistering. No signs of the thing that just happened to me — none of the stages I would chart, none of the visual evidence, none of the damage.
Perfect skin.
Not healed skin — not the gradual regrowth of a body doing its best to recover.
Remade skin. The reset doesn't just stop the damage, it rewinds it, takes everything back to the original file, restores from backup, and the version it restores is the complete, unmarked, pre-Games Olivia who exists somewhere in the Games' data, who will apparently never scar regardless of what happens to her.
“Eight.”
I start laughing.
It's not entirely sane but I allow it. Small and compressed, barely more than a breath, it carries approximately sixteen things I don't have words to sort. The relief. The absurdity.
I check my legs.
My face. The faint reflection in the glass confirms I look exactly as unhinged as I feel.
The cheek Varketh hit: nothing.
All present and correct and accounted for.
What I wouldn’t give to take the Malquarans’ medical technology back with me.
“Seven.”
It worked.
I get to my feet.
The pod hums, steady and cold, the terminal chamber holding its breath in the grey light of a reset cycle.
I look up.
Kaelor.
“Six.”
He’s pressed against the inside of his pod with his whole body leaning forward and both hands flat against the glass, hammering in a steady, furious pattern. Even from here — even through the pod wall and the dim light and the distance — I can see the state of his eyes.
Bloodshot. The rage is the kind that comes from helplessness — from being locked inside a box while something you couldn't stop was happening somewhere you couldn't reach.
I know that kind.
I've been on the other side of it.
The hammering stops.
He goes completely still.
His eyes move to me. The rage shifts — doesn't disappear, doesn't diminish, but reroutes, redirects into something that isn't rage at all, something raw and searching that lives just underneath it.