I reach for it without really meaning to. Without conscious thought.
“I feel… strange.” Charade yawns, ending in a smoke-induced coughing fit.
Did I just siphon from him?
Glow flares to life around us, darkening the stacked walls as much as it lights them up. The fire has arrived, crackling and burning in our faces. We can’t stay here.
The new energy soothes my cracked skin, the soft tissue un-bruising as my cells repair the damage. But now that I know that’s possible, I’m not sure what the right thing is to do. I can take more energy from Charade, leaving him as vulnerable as I had been, or I can pull back and throw myself on his mercy. Neither option gives me comfort.
“Together?” Charade reaches his hand out, palm up. I wrap my fingers around his, and his mouth ticks up into a crooked grin.
I roar back at the fire as I roll to my feet, aided and anchored by Charade’s strength. He hands me a soft, malleable rectangle of fabric, silky and slick, strangely cool to the touch in the face of the heat. He stretches his own piece wide and bring it over his nose and mouth, then rush to fit my own into place.
Arm in arm, we navigate the maze of stacks, racing the ticking clock if we are going to escape the blaze. Knowing thateven if the fire doesn’t flash over, the roof wasn’t made for this kind of heat.
There aren’t many openings along the walls of the production floor. It’s like the stomach of some mammoth beast. We duck as a breaker box on our left erupts into a shower of sparks, sizzling as the circuits fried.
“There,” Charade grunts. The haze is clearer up ahead, the air lighter. As we run together, the faint outlines of a four-foot by four-foot ventilation opening comes into focus, crisscrossed with a metal grate.
“No!” We hammer with our fists, but the locks hold firm.
“Can’t you do something about this?” Charade asks.
Pressing myself against the grate, I breathe in the sweet, cool night air beyond.
“I’ve seen you do things like this before—burning, pushing. Melt the bars.”
“I’m exhausted,” I admit. “My powers need an energy source, and I’m tapped out. I can’t create energy, just manipulate it.”
“The fire?”
I swallow, shaking my head. “Fire’s unpredictable. It’s combustion, fusion. Taking that kind of energy into my body is reckless. I don’t know if I can contain it.”
I would burn up from the inside out, my skin charring and falling away, until the only thing left of the great Checkmate would be my flame-retardant suit.
“There’s something else,” I gasp. “But it’s new.”
“How new?”
Ten minutes ago new. “I’ve only done it once, and I don’t think you’ll like it.”
“Do it,” he says. “Get us out.”
I feel him like a pulse in that darkness, thrumming with life. Power. I don’t need to touch him to sense it. Now that my senses are open to it, the power calls to me again and again.It’s intoxicating. Deadly. The source of him is spice and fire. It tingles along my tongue like cinnamon.
I pull at it softly at first, testing my limits and his. He sags a little next to me.
“Hurry, Checkmate. The smoke…”
It’s not the smoke.I’m not sure if I said the words aloud, but he must have felt them anyway. He turns to look at me fully, his mouth setting into a grim line of resolve.
And I draw upon him in earnest.
My eyes close as it washes over me. Like ecstasy, warm and languid, spreading throughout my nerves a hundred miles a minute, branding my corneas with starlight.
I am changed with it, newly forged with it. Full to the brim and untouchable.
When I open my eyes again, Charade is on the ground, inhaling dirt and rust and burning fumes. Breathing, but weak. The feeling sours in my stomach.
