“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Cormac shrieks. The whites of his eyes burn. Soot smears his face. “That thing—”
I whisper, “Find someone to help,” and the Grace tosses their head and disappears into the blazing halls. Cormac stares at me, and I hiss, “Get your ass up,” and he’s with me.
“Why didn’t it kill us?” he rasps.
“I don’t know,” I lie and pull him toward the door.
There’s something awful building in my stomach, a pounding in my head like Seraph is clawing through, but I get Cormac into the hall. The flames are as tall as a person, and it’s impossible to breathe without hacking. Cormac wrenches himself out of his jacket and presses it against my mouth. I shove it back at him, he needs it more than I do, but he takes one half to block the smoke and shoves the other against me again, and I let him.
We stumble through the back door.
Dozens of people are out here. It’s chaos. Salvador smashes a window on the other side of the courtyard and boosts someone through, into the safety of a strange building. Sadaf shouts at Sarmat to hold someone down while she cuts clothing away from a festering burn.
People are alive. This is my fault, but people are alive, God, they’re alive.
I get two steps into the courtyard before the Grace dies.
I feel it in the Flood, in my skull. My knees give out from under me. Cormac stumbles, trying to catch me under the arms, but he’s too late. Vomit wells up in my throat. I can’t take down my mask to throw up, it’ll show my face, I can’t—
“Benji?” Cormac whimpers.
I snatch his jacket.
“Shit,” Cormac says, “Nick! Nick!” I hold the jacket like a shield and barely pull down my mask before I vomit. My jaw opens so far it hurts, and the tear across my cheek strains. Something big comes up, and I have to get it out with my tongue, and it falls into the grass, wet and heavy and way too big. “Nick, where are you?”
Two sets of hands bring me to my feet, around my waist and under my arms. I cling to the jacket, vision blurring. Acid burns the back of my tongue.
“You’re fine,” Cormac says while I work my mask back up. “You’re okay.”
I slam the jacket against Cormac’s chest to get it out of my face, and the first thing I see is Nick—to my left, our sides pressed together, holding me tight. Then he lets go. He’s in front of me, climbing through the window, holding out his hands for me. Salvador boosts me through and says, “Glad you made it, kid.”
“Sit,” Nick says, a hand hovering over the back of my neck. Like he knows I thought, for a second, of running back in. “Now.”
I collapse against the wall and slide down. This building—a bank, I think?—is full of wide-eyed, fire-red kids, checking on their friends or lying on the floor, eyes closed. Some cry and some are too shocked for tears. Some have marks from bullets, blood soaking their clothes and hands. Lila, a girl with a cane, has found a first aid kit in the back room and is going around with what little supplies she has, picking up the work Sadaf can’t manage.
Nick says, “Are you okay?”
For the first time, I look down at myself. My skin is red from the heat and shimmers with sweat. Ash cakes my clothes. Blisters are starting to form on the backs of my hands. Parts of the soles of my shoes really have melted, and it looks like the hems of my jeans were singed. I toe off one of my sneakers to find the bottoms have stuck to my socks through a hole in the padding.
Nothing too bad, considering. I didn’t even notice, but I can’t tell if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
I decide on, “I’m fine.”
Nick’s hair has come out of the bobby pins. Strands fall across his sweat-slicked forehead. He’s just as much of a mess as me, singed and overheated and exhausted.