I found one safe step then another, trying to reach the stairs as the broken boards wobbled under my shoes. My mom’s medicine cabinet was wrecked. The couch was destroyed. Everything I’d once known was melting away before my eyes.
At the bottom of the stairs, I saw the most horrific sight of all.
A body lay crumpled like a discarded doll, only the head visible beneath giant beams of fallen wood that had crushed her body. Her eyes were open but stared blankly, emptily—wide in shock, but showing no Glimpse.
I was too late. My mom was dead.
Everything stopped.
The hallowed face of my mother was a single fragment of peace in the hellfire. Her face, though bruised and beaten, showed no fear of death—no concern for herself, dying in the same way that she had lived. I stumbled forward, falling to my knees in front of her, trying not to look at her blood soaked shirt. I touched her open fingers but they did not move to curl around mine, her empty eyes continuing to stare, her lips parted like she had tried to utter her last words but had been cut off by the unrelenting fire.
A falling beam smashed our coffee table behind me. The chairs scattered when the ceiling panel above them crumbled. I paid no heed to any of this. It was like a tragedy film was playing out around me and I was stuck in its script. Kneeling before the broken body of my mother, I was merely an actor in a screenplay. A puppet in a show.
This isn’t how it was supposed to happen…
I was broken from my tears when part of the second-story balcony collapsed behind me, striking me in the back and hurling me forward. My hands flew up into a mask that deflected the debris from my face, but I was now perched against the wall across the room, coughing for air. I inhaled smoke. My mom’s face was already gone, now covered by what had been our ceiling. I’d seen her for the last time.
I couldn’t mourn for her any longer, not as the house was collapsing and there was still one hope left. I soared into flight over the stairs, shouting my sister’s name. I hit the floor above but had to catch myself as the wood crumbled beneath me. Alli’s room was already taken over by the flames. But I knew if she had run to hide anywhere, it would have been my room next door.
The burning had not neglected my bedroom. My dresser was toppled with my clothes spilling out in piles—likely the work of Wyck as he’d ravaged my house in his quest to defile it. All the camera lenses were knocked to the ground and shattered, thousands of dollars of my life’s savings spilled across the room.
But worse: my Great Work. As I spun, I saw that every photograph was alighted; the ones on the ceiling breaking off and fluttering like flaming snowflakes to the floor. All of the faces were blackened with holes through them, their eyes fading against the smoke. It pierced my heart to see all of them dying like the slow-burning carcasses of old friends.
I panicked and almost ran to save them. But my sister was still somewhere in the house. My Great Work was nothing.
I threw my closet door open. She wasn’t there. I stepped back and the floor shifted from under me again. Where was she? I spun to get out but found that the floor outside my room had already collapsed.
I wasn’t ready to give up. So I slammed shut what remained of my door and went to the wall I shared with my sister’s adjacent room. Even then I hesitated, though only for a second, before my fingers went flying to rip my work down, tearing the photos to pieces and letting the shreds hit the floor without so much as a glance. The wall beneath it was already hot, my fingers stained black. But I went on, slamming with my fists and digging with my claws into the already weakened panels, hoping that I could break through.
My eyes burned as ash and wood stuck to my sweaty face. An opening finally broke. It was like I had opened a furnace. I could not step inside, fire leaping through the wall at me and my scaly hands flashing once again to my protection. Still, I forced myself ahead, trying to look inside, to see if I could drag my sister out.
I saw her shoes across the room, shrouded in smoke.
“Alli!” I shouted again. But there were just too many flames to see, and the smoke only served as a precursor to the explosion that threw me off my feet.
I was standing one second, vigorously fighting to press forward, and the next I was in the air, powers struggling to catch me, my back slamming into the opposite wall. I tried to get up, but couldn’t as the smoke slowly began to seep through my lungs.
Hands grabbed a hold of me. I was pulled through the window, hit with fresh air that expelled the smoke.
Someone held me up. Wyck? No. Someone else.
I struggled to keep my eyes open, and through slits I saw that I was hanging over Callista’s shoulder. We were high in the air, the wind whirling in gusts against my face.
“I couldn’t save them,” I said. I collapsed into her arms and didn’t even try to hold back my tears anymore.
19
Sophia
With her arms wrapped around my middle and mine around her shoulders, Callista carried me across the city until I couldn’t smell the smoke or hear the sirens anymore. Thad appeared beside us, guarding the air as we went, his claws out and ready to defend.
Even after we’d landed she still wouldn’t let me go—or maybe it was me who wouldn’t? I was in a daze. I wavered between being awake and falling into sleep-like shock, where I would just stare silently, my body trembling, my hands clutching each other to keep them still.
Thad and Callista never left our sacred circle on the mountain, the same edge of the cliff where I’d first awakened with scales and claws. Neither of them spoke. Their mere presence brought me a tiny comfort.
I wasn’t a crier, and yet I’d already cried more that day than I had in my entire life before it. I’d always thought that weeping over dead people merely stretched the period of pain out longer when it should have ended when they did. It wasn’t like tears would bring anything back.
Still, I wept. I just couldn’t stop myself.
A time came when I could not cry anymore. When the tears dried, I told Thad and Callista everything that had happened. When quiet finally set, so did the sun, and we pressed close as the chilly night swept over the hills. Thad gathered enough courage to leave and get food and flashlights, Callista standing over me like a guard. Even when he returned, we continued to sit in the silence and listen as the voice of the city rose up over the cliff.
“Why are we out here instead of at the house?” I asked. The bed would have been far better than the rocks.
“It isn’t safe anymore,” Callista replied. I dusted off my hands.
“Nowhere is safe anymore,” I spat. She walked away from me to ignore the sourness in my voice. Thad came between us.
“Callista is right,” he told me. “We need to move. We can’t stay in Los Angeles.”
His voice dropped. He didn’t want to say what was coming next, but he knew he had to.
“Right now, I guarantee you they’re headed to Lodi,” he said, avoiding my eyes. “The least we can do is use that as a head start…to get away.”
“Once they have it, we can’t be here,” Callista said with insistence. “We have to leave. And we need a plan, Michael. A real one.”
I drew in a quick breath, feeling my muscles tense. I knew what they were thinking: Michael had run off and nearly got himself killed again. Ruining everything, as usual. I straightened my shoulders.
“Here’s a plan for you,” I hissed, picking at rocks on the ground. “Let’s go right in the middle of the city, and stand on top of one of the buildings, and shout the truth to everyone. Let’s make the Guardians send someone to shoot us down, and kill that person.”