Burn (24 page)

“Harm. Why hasn't Zinedine come out yet? What are they doing back there?” His fingers were too hot; her wrist was burning. “Let go of my hand.”

His eyes flicked up, above her head. She wrenched her neck around. Zinedine, coming toward her, followed by Anders. Lona relaxed for a second until she saw Zinedine's face – tight and drawn, so pale she could see the blue vein along her temple. She started to stand up, but this time it was Zinedine who stopped her.

“It's okay,” she said. “Don't follow me. He's just taking me upstairs to sign a few things. I'll be back soon. I love you. It's okay.”

“No!”

“Don't,” Zinedine said again. “Don't.”

Anders led Zinedine out the door, into the bank of pods. Lona watched until she could no longer see them in the darkness, then she listened to their footsteps. They stopped early, before they would have reached the stairwell. Anders wasn't bringing Zinedine upstairs to sign some papers, and he definitely wasn't bringing her back down. They weren't about to go home. There weren't fairy tale endings. The compact was broken.

Harm wouldn't look at her. Harm was still silently sitting, looking down at the table.
Help us!
she wanted to scream at him. Last time he had helped her, with his clawing and his teeth and his uncoiled rage, but now he was just sitting there. Civilized.

“What's it going to be?” she asked him. “Erasing another part of her brain again? Destroying her memories? Are there other programs she started to build that you need help with too? Anders is putting her into a pod right now, isn't he – or getting a remmersing prod.”

“We'll still let you go, Lona,” he said. “That's what Anders told her. That you would still be allowed to leave, if she came along quietly.”

“She did what you asked her to, Harm. She fixed the Compact. She made it work like you wanted it to.”

“We feel that she's still necessary,” he said. She could tell he was quoting something – someone. These weren't Harm's words. “They want her to continue developing and testing new Paths. They don't believe her use has run out.”

“She did everything you wanted – you have to let her go.” It wasn't fair. She'd had her mother for only days. She reached again for Harm's hand, but he pulled it away.

“It's what she agreed to, Lona. It's the contract she signed up for.”

“When? When did she sign up for that? After you modified her memory to forget about me? After she thought she didn't have any reason not to sign her life away for your stupid Path?”

“I have to, Lona.” His voice was flat, expressionless, but there were tears pouring down his face in rivers, a granite statue in the rain. “I have to. It's what they want, and I have to do it for them. I can't go back to where they would send me.”

“Then don't go back!” From the room with the pods, she thought she could hear the clicking sounds that would have come from a pod being adjusted. “Help me escape – we'll all leave together.”

“I can't. I don't know how to. I thought I could but I don't know how to be that kind of happy. I don't have a choice about following these orders.”

He could learn what it meant to be that kind of happy – she was sure of it. She just needed a little more time, to show him how. But there wasn't any more time. Once Anders had placed a remmersing prod to the base of Zinedine's skull, there was nothing more Lona could do.

“It's inevitable,” Harm said through his thick veil of tears. “I can't let you help her, and I can't stop it. Unless there's an act of God, unless this building burns down, right now, nothing can change what's going to happen to Zinedine.”

It was just like last time, again. Just like six months ago when she was trapped in the room with the Architect, except that no one was going to save her or Zinedine. She'd barely met her mother, and now she was going to lose her again.

“Help!” she screamed, even though she knew no one could hear her. “Help me!”

She wrenched her arm away from Harm, and something clanked into her abdomen. Something hard and metallic. The lighter. The heavy weight of Fenn's birthday lighter, tucked in the zippered pocket of his flannel shirt. And the candle next to it, half-burned and worry-worn from all the times Lona had stroked it.

Unless this building burns down
. That's what Harm had said. Was the phrasing a coincidence, or did he know about the lighter? If he saw her light it, would he try to take it from her, or watch it burn? Was he trying to save her?

She couldn't waste the seconds to figure it out. The lighter was smooth and cold and heavy in her palm. She flipped the top open and thought of Fenn, singing Happy Birthday, of the taste of frosting rolling around on her tongue.

She lit the candle – the nubby green lump of half-melted wax – and tossed it into the air, through the door behind Harm, where Zinedine had conducted experiments on Katie. It arced, end over end, until it landed on one of the drums full of diluent, the flammable building blocks of the Julian Compact. For a second it was just a small flame, a flame to make a wish on, as it ate its way through the red plastic. “Get down!” she yelled. And then the room exploded.

She couldn't see anything – the air was black and orange, so thick she wanted to peel it away; she clawed in front of her face only for her fists to close around vapors. She moved her hands across the floor and they came up bloodied – the explosion had knocked out a window and the floor was covered in shards of glass. Something was in the middle of the room that didn't belong there – a long wooden object. It was the support beam that used to be on the ceiling. One end of it had been knocked down, slicing the room in half at a forty-five degree angle, engulfed in flames. She was on the right side of it, though. She was on the side with the door – she could escape.

Shouts poured out of the pod room, Anders's voice and Zinedine's. Lona heard her mother screaming her name. “I'm fine,” she tried to yell back, but smoke caught in her lungs and she erupted in coughs. “I'm fine.”

But where was Harm? She'd thrown the candle past him, she'd told him to get down, and now she couldn't see him. Had he been knocked out by the blast?
Had he been
– no, she wouldn't allow herself to complete that thought. She hadn't killed Harm. Not today.

“Harm?” she coughed again, and pulled the hem of her shirt up to her nose, trying to breathe through the fabric. “Harm?”

Something moved, on the other side of the fallen support beam. Harm was still alive, crouched to the floor like Lona. When he heard her call his name, he moved toward the fiery barricade, but it slipped before he could reach it, sliding down another foot along the wall.

“Crawl under it,” she croaked to Harm. There was enough room to do that now, but there wouldn't be if the beam fell much further – not with the flames licking off it the way they were. “Harm, you have to come with me now.” The smoke filled her lungs, curling around her tonsils, coating her throat, ravaging her vocal cords.

A popping sound came from overhead. The fire was eating away at whatever held the beam in place – any minute it would crash to the ground. A shower of sparks flew off a live wire swinging from the ceiling. Why wasn't he moving? The only way out was past the beam, and Harm wasn't trying to get around it. He was backing away from it; he was standing up, into the space where the smoke was even thicker.

“Lona?” Zinedine's voice again, closer, choking.

“I'm coming,” Lona called over her shoulder. She hoped Zinedine heard her; her voice seemed swallowed in the deafening roar of the flames. It was hot, so hot – now when she touched the ground it felt like putting her hand on a simmering pot. “Get out now – I'll be behind you.”

She turned back to Harm. “You have to come now,” she begged him. “Before it's too late!”

The room had completely filled with smoke; her eyes were weeping tears. She desperately sucked filtered air through her shirt. There was no point – every breath she drew was poisoned. She could barely make out Harm's outline, still standing on the other side of the barrier. Except for his hair. His beautiful red hair stood out through the thick gray of the smoke – but it wouldn't for long. The fire was closing in on him, the flames that were exactly the color of Harm's hair. If they got any closer, she wouldn't be able to see him at all. The fire would completely swallow him. He tilted his head up and raised his palms toward the sky.

“It's too late,” he said. He wasn't yelling, but she could hear him somehow, even over the scream of the fire.

“It's not too late! Just crawl under, Harm!” Her chest ached, from soot and heat. She wasn't going to be able to talk much longer. She looked behind herself for the door and couldn't see it. She was going to have to crawl out by feel. “It's not too late!”

“It's too late for me,” he said, and then he was engulfed in flames.

Sirens were getting closer; she could hear them winding through neighborhoods as she stumbled into the grassy courtyard. Empty. She'd thought there might be a crowd, gathered to watch the building burn, but in a night sky bathed orange with fire, she saw only the still swingset and the empty parking lot. And then Zinedine, running toward her, streaked with ash. “Jane!” she screamed. “Jane!”

“Mom.” The word came out like a croak, but it did come out, as Zinedine folded Lona in close, stroking her hair with calloused hands.

“Shhhhh,” she whispered. “Shh shh shhhhh.” That was the comfort sound that Touchers had made when Lona was on the Julian Path, and for the first time, Lona saw where it had come from – how the hushing murmur from the right person sounded like warm wind and security. “What happened?” she asked. “I couldn't get to you. Anders ran off and I couldn't find you.”

The noise of the sirens became deafening before Lona could answer – two red fire engines pulled into the parking lot, and a team of shouting men in reflector yellow poured out of them.

“Is anyone else inside?” one of them called. “How many people are left in the building?”

“One—” Zinedine started to respond, but Lona shook her head.

“Nobody. There's nobody left inside.”

A brief flash of pain traveled across Zinedine's face and she closed her eyes.

“Do you know how it started?” he asked. “Do you know what the source is?” Lona shook her head back and forth; the words wouldn't come out of her scorched throat.

After the fireman ran on, Zinedine didn't ask any more questions. Instead she draped something warm over Lona's shoulders and they stood silently, side by side, watching the fire fighters swarm the building, call out orders, try to contain what was already ruined.

She was exhausted, a dish towel wrung out, a bowl that had been scraped clean. Harm's face, disappearing into the flames, and the look of serenity he'd been wearing.

Dully, she realized that the warm thing Zinedine had draped over her shoulders was her own coat – the blue wool one she'd worn when she first arrived at the apartment however many days ago, and which Harm had taken from her before she got sick.

“I grabbed it earlier,” Zinedine explained. “It was hanging on a hook; I took it to keep from breathing smoke. Is it yours?” Lona nodded, pulling the material closer around her chest, smelling the chemical scent of the white foam that the fire fighters were spraying around the building. It must have acted as a suppressant; wherever it touched flames, it expanded, turning them into pillows of fluff.

“This was in the pocket,” Zinedine continued. Lona turned to look at what she was holding – a small black rectangle. Her phone. “I turned it on to call the fire department – it had been off.” She held it out and Lona took it from her, the buoyant colors on the screen making her head ache like too-sweet candy.

“We should also call—” Zinedine struggled to complete that sentence. “We should call someone. For Harm.”

Lona didn't know who to call either. There was no one, really. There were government agents who would come and pick up his body, or what remained of it – the charred skeleton the firemen would eventually uncover. And there were people who would know how to codify his death, who would know which standard-issue gravestone in which public cemetery he would be issued. There was no one to call to mourn him, though. “Jane?” Zinedine asked. “Do you know who we should call?”

“Please don't call me Jane.” Zinedine pressed her lips together as Lona tried to explain why the name she'd been so happy to have now felt wrong. “It's – it's a good name. And I'm glad it was your grandmother's. And sometime I want you to tell me all about her. It's a really good name. It's just not mine. Not my real one.”

Zinedine nodded slowly. “I guess we can't go back.”

“We can go forward.”

“We can go forward. Lona.”

Ironic. Wishing to know her name is what started this, one month ago. But suddenly, after everything that had happened, it seemed – not unimportant, but not a part of her, either. Not something that would define her. The only connection she felt with it, besides the fact that it had come from her mother, was the name's third letter, the “N”. “Jane” could have been a Path name, after all. The Pather would have been born in October, on the first day of the month, instead of on December 15. But the Pather would have lived in Sector 14, just like Lona had. And Fenn, too.

What did that mean, symbolically, she wondered. What would a numerologist say about the coincidence? Did it mean Lona would have been the same person, no matter where she'd grown up and what experiences she'd had? Would she still have fallen in love with Fenn?

“Lona!”

She looked up, confused. It was his voice. His voice, ragged and ripped in parts, coming from behind the fire trucks in the parking lot. She must have conjured it, she thought, invented the sound out of thin air. But she hadn't – it was him, looking thin and sick, bags under his eyelids. When he saw her, he let out a guttural cry, and he didn't stop running until he'd crashed into her and his arms were so tight around her she almost couldn't breathe.

“How are you
here
?” she asked. “Fenn, what are you – how did you
find
me?”

“Your phone. They traced the last time you used it, before it was turned off. They traced it to the closest tower, but it was miles away. And then there was nothing, not until ten minutes ago. The police said someone used it ten minutes ago. What happened? What is this place?”

“You've just been driving around looking for me? You've been  …  circling the radius of the tower looking for my car? How far did you drive?”

“I've driven a thousand miles in circles,” he said. “Eleven hundred, the odometer said, and I don't know how far Gamb and Ilyf and Julian have driven – we were all looking separately. I would have driven a thousand more. I didn't know what else to do.”

“What if I wasn't close by anymore? I could have been halfway across the country.”

“Then I would have driven three thousand miles to cross the country,” he said, as if the answer was obvious.

Several feet away, Zinedine looked like she was trying not to listen. She should introduce them, even as strange as these circumstances were – but she couldn't, not without knowing what he was to her.

“I thought you weren't looking for me.” She wanted to avoid his green eyes, so she could get the words out, but she forced herself to look up into them. “I thought you'd given up.”

His eyebrows were pushed together. “What are you talking about?”

“That night.” She forced herself to continue on. “The night before I disappeared. You told Ilyf not to worry about me. And when I called you, you were, um, out with Jessa.”

His face softened and he gently reached up to run his thumb along her chin. “I was driving around in Jessa's
car
,” he explained, “because Jessa was the only one who drove to the restaurant that night. The rest of us had walked, but Jessa had her car, and Jessa was nice enough to volunteer to drive me ninety miles home.”

“You drove to the
house
?”

“The second I hung up the phone with Ilyf, I told Jessa that I needed her to drive me home so that I could stand outside of the door until you got back. And I told Ilyf not to worry because I wanted one of us to have a clear head in case something had happened to you. It wasn't going to be me because I was completely out of my mind for the entire drive. When we got there, your car was already in the driveway. So I left. So you wouldn't think I was bothering you. Jessa dropped me off at my dorm.”

“Oh.” Oh. She leaned her head against his chest and inhaled. Her nostrils were too scorched, she realized. She couldn't smell the grass of his skin, not through the ash and chemicals.

“Lona, I've been terrified every minute of every day,” he said. “Can you tell me what happened?”

“I will. Eventually.” He nodded. “First, I want you to meet my mother.”