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“Because when the battle comes, we’re going to be greatly outnumbered. Fire will be one of your great allies in war. You need to learn to fight while burning. ”
“Ugh. ”
“If you get in trouble, jump into the snow and start rolling. ”
I look at Sam, who has a big grin spread across his face. He is holding a red fire extinguisher in his hand just in case it’s needed.
“I know,” I say.
Everyone is silent while Henri messes with the matches.
“You look like Sasquatch wearing that suit,” Sam says.
“Eat it, Sam,” I say.
“Here we go,” says Henri.
I take a deep breath just before he touches a match to the suit. Fire sweeps across my body. It feels unnatural for me to keep my eyes open, but I do. I look up. The fire rises eight feet above me. The whole world is shrouded in shades of orange, red, yellow that dance in my line of sight. I can feel the heat, but only slightly as one feels the sun’s rays on a summer day. Nothing more than that.
“Go!” Henri yells.
I hold my arms out to my sides, eyes wide-open, breath held. I feel as though I’m hovering. I enter the deep snow and it begins to sizzle and melt underfoot, a slight steam rising while I walk. I reach my right hand forward and lift a cinder block, which feels heavier than normal. Is it because I’m not breathing? Is it the stress of the fire?
“Don’t waste time!” Henri yells.
I hurl the block as hard as I can against a dead tree fifty feet away. The force causes it to smash into a million little pieces, leaving an indentation in the wood. Then I raise three tennis balls soaked in gasoline. I juggle them in midair, one over the other. I bring them in towards my body. They catch fire, and still I juggle them—and while doing so I lift a long, thin broomstick. I close my eyes. My body is warm. I wonder if I’m sweating. If I am, the sweat must be evaporating the second it reaches the skin’s surface.
I grit my teeth, open my eyes, thrust my body forward and direct all of my powers into the stick’s very core. It explodes, splintering into small bits. I don’t let any of them fall to the ground; instead I keep them suspended, collectively looking like a cloud of dust hovering in midair. I pull them to me and let them burn. The wood pops through the flicker and hum of the flames. I force them back together into a tightly compacted spear of fire that looks as though it has sprung straight from the depths of hell.
“Perfect!” Henri yells.
One minute has passed. My lungs begin to burn from the fire, from my breath still held. I put everything that I am into the spear and I hurl it so hard that it speeds through the air like a bullet and hits th
e tree, and hundreds of tiny fires spread throughout the vicinity and extinguish almost immediately. I had hoped the dead wood would catch fire but it does not. I have also dropped the tennis balls. They sizzle in the snow five feet away from me.
“Forget the balls,” Henri yells. “The tree. Get the tree. ”
The dead wood looks ghastly with its arthritic limbs silhouetted against the world of white beyond it. I close my eyes. I can’t hold my breath much longer. Frustration and anger begin to form, fueled by the fire and the discomfort of the suit and the tasks that are left undone. I focus on the large branch coming off the tree’s trunk and I try to break that branch away but it won’t come. I grit my teeth and furrow my brows and finally a loud snap rings through the air like a shotgun blast and the branch comes sailing towards me. I catch it in my hands and hold it straight above me. Let it burn, I think. It must be twenty feet long. It finally catches fire and I lift it into the air forty or fifty feet above me and, without touching it, I drive it straight into the ground as though I’m staking my claim like some old-world swordsman standing atop the hill after winning the war. The stick totters back and forth smoking, flames dancing along the upper half of it. I open my mouth and instinctively take a breath, and the flames come rushing in; an instant burning spreads throughout my body. I’m so shocked and it hurts so much that I don’t know what to do.
“The snow! The snow!” Henri yells.
I dive in headfirst and begin rolling. The fire goes out almost immediately but I keep rolling and the sizzle of snow touching the tattered suit is all I hear while wisps of steam and smoke rise off of me. And then Sam finally pulls the clip from the extinguisher and unloads with a thick powder that makes it even harder to breathe.
“No,” I yell.
He stops. I lie there trying to catch my breath, but each inhalation brings about a pain in my lungs that reverberates throughout my body.
“Damn, John. You weren’t supposed to breathe,” Henri says, standing over me.
“I couldn’t help it. ”
“Are you okay?” Sam asks.
“My lungs are burning. ”
Everything is blurry but slowly the world comes into focus. I lie there looking up into the low gray sky at the flakes of snow sifting sullenly down upon us.
“How’d I do?”
“Not bad for your first try. ”
“We’re going to do it again, aren’t we?”
“In time, yes. ”
“That was wicked cool,” Sam says.
I sigh, then take a deep, labored breath. “That sucked. ”
“You did well for your first time,” Henri says. “You can’t expect everything to come easily. ”
I nod from the ground. I lie there a good minute or two, and then Henri extends a hand and helps me up, bringing about the end of training for the day.
I wake in the middle of the night two days later, 2:57 on the clock. I can hear Henri working at the kitchen table. I crawl out of bed and walk out of the room. He is hunched over a document, wearing bifocals and holding some sort of stamp with a pair of tweezers. He looks up at me.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
