by Jade Alters
“You know, in some part of you, that it wasn’t your fault.” What’s more infuriating than having someone tell me something like that about myself is that he’s right. How can he know that? I find myself hesitant to think on it too hard. Lee seems to hear more than just what I say.
“And that means…the rest of me knows…it was,” I tell him. The truth just so happens to be the strongest wall I can put up around myself. I have to block him out. My parents walked out, maybe hours ago. I’m not about to invite a stranger from the dark to walk in.
“Listen, Cece-”
“I never told you my name,” I cut in. I feel Lee’s heart freeze mid-beat. I can hardly handle what’s in my own chest - this is too much. I withdraw. I pull myself back hard enough to leave Lee’s ember floating freely, alone in the dark. “Goodbye, Lee.”
“Please, let me-”
Cece
Sutter Hospital, San Franciso
It’s a struggle, but I pry my eyelids open to escape the Soul of Fire. I find them three times as heavy as when I let them close. I shake myself to stay awake. I’ve got to stay awake, and away from psychic fire-people who just want to “help”.
I shuffle my shoulders. I sit up on the edge of my bed. I wait for the heaviness to leave, for my faculties to resharpen. My vision, however, remains fuzzy. My arms thunk down beside me like I’m clutching lead weights. My eyelids flutter with each blink. The shutters of my consciousness threaten to latch closed every time. Even when I shake my head, sleep tries twice as hard to pull me under.
Then I remember. Just before I fell into the Soul of Fire again, just after Mom and Dad left me here - I lost it. I kicked and screamed. I thrashed. I probably cooked the salt right out of my IV bag. The doctors switched the bag out for another one to calm me down. That new bag is still on the metal tree of hooks hanging over me. Diazepam, it says on it. A fancy name for Valium, if I’m not mistaken. I don’t care to admit to most people how familiar I am with the occasional abuse of sedatives. After all, high school was a long time ago now.
I focus everything I’ve got into crossing my free arm across my body, to the one with the needle in it. I grasp my line of drugs with as much strength as my doped up knuckles have. Any other day, I might have left it in. I might actually take the coma, over staying awake with the consequences of my temper. That is, if a shot of the good stuff wasn’t going to send me straight to a black eternity full of talking candles. I can’t decide which world is crazier, but I’d rather be in this one for now. I tear the long, hollow rapier out of my vein.
I survey the door with my groggy eyes to make sure no one’s watching. Once I’m remotely sure, I take the needle tip off the end of the IV line. I hold it upright so the drugs don’t spill everywhere while I skim the steel swinging table for something to plug the line. I snort at how much they’ve underestimated me - the cap is still right there. I screw it back on the line before I tape it to my arm. Not a permanent fix, but it will buy me some time. Now I just have to sell my calmness. Knowing my own track record better than any police report or juvenile record, to say it makes me sweat does my throbbing heartbeat no justice.
“Ms. Ford,” a voice comes into the room a second ahead of the speaker. He startles me, but I do everything I can not to flinch. I slump over on the side of the bed like the drugged-up zombie I’m supposed to be. It helps that a decent amount of the diazepam is still swirling around inside me.
“Hm?” I mumble.
“Are you…feeling better?” the doctor asks me. It’s a different one than before, though he carries the same clipboard under his arm. I don’t mean to, but I catch a glimpse of a couple of words on the top sheet. The paper is marked with the emblem and title of Sutter Hospital. The first few notes are about my miraculous recovery, then some supposed rage issues.
“Mhm. Good stuff,” I nudge over to the bag beside me. The doctor doesn’t bother to look at it. He only squints at me. Is he honestly waiting for me to snap then and there? Even full of sedatives as he thinks I am? He waits long enough to say anything else that I feel like giving him the satisfaction.
“We’d like to run some tests, if that’s alright,” he says. It’s too casual. Too vague. Tests. But I can’t show him any fear, or he’ll know how much my faculties are returning.
“Mhm. What…kind?” I ask. I’m sure to let the words slur into one another a bit.
“A CT scan, to start,” he tells me. I suppose it’s a safe enough test. They just want to see if my “rage” stems from the fact that my skull is a post-birthday-party pinata. I’m automatically wary of anyone who would ask permission from a sedated woman to run tests, but then this is a unique situation. Plus a CT is an easy test to identify. The whole sliding table in the tube and all. If they try to pull one over on me, I’ll at least see it coming.
“Lay as still as you can stand, Ms. Ford,” one of the nurses tells me about ten minutes later. I hardly hear her inside the full-body scanner. I elect not to answer to uphold the illusion that I’m still completely loopy. I briefly consider rolling around a little to really seal the deal, but as soon as I’m in the fluorescent chute, the most important thing in the world to me becomes getting the hell out.
The next ten minutes are some of the most agonizing of my life. I still have some of the drugs in my system. I’ve just unleashed two of the hottest bursts of my inner fire, ever. I watched my brother’s arteries empty out feet away from me, then my parents left me at the mercy of strangers in white coats. I’m damn tired. But I can’t let myself drift. I can’t go back to the blackness. I can’t trust Lee. I can’t trust the doctors, who doped me up for a CT scan and I can’t trust my parents. I can’t even trust myself to keep my eyes open, without blinking a hundred times a minute.
“All done!” the nurse chimes. The table slides me back out on a rail to a dark steel room full of men and women in long white coats. There’s three times the number of them that were there I went in. “See, that wasn’t so bad,” the nurse smiles.
“No,” I pretend to agree. My tired eyes, however, are already drifting from one science drone to the next. They ogle me like I’m something on the other end of a microscope.
“Ms. Ford,” one of the doctors says - if they even are doctors. Most of them have a look in their eyes of something more powerful than simple scientific curiosity. They’re scared, on top of thrilled. “We’d like to run some more tests on you, as soon as you’re feeling-”
“Don’t you want to go over the results of this one first?” I ask. In my panic at so many hungry eyes, I completely forget my drug-infused ruse. Even more terrifying is how the man who speaks doesn’t seem to notice. It doesn’t matter to them if I’m wasted or sober. All that matters to them is whatever is on the screens on the other end of the CT machine. Whatever several other doctors are staring at, dumbfounded across the room.
“Ms. Ford, while your recovery is beyond incredible… Well, that’s exactly what worries me about it. Your skull should have been…” but captain narrative can’t seem to decide how to phrase the news. He clears his throat and starts again with, “we noticed some discrepancies between the scan we took of your head and what we can actually see… Ms. Ford, where are you going?”
“To see these discrepancies for myself,” I tell him as I march to the other side of the room. As if the room full of lab coats doesn’t chill me to the bone, the fact that no one can spit out what’s going on is just the icing on the fucking cake. I nudge the nurse out of my way to lean over the glowing panels of my scans. “I’ve got a right to see the scans you took of my body, while I was still drugged, don’t I?”
“We-we-we would be more than ha-happy to have a techni-ni-ni-nician explain the results to you in your room,” the doctor fumbles after me, but it’s too late. My eyes have already filled with the glowing images of my own body on the screen. My jaw has already locked in a possibly permanent open position. The figure on the screen isn’t mine. It can’t be.
“Ms. Ford, please, I-I-I’m sorr
y. This is all too much for you at once. Why don’t we see you back to your room, and we’ll bring a technician to explain-”
“What the fuck is this?” I bite back. A few of the doctors take a step towards me. They freeze, however, when they feel the palpable screen of heat swirling around me. My fingers fling out at the images on the screen as I call them out. There’s the faintest outline of a human body there, but it’s layered with something very different. “What are these? My nails aren’t nearly that long. I don’t have those weird…tips on my head. And those look like wings! Is this a joke?”
“Ms. Ford,” the soft-spoken nurse says. She lays a hand on my shoulder, then recoils immediately from the burn.
“No - you tell me. My teeth… My teeth don’t look like this! I don’t have fangs!” I scream. There’s no chance in hell, or anywhere else, that I’m…like that guy - the one that bled Jason dry. Not in any way. “And my skin… What is that?”
“Scales, it looks like,” one of the doctors murmurs.
“Matheson!” one of the others scolds him. I zero in on him and charge through the line of doctors. They fold away from me the second they feel the heat wave I wear like an invisible coat.
“No, Matheson, go on. Please. What is that body on that scan? It’s sure as hell not mine. I know you’re not saying I have…scales under my skin. Are you? Matheson!” I scream, and watch the shiver dance up and down every hair on the man’s body.
“That’s enough, Ms. Ford. We pushed you. No more tests for tonight. We’ll get you back to your room for now, to rest. You’ve been through a lot. We’ll give you something to relax and revisit tomorrow,” one of the other doctors says as she taps her way over in her high heels. She reaches for me, but I snatch her wrist from the air first. I squeeze it hard enough to jam every word climbing her throat right back down.
“That is enough. I’ll go back to my room after I talk to my parents on the phone. I won’t move another inch - I won’t so much as fart in a bag for your tests until I see a phone. Understand?” I demand. The doctor struggles to focus her darting eyes anywhere but my face. I feel the surge of heat in my hand by how cold her skin feels against it. I know it’s burning her by the way she shakes. “Do you understand?”
“M-M-M-Ms. Ford-”
“I will break your fucking arm,” I murmur, just low enough for the doctor to hear. I watch her throat for the lump to move, for her to swallow whatever she was about to insist. Instead, she finally says,
“Let’s show Ms. Ford to a phone she can use.”
More than half the doctors stay in the room where I got my CT scan when we go. The other seven form a shell around me, with the lady doctor leading. Now that I’ve let her go, a finger-shaped rash rises up around her wrist. A perfect replica of my hand. She takes me past a suspicious nurse’s station, and more than a few rooms full of glaring spectators. Maybe they’ve heard about the girl full of fire down the hall. The doctors take me to the very edge of the wing my room is in. There, they let me into a little maintenance alcove, away from where anyone else might hear. On the wall is hung a little eggshell landline straight from the nineties.
“Go on, Ms. Ford,” one of the doctors invites, while the rest of them turn their backs to me. They spread out a foot in each direction. It’s a wall of separation, but I can’t decide if their plan is to keep the other patients away from me, or vice versa. I fumble the receiver in my sweaty mitts a few times before I jab the number for our little house on Scott Street. My forehead thunks against the wall. I smash the receiver harder against the side of my exhausted head with repetition of the dial tone. It’s blaring through my inner ear before I accept the truth. They won’t pick up.
“You’ve reached Jonah, Marie and Cece. Leave a message at the tone!” Mom’s voice sings like a canary. My hands become a vice-gripped fist around the phone. I slam it on the hook, then yank it back off before anyone can suggest otherwise. It’s at least a stall. Some small victory as a warning to the white coats - they can’t just poke, prod and herd me around wherever they want. I dial the number again.
“You’ve reached Jonah, Marie and Cece. Leave a message at the tone!” I clutch the phone even harder. The ringer inside of it dings as it crashes back into the holder on the wall.
“Ms. Ford, if you wo-wo-would, please,” one of the doctors forces himself to say. I whip my head sideways to glare at him. The twist of a few wild locks of hair helps deliver the maniacal message. His lips clamp shut. I wrench the phone off the hook and hammer in the number again.
“You’ve reached Jonah, Marie…”
“... and Cece…”
“Leave a message…” The words ricochet around the corners of my mind in the next five or six times I dial the message. By then, I’m beginning to hate the sound of my Mom’s voice. I resent her at the same time as I miss her. How could she go from this, this cheerful message, to walking out on me in a day? They lost Jason, sure - but I lost him too! And now I’ve lost them. Everything.
“Cecelia.” the voice runs through me like a paralytic drug. I’ve gotten so used to hearing Mom’s voice on the machine that Dad’s strikes me stupid. I hang there, head against the wall, phone mashing my cheeks, in silence. “Cecelia, is that you?”
“Yeah,” I tell him. My voice is so hollow, I hardly recognize it.
“Are you alright?” Dad asks. His voice is just as empty. They’re just motions we’ve trained ourselves to go through over the years. There’s no honest intent in his words.
“I guess. For now,” I say.
“What are they doing for you?”
“Running tests,” I murmur. The line goes quiet for so long, I almost think he hung up on me. When he finally has something to say again, it’s:
“You should let them run whatever they think is best… Maybe they can help you more than we ever could,” says Dad. If he has anything else to say, it’s lost to the heat that melts the speakers of the phone. The whole shape of the receiver softens and dimples in my clenching grasp. The thing is more like clay now than plastic and metal.
“Are you taking this down?” one of the doctors asks another as they notice the phone warping between my knuckles. Another of them starts jotting notes. Let them run whatever they think is best? I play back Dad’s sage advice behind my sealed eyelids. Sure, let them scan me, tell me I’m some kind of lizard-person while they take notes on how hot my shit comes out? No, this is enough. This is it. I’m done trying to control it.
“Ms. For-”
The doctor never gets to tell me what it was. He can’t scream louder than me. Each of them flings back to the nearest wall as I unleash the scorching shockwave.
Lee Kaiba,
Outside Sutter Hospital, San Francisco
I swipe beads of sweat across my forehead and fling them into the cool, city night air. Goddamn, it’s been a while since I’ve been this nervous. But I can’t let them see it - the three men and two women breathing down my neck. I’m the lead on this operation, my first field rescue, but each of them has more than a few under their belts already. I definitely can’t let Cece see it. What she needs right now is a calm voice. A friend. Hell, if I don’t remember how bad I needed one, when I first awakened.
“You sure this is it?” one of the girls behind me double checks. The sound of her voice, so close over my shoulder, makes me jump. We ford the constant traffic of the curbside pickup in front of Sutter Hospital - nurses wheeling patients, families paying valets so they can visit their loved ones. I have to keep reminding myself, it’s okay to talk. We don’t even have to whisper. They can’t see, hear or feel us. After all, the Broken Academy doesn’t just send any old Magicians to conceal an operation like this. For a high-profile target like Cecelia Ford, they only send the best.
“I’m sure,” I tell the Magician. “I saw it on her chart. Sutter Hospital.”
“But Thise said the Soul of Fire is fuzzy on the first few trips, and it’s not exactly like this girl is inviting you to look through her eyes,” anoth
er of the crew behind me questions. This one’s a Warlock from one of the prestigious core lines. “How do you know it didn’t say-”
“Dragonlord Thise also put me in charge of this operation,” I remind him. This is as much a test for them to follow, as it is for me to lead. Being one of the top students in the Dragon program at the Academy doesn’t mean much, if you can’t take what you learn to the field. I wait a few more seconds to see if anyone else has reason to challenge me. We stay quiet until our tight-grouped contingent reaches the front doors of the hospital. I give my guys a quick turn. “Witches and Warlocks. She’s under extreme stress. Be ready for some fireworks the second we step through that door. Magicians. Fan out to keep as much of what happens as you can under wraps.”
We don’t make it past our first step inside, however, before a shockwave rattles the cement under our feet. A second later, an alarm screams through the building. Lights flash. Bodies swarm. Sprinklers spit out a cone of water on everyone scrambling for cover.
“That’s going to be hard to walk through, without looking really weird to everyone inside,” one of the Magicians warns me. He points over my shoulders to the spraying sprinklers. I turn back to my Witches and Warlocks.
“I know we’re not talking rivers or waterfalls here, but water’s water, right? A force of nature? What have you got for me?” I ask. The same Witch who doubted me seconds ago now stretches out her hand before us. She stretches her fingers out as wide as they’ll go. In seconds, a few of the holes of the sprinklers are coated in ice crystals. In under a minute, the little iron heads are frozen solid. My Witch lets out her efforts in a puff of air. “Let’s move,” I issue.
“How are we going to find her?” one of my Magicians asks. He and his colleagues walk on the fringe of our group, fingers contorted in formations to bend the light and shadow of the space to hide us. “Did you see what wing she’s in on her chart?”
