“Finally I was able to get back to my feet, although my knees were still shaking. I made my unsteady way back to the cottage. My tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth and I needed a drink of water before I was able to speak. I woke Sarah gently and told her I needed to show her something and not to be afraid. I said it was about Nick and that he was all right, but she needed to see what he was doing. And I led her out.
“When she saw flame spurting from the boat, she got wobbly herself and I needed to hold her arm to support her. But she didn’t shout for him, didn’t cry out. She let me lead her to him, trusting me that there was no reason to panic.
“We stood over him and watched him play with fire for most of five minutes before she was overcome and sank to her knees and reached into the boat to touch him. She stroked her hand over his hair and he snapped out of the trance he was in and for a moment was coughing black smoke and blinking blearily. He jumped up on a gunwale, looking embarrassed, as if we had found him flipping through a girlie magazine.
“She climbed into the boat, her whole body trembling, and took him into her arms. I descended after her. For a long time we sat together in silent conference. He told his mother no, he wasn’t hurt, it hadn’t caused him any pain at all. He told us he had been doing it for days and that it never hurt. He said he always did it in the boat, because something about the sway of the ocean helped him get going. He enumerated his many accomplishments. He could breathe smoke, blow streams of fire, and light one hand like a torch. He told us he had made little sparrows of flame and set them flying and that sometimes it seemed to him he was flying with them, sometimes it seemed to him he was a sparrow himself. I asked him to show us and he said he couldn’t, not right then. He said after he lit himself on fire it sometimes took him a while to recharge. He said after throwing sparrows—that was how he described it in sign language—sometimes it was hard to get warm, that he’d have the shivers and feel like he was coming down with flu.
“I wanted to know how he was doing it. He did his best to explain, but he is only a little boy, and we didn’t learn much, not that day. He said you could put the Dragonscale to sleep by rocking it gently and singing to it like you’d sing to a baby. Except of course Nick is deaf and doesn’t have any idea what singing sounds like. He told us that he thought music was like the tide or breath: something that flowed in and back out again in a kind of soothing rhythm. He said he’d get that flow going in his mind and then the Dragonscale would dream whatever he wanted it to dream. It would make rings of fire or sparrows of flame or whatever he liked. I said I didn’t understand and asked him if he could show me. He looked at his mother and Sarah nodded and said it was all right, he could try to teach me how to do it . . . but if either of us ever hurt ourselves, we had to stop, right away.
“The next morning my lessons began. After three days I could light a candle. In a week I was throwing ropes of fire like a walking flamethrower. I began to show off. I couldn’t help myself. When Allie and I went on one of our rescue missions, I would make a wall of smoke to create an impressive getaway. And once when we were chased by a Cremation Crew, I turned on them and ignited, made myself into a great burning demon with wings to scare them off. They ran wailing!
“How I loved having my own legend. Being stared at and whispered about. There is no drug in all the world as addictive as celebrity. I boasted to Sarah that getting Dragonscale was the best thing that had ever happened to me. That if someone came up with a cure, I’d refuse to take it. That the ’scale wasn’t a plague. It was evolution.
“We often discussed my ideas about Dragonscale: how it was transmitted, how it bonded with the mind, how it produced enzymes to protect Nick and me from burns. I say we discussed my ideas. What I really mean is I lectured her, and she listened. Oh, I did like having an audience for all my insights and theories. That’s what should be on her death certificate, you know. Sarah Storey—talked to death by John Rookwood. In a sense that’s what happened to her.
“I remember the day after I first turned into a devil and scared off a crowd of armed men. I took Sarah out to the island for a picnic and a celebratory screw. She was quiet, off in her own head, but I was too full of my own greatness to really notice. We made love, and after I lay in bed, feeling like a rock star. A rock star at last. She got up and found her jeans and dug a bottle out of a pocket, a bottle full of white grime. I asked her what she had there. She said it was infected ash. Then, in front of me, she dumped it on the kitchen counter and snorted it. She poisoned herself intentionally. She did it before I had time to scream. She knew all about how to infect herself, of course, because I had told her just how the spore spread.
“Three days later the first marks appeared across her back. It looked as if the devil had lashed her with a burning whip. I was right about the method of transmission, but for once there wasn’t any pleasure in saying ‘I knew it.’ She was dead less than four weeks later.”
15
He grimaced, holding his right wrist in his left hand. “How’s your pain?” she asked.
“It’s not as hard to talk about as I thought. It feels good to remember her, even the bad stuff at the end. Sometimes I think I’ve spent the last nine months lighting fires because it feels so good to burn things down. Like: if Sarah burned, then so can the rest of the world. Arson is almost as good as Prozac.” He went silent, thinking. “Shit. You weren’t asking about psychological pain, were you?”
“Yeah, I was asking about your wrist.”
“Oh. Uh. Quite hurty actually. Is that normal?”
“After popping the bones of the wrist out of place for a second time? Yes.” He twined the fingers of his good hand through hers. He stared across the room at the furnace, the hatch open on a square of yellow leaping flame.
“I hate a little that this feels good,” he said.
“We’re just holding each other. We’re not even undressed.”
“I shouldn’t have kissed you outside.”
“We were drunk. We were having fun.”
“I’m still in love with her, Harper.”
“That’s okay, John. This isn’t anything.”
“It is, though. It’s something to me.”
“Okay. It’s something to me, too. But we aren’t going to do anything you have to feel bad about. You haven’t been held since she died, and people need that. People need closeness.”
Firewood whistled and snapped.
“But she isn’t dead. She isn’t alive, but she isn’t dead, either. She’s . . . stuck.”
“I know.”
The Fireman turned his head to look back at her, his gaunt features drawn in alarm and surprise.
“I’ve known for a while,” Harper said. “I saw her once. In the fire. I know there’s something there, anyway, something in the furnace that you’re keeping alive. But whatever that is, it can’t be a person. It can’t be aware. Flame can’t have a consciousness.”
“The spore can. That’s how the Phoenix seems alive. It is. It’s a part of me. Like a hand. Sarah’s body burned, but the girl in the fire remains. As long as I keep the fire going, some incombustible part of her survives.”
“You should sleep.”
“I don’t think I can. Not with my wrist throbbing like it is. Besides. Maybe I don’t just need to tell. Maybe you need to hear. Before you go any further down the road you’re on and wind up killing yourself like she did.”
16
“She took to the Bright straight off. I’ve never seen anyone get it faster. Four days after she developed visible marks, she was lighting up with us in chapel, brimming with brightness and joy. You know how the ’scale can be peculiarly beautiful? Comparing Sarah to the others was like comparing lightning to the lightning bug. It was exciting, and a little scary. She had more power than any of us. She’d play the organ, and after, no one could remember their own name—they could only remember hers. For hours after we joined together in the Bright, people would drift around, talking like her, walking like her.”