She didn’t hate me. Okay.
I was breathing too fast. Wood shavings and paint thinner and something like sulfur filled my nose; there wasn’t enough air. I wedged the crowbar into the padlock—but the bar slipped from my hand and clattered to the ground. I bent down to pick it up again—I could barely stand to tear my eyes from Diana for a second—when Ari shouted and I turned.
Cal stood in the doorway to the woodshop. He had his silver lighter in one hand and a bottle of paint thinner in the other.
“Give me the key!” I yelled. It was hard to hear words, and I didn’t think it was just me; the flames had gotten louder, the burning more intense.
Cal started walking toward us and I looked at Diana. “It’s okay, it’s okay, we’ll get you out—”
“Markos, no—you’ve got to get out of here—”
“I’m not leaving without you.”
Cal stopped a few feet away and put the can down. He didn’t say anything. I didn’t look too closely at his face—there was something strange happening with his eyes—and I didn’t let myself think of anything except that he had the key.
“Hurry up hurry up! The key!”
“I’m not under a spell anymore,” Cal said.
Diana sucked in a breath and I turned to look at her. Which meant I missed the moment that Cal picked up my dropped crowbar; missed him winding up and swinging; saw nothing but Diana’s wide-eyed panic before the pain hit and the whole world turned black.
“Cal, no!” I shouted, but he’d already swung. The crowbar hit Markos’s head solidly, straight on, and he collapsed. Cal dropped the crowbar and covered his eyes with both hands, pressing the lighter into his eye socket. Markos’s body lay unmoving on the ground, and Diana knelt behind the cage and whispered to him. Spots of fire licked at wood and walls.
“Why’d you do that?” I asked.
“Because I couldn’t before,” Cal said into his hands. “And it’s his fault that I can remember.” He said the word is if it tasted bad.
My heart felt strangely light, beating its way out of my chest, and the room pitched sideways as I tried to breathe normally through the smoke. Something was seriously wrong with Cal. But more importantly, I needed to open the cage and get Diana and Markos out before the fire spread.
“Cal . . . the key . . .” I said, keeping my eye on the crowbar in case he came after me next.
Cal looked up.
His eyes . . .
He looked so much like Markos, only shattered. Like behind his eyes, a cornered animal peered out instead of a person.
He tried to take a deep breath but it got caught in his throat and he gasped. “I used to be angry,” he said. I couldn’t even tell if he knew who I was, or if he understood what he was saying. “Angry about my dad, about everything—but I haven’t been angry in nine years.” He blinked and whatever wild thing had taken up residence inside him shifted, pushing its way to the front, all rage and blindness. “Do you know what that’s like? No emotions? It’s not being able to breathe, but also not even remembering what breathing even is. But now I can, only it’s—too much. Too big. You understand?”
I didn’t try to answer. Something caught his eye on the wall—the security monitor, with its dozens of camera angles throughout the store. Most were dark, but the view of the door had enough streetlight to make out two people walking through the propped-open door. One of them had a long swinging coat and short hair.
Cal made a noise, something between a cry and a scream, and ran out of the burning shop.
“Ari,” Diana said. “The fire.”
I snapped into action, grabbing a dropcloth from underneath one of the machines and using it to smother the fires—the two-by-fours and piles of scrap. The flames hadn’t joined together into one big blaze yet. I felt cold, even, but I suspected that was some sort of shock, the sweat on my skin chilling like shards of ice.
It took me a second to realize that as I was running from fire to fire, Diana kept saying my name. “No—Ari. No,” she said. She knelt behind the cage as close as she could to knocked-out Markos, but she looked up at me with the saddest expression I’d ever seen.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll get out. Echo’s here now. She’ll find us. It’s okay.”
“No, Ari. The fire. Not this fire.”
“The fire?” The only other fire I could think of was the fire that burned down my house when I was eight. Diana never brought it up. We never talked about it. It was in the past.
“I came here to try to find Markos,” Diana said. “The door was open so I walked in. I could smell the kerosene or oil or whatever this is—found my way back here—Cal was dousing the place. I tried to stop him and he freaked out. Put me in here.”