Luminous Beings

The Promise - Second Star to the Right, and Straight on 'til Morning.

Cordelia

Lynn lay next to Archie for as long as she would let herself. Why did he have to stay? Why? Why couldn't you make this any easier?

Lynn leaned back, unable to keep her mind from what it always did. There was always another corner. There was always an angle. The girl was jumpy. The girls who weren't didn't last particularly long in parahuman juvy.

Juvy. Christ, if those bitches could see me now. I'll bet anything any one of them could eat Paw Patrol upstairs alive and -

Lynn's eye opened. If Archie was paying attention, he would have felt her heartbeat triple in the span of a few seconds. Che was gone, for the moment, at the edge of her perception, right where the drugs were keeping all the pain, but they were wearing thin. Lynn let her mind race for just a moment, picking pieces apart and putting them back together.

Then she waited.

The waiting was the hardest part. Every few seconds, she would feel herself start to slip, and have to cement the cracks in her resolve over again. You have not done everything you've fucking done to pussy out now. They can get off. They have a chance. They need a window. Lynn closed her eye and focused, trying to think as far ahead as she could. Damn you, Denim. Why couldn't I have been half as smart.

Lynn feigned slumber, which was easy enough to fake, given that she dozed off for real. She woke when Archie was untangling himself to use the restroom, and Lynn forced the stupor to pass from the drugs. A second. Do you have to do this? He - he would come back, and lay down, and -

Lynn punched the call nurse button. The nurse came in smiling.

"Hey, ma'am," Lynn said, hoarse and croaking. "I have...it's...I'm sorry, I shouldn't have called."

"No - what's wrong?"

"I just, um." Lynn turned away. The bandages over her face made it a lot easier. "It's...it's silly."

"Tell me. Do you need more pillows?"

"No, it's just - I know I've been here a few days, and, um, I could really use a toothbrush."

"A toothbrush? Of course, but - "

The nurse looked around the room for a moment, noting Archie's absence. She gave Lynn a quiet smirk. "Just a moment, sweetheart." The nurse disappeared and returned, a cellophane-wrapped toothbrush in hand. It was pink.

"Thank you," Lynn said with a smile. "I - " she paused again.

"Yes?"

"There's footage, isn't there?" Lynn asked. She let her head sway.

"...you don't need to watch that right now."

"I just..." Lynn shifted, making sure her tattooed arm was beneath the sheets. "I'm worried my parents might, they..."

The nurse came over and gave Lynn a kiss on the forehead, pulling her in an embrace. It was all the opportunity she needed, really. She felt something she'd never felt before - the same iron twist in her gut that she'd felt lying to Anderson. Damn this, fuck all of this, I have to do this, stop being a pussy about it. Christ, you are not going soft now. Lynn put a hand on the back of her head, holding her for just a moment more.

The nurse pulled away and brushed a strand of Lynn's hair out her face. "Just get some sleep, okay? I'll hold him up in the hall if you need a moment to brush your teeth."

Lynn gave her a smile.

The nurse returned to the hallway, short her ID card and a hair clip.

"See, Clarita, you do it smooth, so they don't notice, not until you're in the clear," Lynn murmured, pulling the tube from her arm and blinking a few good times. "Now you try. That guy's got a rolex. Rolex. Hey, the fuck happened to Fish?" Lynn shook her arm, unsure if it would make the drugs wear off faster but it at least felt like it would. She grabbed the notepad from the bedside table and the pen. Archie would be back quick.

Her heart thudded in her head again.

Just one more lie, Lynn told herself. Then you don't have to bother them anymore.

Or she could tell the truth. Half of it.

Anderson,

I'm going to see my dealer. Go to the picnic table by the woods down past that coffeeshop we Lynn felt the twist again. He brought flowers. went to last time you busted me out.

It curled tighter.

See you guys soon.

Then Lynn hobbled barefoot to the door and slipped into the hallway.

---

The supply closet took the card, but the clothes cabinet took the clip.

Lynn held the toothbrush in-between her teeth, stripping and staring at the racks. The sanitized air was cold on her bare skin, but she couldn't help but look for a moment.

The smallest scrubs still dwarfed her.

"Thmfck?" Lynn spoke around the brush, shaking her head and tying the strings around her waist an extra time, rolling up the cuffs. Where'd my hoodie go?

---

There was a stairwell Lynn stumbled into, her senses recovering quickly. She felt her hair warm around her, more intensely, the light on the concrete walls dancing to meet her. How much food had they pumped in her the last few days? Enough? Lynn ran through the steps in her mind again. She might make it work.

She found what she needed. There was a concrete corner.
Scrape. Scrape.

"Cell block e," Lynn mused. "How proud you'd be."

---

Radvi's room was unoccupied. There were dying children and he was a vegetable if ever there was one.

"Don't worry, fuckface," Lynn said. "I'm gonna do your job for you." Lynn leaned in close and put the shiv to his head. His hair had grown out. Lynn sliced a bit off, and then cut off a piece of her gown. She pricked his arm - perhaps a touch more forcefully than was strictly necessary - and dabbed it in the blood. Lynn grabbed the notepad beside his table and scrawled two messages. The first was simple - RADVI WAS RIGHT. MASS KILLER ON PROMISE. KIDS IN HOLDING. STAFF DOES NOTHING. MUST HELP. She wrote the day's date on it.

Lynn paused. No, that wouldn't work. They wouldn't give a shit, the cops would only care about -

Ah.

Lynn thought for a moment, two, heart pounding and sweat running down her brow. Anderson would be back any second now, she had to just do it.

THEY'RE GOING TO CRASH THE STATION INTO THE EARTH. SEND HELP IMMEDIATELY. DON'T STOP ESCAPE PODS.

She paused for a moment. The iron coiled again around her gut.

TELL THEM I'M SORRY. TELL -

"Stupid," Lynn said, picking up the pen. "Stupid."

Lynn folded the note and tucked it into the scrubs pockets. She jotted again.

"Cell block e," she muttered. "How ashamed you'd be."

WE ARE ALL DEAD. RIGHT ABOUT ARIANNA. GETTING ELI/others off SHIP. THEN GOING FOR KIDS. HELP ME OR YOU'RE NEXT. -LYNN FUCKING HOLMES."

Lynn folded the note and tucked it under the cop's body. She paused for a moment, checking the sheets. Fresh. She had a day before they switched them. Or was it twelve hours? Eh. Long enough.

"Wakey wakey," Lynn said, turning and walking out.

--

Lynn walked down the hallways quickly and with purpose. One of the few times she had felt blessed with the body she was given was now - even with flickering hair, a five foot girl is easily lost in the crowd of a hospital in times like these. She fumbled to avoid being impressed into service with moving a stretcher down the hall and kept moving back towards the stairwell, doing her best to project as many inconspicuous vibes as she -

"Lynn Holmes?" a voice asked.

"Oh, fuck me," Lynn whispered, turning back around.

The doctor stood there, pamphlets in hand. "I heard you were - "

"I was on my way to the cafeteria."

There was a moment of silence and Lynn felt her hand tighten in her pocket. Christ if this is how I get -

The doctor embraced her in a hug, patting the side of her head where her eye was missing. Ow. "I'm so, so proud, Lynn, we've really gotten you so far, and - "

---

Lynn stepped out of the hospital and took one beautiful second to breathe in deeply.

"Cara, where is Isaiah Marlon's dorm?"

"I must inquire as to the nature of this visit."

"I need to see if he's alive."

"He is."

Well, what was another lie. "Do I need your permission to get a survival fuck out of somebody? You don't see me stopping you from doing your thing every time somebody hits control alt del-"

"West Wing, third floor, room seventeen."

"Thanks."

The thanks surprised even her. Lynn didn't dwell on it.

--

Two knocks.

The door was opened a crack, and Isaiah fumbled with the lock for a moment.

"Christ, I thought you were dead - Jesus, you look dead."

"You know what to say to a woman."

Isaiah looked her over for a second. "Hey, why are you in scru - "

Lynn lunged forward, slamming the door behind her. She felt Isaiah's power hit her as soon as she did. Nullifier. The fire went out of her hair suddenly the pain of the left side of her face was all she could feel. That, and pissed off.

Lynn turned and pressed the shiv to his gut.

"Oh,"

"You're a terrible fucking weed dealer."

"Please, I - I don't - "

"Money. Weed. Now."

"Are you serious? I - "

Lynn pressed. To her credit, gently.

"Okay, okay, under the - "

"Bitch, you think I'm getting it?"

Isaiah fumbled, handing it to her.

"Oxy too. And the pills. Whatever you got."

"That's al-"

Lynn stared with force disproportionate to her height.

He returned.

"Good. You should probably tell Cara or somebody about this."

Isaiah stared at her in disbelief. "I was gonna cut you in, you know, but -"

"But you're a dipshit. No hard feelings. Oh, yeah, give me your clothes."

"The ones I'm wearing?"

"I meant - " Lynn smirked. "Actually, yeah, that's kind of funny."

"Fuck you."

"Christ, you're a poor sport. Give me the smallest shit you have."

Lynn turned and closed the door behind her, passing back down the hall as quick as she could.

As she walked, she slipped the note in the bag with the weed, and slipped the painkillers in her back pocket with the cash. A few hundred. Might be a few palms left to grease.

Then Lynn left.

--

"We're closed."

"No you're not."

Lynn smacked the cash down on the counter, eyes wide. For a second, she let herself feel like a little kid again, like she had before she'd made the candle dance, two nights before Christmas.

The clerk sighed and rang her up.

--

"FUCK!" Lynn whispered to herself. The faded [i]CAMP MOON LAKE[i] t-shirt was too big on her, so she had knotted it at the waist, and the jeans were cuffed up once or twice. She would've kicked a trash can if she had one ounce less of restraint. She gnawed on the back of her hand, thinking. Her brand new sneakers fit snug and cozy, and the leather jacket, although also too big, was comforting. It was nice to have something slightly tougher on her. A little more time. A few more hours. They have those guns. I just need a little more time.

"Cara," Lynn murmured.

"Yes?"

"They have arts and crafts shit here?"

"...please specify."

"Like, pots."

"Kitchenware?"

"No, I mean, like, pottery."

"...you're an artist?"

"Yeah."

"You're an artist looking to enroll in arts classes."

"Yes." Lynn couldn't resist. "As a student, not a teacher. But I'm probably qualified." beat. "I'm, like, real passionate and shit."

"...there is a ceramics course, yes."

"They, like, open?"

"...I suspect my answer is irrelevant to your next course of action."

"Christ. Where at?"

"The art wing, first floor, third room on the right. I trust you will use the kiln responsibly."

"The fuck is a kiln?"

Lynn leaned back against a post, thinking. Bulletproof vests had that shit in them. If she could, like, duct tape some in there, it might stop those tasers. She only needed it to work once or twice. Or maybe duct tape? She could bind the whole thing in duct tape and that might stop it. These Gennedy-sucking fucks probably had something stronger. Lynn was not about to believe for a moment this had nothing to do with whatever powers that be. They keep getting Anderson mad. They keep letting things like this happen. There's some angle. I don't know what.

Didn't matter. "Focus," she thought, hand on the bag in her pocket. Dogs would smell that easy. Surely they had as much security on stuff coming back as they did going out. Lynn squinted. The inside of her eye socket was itching like crazy, and she could not figure out why.

Payback for killing a kid.

You're not a bad thing.

The docks were crawling with security. "You stupid bitch," Lynn said, turning idly and walking back away from the cafeteria area. Things were on high alert, and why wouldn't they be. They were probably still cleaning up brains from - you better have my back

"Fuck," Lynn hissed, turning back and walking away for a moment. She ducked behind a secluded corner near a bathroom and stood still, chewing on her hand. There was no way to get the bag anywhere near anything that would get shipped back. It was a hail mary if Lynn had ever thrown one, but there wasn't anything else. Her worthless fucking case manager never wrote back on that email, and they were probably checking them now, anyway. If the others were doing what they were supposed to, they'd be hopefully trying to break through here and leave soon anyway.

She could give it to one of them. No. Don't be a coward now.

Lynn took another breath. She had to find a way to get this shit in some kind of cargo. Christ, if she'd only asked more questions at Vaquero. Keaton could piece this together. Or Amelia could just warp her over. Eli - well, that'd be a fucking cakewalk. Boat Farmer probably, like, ran moonshine or something.

"Jesus Christ," Lynn sighed. "Even Spoons would be helpful right now. We'd have to, like, hold hands after, but she'd. Fuck. Fuck." Lynn leaned back against the wall, her desperation only matched by her anger. "I did not just fucking hug that bullshit doctor to get stuck here. Think. Think."

And think fast. They can't find you. Gennedy or the others. Either one stops you.

The Promise - Second Star to the Right, and Straight on 'til Morning.

Lynn and Archie

---

When Lynn woke up, there were names swimming in her head, threatening to pour out the weeping eye socket that was packed with gauze and bandages.

Gennedy. Radvi. Arianna. Che. Che. Che.

One swam out to the forefront.

Lynn blinked her eye open and turned, breathing shallow and gasping on the respirator. Her throat - her throat was sore. Like someone had made her swallow sandpaper. Feeding tube, Lynn thought for a moment, lifting the arm that was bound by an IV to enough rolling fluids to keep her hydrated until the end of her life.

“Wrrtrr,” Lynn choked, gasping. She coughed and coughed, turning. Ash splattered out onto the bedsheets. Get it together you fucking bitch, Lynn wanted to scream. You’re not dead yet. You have a few more hours. Lynn looked at the room around her. One thing she had learned in prison, growing up, anywhere - any few moments you could take to gain some kind of knowledge about your surroundings was invaluable. She looked at the room, blinking, bleary. My eye, she thought. I got my eye -

The kid. Burning. Burning. The gun melting through his -

Lynn closed her eye and leaned back into the pillow, trying to keep her breathing steady. Christ. For a beautiful moment she’d - she’d almost forgotten, and -

She opened her eye again, staring up at the ceiling. “Cara,” Lynn whispered, hoarse as a dead man.

“Yes, Lynn?

“Water. A nurse. And….” Lynn closed her eye, gripping the side of the hospital bed to force some kind of stability into her bones. They’re shooting me full of something, Lynn thought, her thoughts swimming. All of them swam up and rippled out across the front of her mind. All but one.

“Anderson. Please...call Anderson and tell him to come here.”

“No need. He is in this room with you. He will return from physical therapy shortly.”

Lynn giggled. She giggled until her throat, raw from the feeding tube, coughed and hacked again. “That was funny, Cara.”

“...I’m sending for a nurse immediately.”

There was a bit of a bustling sound against the door, as if someone was fumbling around outside rather than simply turning the door handle. Eventually whomever was on the other side managed to get a grip. Archie, clad in a shoulder sling that seemed to stiffen and brace the shoulder, stumbled through the doorway muttering a string of shoot, dangit, and hell’s and shut it gingerly behind him.

He just about jumped out of his skin when he turned around and saw Lynn sitting up in her bed. The noise he made, halfway between a squeak and a yell, was almost pitiful if not funny considering the source was a five foot nothing girl… but Archie was not a brave man inherently. Not like she was.

“Lynn…!” he said, eventually regaining his composure. “You’ve been-” he trailed off, his mind racing somewhat. Between all of the things that had happened over the past several days and the last time he had seen Lynn, it… probably wouldn’t be a good idea to mention that she had gone in and out of consciousness more than a few times. Or that she had seemed to be in pain when she was. Or that she had said names of people that he didn’t know. People she had never mentioned to him. So in an act that was strangely emotionally intelligent for a man that habitually grabbed the hands of living suns and super strong girlfriends, he didn’t. At least not in that moment. “I- I’m glad you’re up. Are you, y’know, feeling okay?”

Lynn stared at Archie with one eye that flickered between light blue and soft red and sunshine yellow the sort of way she had never looked at anyone. You were always a stupid girl, Lynn thought, You thought he was like Che. “Back from the dead,” she said, coughing again. A nurse entered with a cup of water and some instructions and medical terms Lynn didn’t listen to. As long as she had a pulse and food in her stomach, she would live. Lynn sipped on the water slowly as she left, then put the cup on the table. “For a little while.” Lynn looked over at Archie, just looking for a moment. This will not get easier the longer you wait, she wanted to say, and she felt like the corner of the room, the visiting chair to her left that was gone to her sight - she felt like Che was sitting there, mocking her between sips of whiskey. “How are you?” she asked quietly, drinking more water. His hand is bandaged. He won’t get any closer to you. He knows better.

Archie shrugged, or at least tried too, moving only the unrestrained shoulder upwards. “It’s my first time taking a bullet. At least, when I’m not covered in scales.” he explained. He sighed but grinned for her benefit. “It felt weird. All that stopping power. Been hit all sorts of times, big brother used to beat the hell out of me when we were kids, but I didn’t even feel the bullet. One moment I’m getting ready to say hello to a bunch of new kids and the next I’m bleeding out on the floor.”

He laid on the floor staring straight ahead for what felt like a while but couldn't have been more than a few seconds. He saw people jerk and fall, some managing to hobble up or move. Some didn't. Amidst the chaos he saw Lynn get shot twice in the chest, the force of the bullets just about taking her off her feet. One landed home on Amelia's upper body, where her neck connected to her shoulder. She fell, and he couldn't see the damage and if it was fatal or not. His eyes flashed to Eli just in time to see a round enter and exit her left calf.

Archie shook for a moment, suddenly violently uncomfortable with the memory. “I, uh… I watched people die. Watched you and other friends get shot and- and apparently when I turned I-”

He felt his stomach flip, and he took several brisk steps towards Lynn’s side of the room where the sink was and released whatever he had eaten for lunch. He had killed people. He had killed people and he didn’t even remember their faces. People that had lives and families just like him that he had snuffed out just like that. Yeah, they were bad people who hurt other people. Who hurt him- but he couldn’t shake the idea that he was like them because he had killed them. He had almost killed Keaton and Eli and that Nic kid, too.

Archie reached up and turned on the sink when he was finished to run his stomach contents down the drain. He rinsed out his mouth too, but since that day… There was a muffled scream that was instantly choked as the power of Archie's jaws forced his teeth through skin and bone vice grip. Like being caught in a giant bear trap that rent flesh and shattered bone. He remembered the feeling of his jaws sliding shut.

“I can’t get the taste of blood out of my mouth.” he said, half to himself and half to Lynn. That thick, metallic taste seemed to hide in some hidden crevice. Faint but omnipresent and lingering like some hidden putrid scent.

Lynn watched and said nothing. He’ll have the Salamandra dreams now, she thought bitterly. If she had ever believed in Santa Claus, she would have felt like she was telling him the truth of it all now. There’s no magic under the tree. Just lights that go out when the timer’s done ticking. Even with one arm in a sarcophagus of a sling, his muscles tensed and flexed as he gripped onto the side of the sink. He was tall, and broad, but he looked younger and more scared than someone a third his size. Lynn didn’t know what to say. She realized, like she always did, too fucking slow. She wasn’t smart like Keaton. She couldn’t put it together in time. Not then, not ever. She should have told Archie this on the first day. “You need to get out of here, Anderson.” Lynn said, quietly, watching him. “Don’t go back to your room, don’t get your shit, don’t - “ she stopped, coughing again, placating her throat with another sip of water. “Don’t pass go. Just leave. This - the - “ Lynn felt her arm rattle as if she was slamming Salamandra’s head into the wall all over again - “it doesn’t go away. You just…” Lynn leaned back into the bed for a minute. “I mean it. I know I’m - just go. Get to the pods and - something, okay. This isn’t where you should be.” Lynn had not noticed her voice wavering. The morphine, the part of her that had stared Anderson down and wondered what he’d done to get put in those restraints on the first day told her. But the rest knew better. Archie was just Clarita and Megan a few years older, a few inches taller. “Please. Because - “ she stopped, turning away for a moment. She couldn’t gather her thoughts. Whatever they’d given her made them keep slipping away.

“That’s not really an option,” Archie stated. “Aint got no family or friends to go back to. Ma’s gone, Pa’s dead. Brother’s in jail. The night or two before I came here I woke up with my illegal step dad pointing a shotgun at my face, ass naked in the dead of night, caged and surrounded by a town that had tried to kill me.” That probably would kill him if he went back, he mused. “Lotta people come up here and have the worst separation anxiety cases recorded in human history. ‘Cause you leave everything you’ve ever known behind, y’know? Cara checks in on you every day to make sure you’re not curling in on yourself like-” like a naked man in the woods peppered with birdshot and burnt by torches. He breathed, hard and heavy.

Lynn bristled, listening to him. She hadn’t known. It twisted her even more, knowing - you never should have been here. You’re not a bad person. In a cage. He was a kid. It made her angry, angrier knowing there was nothing she could do. Someone should have kept you safe.

“...but coming up here was easy. Had nothing left. All I’d do is go home and die. Only difference is it’d be alone in the woods as opposed to not alone in the woods.”

He managed to pull himself together enough to push away from the sink and grab a chair, which he pulled up so he could sit next to Lynn’s bed. “You always talk about knowin’ things,” he began. “First day I thought you were gonna bite my head off just for sitting at the same table.” He almost did bite her head off. It turned his stomach again knowing that he would have. “But I don’t know much about you. You’re always acting like someone’s gonna slink out from behind and-”

He remembered how she acted when they found the body. No cops. How angry she got when Natalie had called them. How she had acted when they were interrogated after they were released. How she had jumped and burned him when he took her hand. How she was talking now, as if she knew shit that he didn’t. It bothered him to no end- because he had just physically and metaphorically spilled his guts to her and yet here she was telling him to do this, that, and whatever from some unknown position of authority. Archie was tired of not knowing Lynn. He was tired of calling her his friend when he knew she didn’t for a moment feel the same way about him. Normally he wouldn’t ask, or press. He’d be sweet, dumb, good kid little Archie. But not right now. Right now he deserved some answers.

“Who’s Che?”

Something inside Lynn went cold, cold like she’d never felt even on the floor of the cafeteria, and Lynn couldn’t look away. Ice cubes clinked in a whiskey tumblr, somewhere far away. This was it. This was pulling the oversized hoodie off her and showing how rail-thin and hollow her body was to the whole world. Who’s Che? “How - who…”

“Kept sayin’ it in your sleep. It and few others.”

Lynn leaned back into the pillow. Her first instinct was her oldest one, the safest one, to tell Archie to fuck off, to stop listening, to mind his business, that - but it passed. The bed beeped and the next dose of whatever liquid ecstasy they were pumping Lynn full of coursed into her, and the girl’s body temperature was low enough to keep it more or less chemically intact.

And somewhere in the fuzz Lynn had a crooked grin. It didn’t matter. She could tell Anderson anything. There were only hours left, now. The question was whether it would be Arianna or Gennedy or a handful of terrorists. Or maybe a nurse slips too much of this drug, and there’s one less headache for all of us. She’d always thought so - since the day she’d come onto the Promise, since the day she’d entered juvy, since the day she played lookout that first time - but she knew it now. There were only hours left. “Okay,” Lynn murmured. “It’s a long story.” Lynn was quiet for a few moments. It was impossible to answer. Who is Che? It was like asking how the sun rose and fell. You could say, “it just does”. You could break down the orbit of the earth. You could tell a myth. They’d all be true. Che just was. He was every ticking rule of the universe that kept things in line. He was more superhuman than she ever was. All true.

“When I was eight years old my hair was down to my waist because every time they tried to cut it the scissors would melt.” Lynn said. Her skin felt far away from her body, now, and there was some warm cloud that was filtering through all the memories and making them almost giggly. Lynn turned and stared at Archie and the warm cloud pushed away the knowledge that she was more wretched to look at now than she ever had been. She didn’t care. “I never knew my folks. I - isn’t it funny? You talk about your brother beating you and I’m jealous.” Lynn giggled, then blinked. She didn’t like this. She didn’t want the drugs. She fumbled at the needle in her arm but it wouldn’t move, her fingers wouldn’t grip. “I wish I hadn’t...I wish you hadn’t gotten put in that cage,” Lynn said. It was just juvy, really. The same as hers. Just different. They’d made Lynn get naked too, small and bone-thin and hosed down, her almost-bald hair sticking to her skull. “That wasn’t…” Lynn blinked, and the rush was starting to simmer. “I think I killed people when I was ten, Anderson. I threw a bottle. And they had me throw it because things burn better when I…” Lynn blinked again. She closed her eye and forced her thoughts into line, some kind of iron vise tightening around them. She opened it again softly, speaking slow. This was the only thing she thought she’d said that really mattered, aside from theories with Keaton, and even then nothing she’d said had helped. Always too slow, Che chided. “When...I mean, I don’t have to tell you. It sounds like your family was fucked. I didn’t really have any. I was in foster care from the minute they pulled me out. I - a lot, you know, are. Paras. When the first thing your mom sees is blue hair they…” Lynn drifted. “Anyway. Not a lot of homes kept me. Because I was a shit kid. Breaking stuff. I couldn’t...things burned and I couldn’t help it. I burned a house down, one time, on Christmas. They had candles, and I wanted to play and they…” Lynn fumbled with the needle, but it wouldn’t move. “You know my first name, Cordelia, it...it’s Shakespeare or some shit. It’s supposed to be the good little sister. I fucked that up, didn’t I?”

“I...when I was ten, I met Che. I grew up in a shit city, and in the shit part of that city, and...I dunno. Anderson I...there wasn’t anybody. Like even the other fuck-ups, at least, they weren’t para fuck-ups. And the only other para fuck-ups I knew…” she paused. “They go away. Here, or...I dunno. Here there’s always someone watching and listening. But when your school doesn’t have enough money to keep the lights on, it’s like...they can’t keep track. There’s not enough money. We never really knew. I guess now, they got caught up in gangs, or some fucker sold them off to a billionaire who likes their paras pint-sized. I don’t know.” Lynn breathed again, the world still fuzzy around the edges. “I keep...I keep dodging the question. Che’s not his real name, he...he called himself that. ‘Cause he led all of us. Like Che in the...the one in the books and stuff. He - he saw me on the street one day. And he asked me to do him a favor. I just had to keep an eye out. For just a minute. And…he was, he was the first one who saw me on the street and didn’t look away. So I said sure. And then there was another. And another. And it’s not, like, who the fuck else was there? I was in a different house every eight months because the microwave burned through the wall or I had a nightmare and singed the sheets, you know? And I was a shit kid on top of that, I stole and I - I fought kids. I was always little, and they - you have to show them you’re not a bitch, or... “ Lynn blinked again, unaware her head was swaying as she spoke. You’re making a fool of yourself, she heard, faintly, through the drugs, but that slipped away. “Anyway. He...he took me under his wing. I did things for him. I was happy to. I was good at something, now. And occasionally I’d have a foster parent who would keep an eye on me, but never for long. I got shuffled around. There were others, too. The names, I - Clarita. Megan. They were like my little sisters. I took care of them, you know. I was only eleven or twelve, but I could fight.” she sipped at the water, holding it to her chest, staring at the wall. “I fought, like adults. There was a warehouse, and I’d go, and they’d put down bets, and - and I always won, because no one thought I could. And you know what’s funny is Che always won those bets but we never had any money, figure that the fuck out.” Lynn paused for a moment, eyes flickering red, but it passed.

Despite himself Archie managed to snort a bit. “If I uh…” he said. “If I didn’t know you any better I wouldn’t have thought you can hit nearly as hard as you can.” This one had stood up to the lizard. He always had to remind himself of that- the two tiniest people he had met were probably some of the strongest in the world.

He scooted up a bit closer to the table and, as gently as he could, put his hand on her arm. Archie wasn’t sure what he was doing- in fairness though he rarely was. He just remembered a day many, many years ago when his adoptive father put a hand on his shoulder after lowering his actual father into the ground and it just felt… nice. He ran the pad of his thumb along her bicep but didn’t meet her gaze, more focused on the catheter in her hand. “Sorry I- continue.”

“If I didn’t know you, I’d be surprised by your weight class too,” Lynn said. When Archie put his hand on her Lynn tensed, but took a breath and kept going, nodding. “I...I don’t know. It was a gang, I mean, but that’s not...people don’t get it. It’s like these were the only people that gave a fuck. The teachers just looked at you and you knew that they didn’t give a shit. You were the two or three kids every year they got to write off, because of course a few kids are gonna fail. And slowly the foster homes get in worse and worse parts of town, and sooner or later I don’t know anybody who ever really gets out. I don’t know anybody older than nineteen or twenty. I wound up in - this guy named Gary, he was my last foster parent. This guy was a piece of shit.” Lynn started chuckling again, wheezing. Cara had told her a funny joke about Gary a while back. “Heh. Sorry. I just remembered something funny. He - he tried to do things. And...he got burned.” Her tone had melted back to serious before she knew it had. “I...I freaked out. I went to Che. And he said that was fine.” she paused for a moment. “Because we had that, over him, you know. Like blackmail. And he - he couldn’t do anything about it. And I thought that wasn’t right. But I said...I said okay. So from then I was with Che all the time. I didn’t have to check back in or anything. And that just became everything. I stole stuff or broke into cars. We jumped people. I kept doing the fights. I helped Che expand. See, the other gangs didn’t have any paras, because that brought the feds down on you. But we were small enough to get by. There was always just one more, one more thing, you know. One more wallet. One more deal. One more fight. But like, he told me, I was always keeping us safe. I was doing the right thing. I was keeping clothes on Clarita and Megan. Like if we could just get a little more we could fix it all. And every time it was a little bit more. A little more...I don’t know how to…” Lynn paused again, shaking. The drugs were swirling in her head. “I wanted him to be proud, Archie, I wanted to be good at something. I wanted...I wanted him to want me...no other guy ever wanted to touch me…he just always knew what to do, or to say, and he could make anything sound like a good idea. And it was, it...” she drifted off again, quiet for a few moments, before she found herself. “Eventually, I...I get to be fifteen or so. And Clarita and Megan, they’re like, they’re like the kid sisters I always wanted, but they’re not really kids any more. I taught them how to tie their shoes and walked them home from school when they still went and everything, you know. And I’m walking back from something one day, and it’s late, way too fucking late, but I haven’t been to school in a month at this point, and Clarita - she’s, she’s Che’s sister - she and Megan are waiting on the sidewalk. And they’re, like, waiting. Not just dicking around.”

Lynn stopped again, steadying her breath. “I...he’d put them out there, to...to.” She couldn’t finish the sentence. “His own fucking sister. I went right to him. I said what the fuck was the point, of, of picking pockets and mugging people and everything if this is what we were doing? It was the only time I ever said anything back to him. Everything else I just said okay, because I thought he knew, but - and I could see in his eyes he was angry, he was so fucking angry, but he said okay. And I believed it was, because I wanted it to be. Because who the fuck else was there.”

Lynn shifted her weight and pulled up the hospital gown, just an inch or two. Her legs were bare, short and pale, and the vicious scar on her knee stood out clearly. “So about a week later, Che says there’s a job we gotta do. Just the two of us. Down at the warehouse. Is it a fight? I ask. No, he says, just roughing up some guys. Nothing I hadn’t done a thousand times before. We go. I go in first, like we always did when we were breaking in somewhere, because I could take the hits, you know, and I go in, and there’s like three dead guys in there. Rival gangs, I don’t remember which, and they’re all burned. Burned bad. They’re dead. And I go to say, ‘What happened?’ and there’s a gunshot. And…” Lynn laughed again, as bitter and empty as a laugh could be. “And my first thought was, they’re behind us, they got somebody behind us. And I tell Che to shoot them. But there’s nobody else.” She paused for a minute, breathing. “And that’s not the kicker. The kicker is he stands there for a second until we hear the sirens. And then he goes. They take me away and the whole time I can’t - I can’t make sense of it. I didn’t get it. There was just some puzzle piece I was missing, you know? Because I was fucking stupid. And so I’m in holding, and I’m talking with the public defender, and the whole time I’m thinking if I could just talk to him we could sort this out, something didn’t make sense. But it made sense. Sooner or later I was gonna say no. Sooner or later I was going to realize I had more firepower in my left hand than he had in the whole gang. And sooner or later I was going to put those together, and he put it together before I did.”

Lynn emptied her water cup but held it closer to her, shaking. “So we go to trial, and I keep thinking, surely - surely one of them will say something. How could I have done that, you know? There’s - there’s no way. And there was a slew of other stuff, arson and shit, anything in the area they could throw, because nobody wanted to think about paras running around uncontrolled. And…” Lynn stopped again, her whole frame shaking. “Not one of them did. They all got up, they’d been busted for some dumb shit a week after, and they all flipped. All of them swore I’d done all of it. My guy, he even proved, like, I would’ve had to be in two places at the same time for half of it, but….but they all swore. They all swore to God. I couldn’t look Che in the eyes. I still thought there was something I did wrong. I just had to sit there and listen.” Lynn stared ahead for a minute. “I taught her how to tie her shoes, Anderson. She told those people I put her out there.” she took another deep breath. “Then juvy. Then...then here.”

She drained what was left of the cup and put it back down. “I don’t know shit,” Lynn said again. “I just know one thing. If you put anybody in that position they do what they do.” She turned and looked at Archie. “I thought you were running some game on me, you know. The first time, in the hospital. But I was wrong. I was really wrong. You’re the kind of person who throws up after what just happened. Not the kind of person who burned a house down when he was ten.” Lynn stared at him. Maybe this is it, she thought, swimming to stay coherent through the drug-induced stupor. Maybe you never get to any of those fucking kids but you can get to him. Let one decent fucking person get out of here. Christ if you’re even real let me just have one thing. “Anderson you brought me flowers. No one….” she breathed again, trying to make the words say what she needed them to, but they wouldn’t, they never did. “Each time,” she said, shaking. “Each time you - each time some shit goes wrong we’re both there, have you noticed. And I stayed away from you because I burned you, and I didn’t mean to, I just…” she closed her eye again and focused. “Anderson we’re not gonna both keep getting lucky, okay? And you don’t need to spend the rest of your life throwing up in the sink. You’re a good person, you’re not...I…” she paused, and it was the moment, the Che thing, it all could’ve been a lie, some morphine-made fever dream, but this was it. She reached over and grabbed Archie’s hand and leaned in close, close so that Cara couldn’t hear, she prayed, she dared, and whispered, “I killed Salamandra, Che. When she said she was going to - to rape you. She begged me not to. But I did. And then she blew up and those people died. Because of me. And in the cafeteria. I...I lit one of them on fire, after he shot me.” her fingers were numb but she dug them into him with all the strength she could muster, but she knew it wasn’t enough, it never was. “It was a kid. He burned to death, Archie. I killed him. You can still get out, and I - I - I know back home, there’s no fucking home, but you’re not a bad person yet and that’s what this place will make you. People like me and people like you can’t...you’re always gonna get burned. And I don’t want to burn you. And I think sooner or later something worse than that is gonna happen. And I…” she pulled away and leaned into the pillow, shaking. “I hope it’s me. I know what I am. I hope it’s not Eli or Keaton or Amelia. I hope it’s not Natalie. I hope you don’t know that’s what we’re all like deep down. But somebody will. You’re the kind of guy who walks through the door first. And we always get shot, Anderson. Always. Please get off the station. Just find somewhere. Anywhere else. I know - I know back home is shit but you…” she closed her eye, trying to breathe. She was out of breath.

“Lynn.” Archie said, effectively cutting her off with a firm but incredibly gentle tone. She was feeling the drugs they were giving her and he knew it, but he hoped beyond hope that she would understand him- or at least would remember. Maybe what he did next was stupid, given what had happened last time. Given what she had told him. Given that it would very well blow up in his face a validate every one of her fears for him- but he slid his hand from her arm to under the small of her back and hugged her as best he could with one arm.

Lynn didn’t have hair like normal girls, and she didn’t smell like perfume or shampoo. She smelt like ozone, and smoke, and cinders. She smelt like some of the nicer memories that he had as a child- in the woods with friends and acquaintances getting blasted out of his mind and throwing up on the beach. He rested his head in the crook of her neck and waited to speak- to feel the heat that her whole body emanated from every pore. It was subtle, but a comfort that was unlike any other person that he had ever met. She was unlike anyone he had ever met. He felt her go stiff as a board, but he didn’t pull away. He held her there, close and intimate until he felt the weight of her arms settle on his back.

“Bad things happen.” he mumbled into her neck. “But you aren’t a bad thing. I’m so glad that I met you.”

It was a simple sentence, but it carried weight to it that many didn’t. To give someone that gift of just being right there. To say what was happening. You’re a great friend. You mean a lot to me. You make me happy.

He pulled away, but kept his hand on her shoulder. He believed her now. At least, more so than he did before. If Lynn thought that they needed to get off this ship then, well, she was probably a lot better at sniffing out a shit situation than he would ever be. She was smarter than him, and more experienced, and he knew it. “I know you don’t trust easy. But… if we get off this station and go… somewhere, if I walk through those doors first… you better have my back. Every step. You hear me?”

He breathed and met her eyes. Well, eye. “Thank you. For saving my life.”

Something in her twisted, around and around and around, and Lynn could not begin to tell where the knot began or where it ended. Her heartstrings and her gut and her ribs were all bound tight, so tight she couldn’t breathe. She had let herself, for just a moment, hug him. Just relax in it. It was all she wanted. Then it was gone. You aren’t a bad thing. I can’t, she wanted to whisper. Nobody can, Archie. Lynn couldn’t look him in the eyes and tell him that. He’s too dumb to know, she thought. I’m just another Che. “Anderson,” she said. “If you get the chance to go you take it. I…”

Lynn paused. She closed her eye. She tried to pull back that feeling, of the hug, when she was a good person for a few heartbeats that drummed against each other. If I was beautiful, Archie, would...could it…? “Okay,” she said softly. I will burn for this before everything else. “Can you get the others? Are they - “ she hadn’t considered they weren’t alright. The drugs, she wanted to blame, but she knew the truth of it. Ice cubes clinked. “I...we should all meet up. Keaton will know. Where we talked about throwing flour on the floor.” Lynn could not meet his gaze. Just one more lie and it’s over, she thought. It’s better to lie to Anderson now than...than he gets in a situation where he has to be like me. If they met there, they’d wait a few minutes. Of course Lynn would be late. Keaton might suspect something. She was early, normally, but maybe she’d be lucky. Maybe Keaton would need a minute to piece it together. Maybe Eli or Amelia says not to worry. But sooner or later Keaton figures it out. Lynn’s not coming. If Lynn could come to the conclusion she had - that things were fucked, fucked now and fucked until they were all dead - they had to get off. And she’d know Lynn couldn’t go. Not when there were dolls left in the woods. And - Lynn prayed - she’d run the math on that, and realize it was smarter to -

Through the drugs, Lynn forced everything soft and swimming to turn to iron. Hold it together, she wanted to scream. Just a few more minutes. You won’t fuck him over. You won’t let that happen. But if you all have to stay together you will. You burned him before. Just like the kid you murdered.

Archie nodded. “I’ll gather the troops,” he said, but instead of jumping up to his feet and running off to start their mission, scooched a bit closer to the bed. “I’ll send the text. In a while.”

Archie leaned forwards and hugged Lynn again. She was doped up, and probably wouldn’t remember it, but he wanted to show her. To show her that he trusted her, and that he trusted that she wouldn’t burn him. For now they- or at least she, would rest. “We’ll go together in a while.”

Lynn’s heart sunk into her stomach, but it raced at the same time. The part of her that played with candles at Christmas lifted an arm up around Archie. This was not too much to ask for. Even if she lied. I begged you to fucking listen, Anderson. She turned, feeling his warmth against her. She was not used to feeling someone else’s warmth. I burned you, she wanted to say. [/i]I killed a kid.[/i] But the other part of her wanted to grip tighter. Somewhere in the delirium of the painkillers, a part of her wondered if he would tell a soul if she twisted his face to hers and pressed her lips against his. I would’ve kept you safe. Are my lips warm as the rest of me, Anderson? And for a half-blurry second her hand started to, but she stopped. The cold knot in her stomach pulled her back. Che would be proud, wouldn’t he? Lying to the boy one minute and kissing him the next? Lynn pulled back, blood thundering in her head. I’ll fuck it up, Anderson. I’ll fuck it up. Why can’t you just fucking go. Just one thing. The others swam into her mind. Amelia and Eli and Keaton. She hoped they’d made it. She hoped they got off the Promise. Some people could make it out.

It was just that Lynn was never going to be one of them.

---

Some time passed, and eventually everyone’s phone dinged- the same group chat that had been used on Homecoming night.

Archie Anderson: Hey, Lynn and I need everyone to meet up. Where Keaton said they should spill flour on the floor. Ask Keaton if you don't know where that is and don't see any of us on the way.”

The Promise - Second Star to the Right, and Straight on 'til Morning.

Cordelia Lynn Holmes

Lynn's arm itched. She looked down and there was something in the crook of her right arm. Something. She tried to focus her eyes on it, but her eyes were not cooperating. She blinked. Did she? Did she blink? Something wasn't right with her vision. She was forgetting something. She was cold.

"You always were almost adorable." Lynn frowned. She'd heard that voice. The clinking of ice in a glass. Lynn looked up from her arm, eyes tracing over the orange jumpsuit pants that hung baggy and loose from her legs, though none of the other girls had ever once been fooled into thinking Lynn was a half pound heavier than she was. That sweatshirt had never fooled anyone either. It was just a hoodie to tell the world how rich and tall she wasn't. The jumpsuit told the jury what decision to make, if that silver collar hadn't. On seventeen counts of arson, eight of petty vandalism, three of petty theft -

Lynn was in a living room. There was a couch littered with cigarette burn marks opposite her. She must have been in the easy chair, then, the one that had more quarters than a pinball machine in its cracks. They fought over who got to sit there. Lynn lost intentionally. To her left was the window, barred over, broken through.

Lynn looked across the room and saw a man sitting there. A girl lay sprawled across his lap, strung out to oblivion. He had one hand cradling her neck, idly toying with her hair, and the other swirling the whiskey in his glass. To their right, a fireplace crackled and stirred, even though Lynn knew there was no fireplace supposed to be there. No fireplace in a meth house, Lynn thought. She felt like she was swimming. She felt like she was looking through stained glass, watching rain drizzle down. But there was no water. Only the clinking of ice cubes in glass. Something was wrong. It was too empty. There was always a junkie or two hanging around, some debtor or would be disciple girl to their resident prophet. But it was so empty. She was cold.

The man had olive skin, the wisps of an unformed beard and mustache clinging to his face. His cheeks were pudgier than she remembered, but she was thinking that was more that she'd remembered wrong, than that he'd changed. His eyes were dark and seemed to soak in the firelight without turning warm. Lynn went to pull herself up more in her seat but her arm caught. She turned back and saw there was a handcuff around the side of the easy chair to the crook of her arm. Some distant back part of her head started to hurt. That wasn't how the chair's arm was, Lynn thought. There was nowhere for it to hook in, this isn't right, who's that girl, why is there -

"Lynn." Che said, voice smooth as the whiskey swirling in his hands.

"Fuck off." Lynn muttered, looking around, fidgeting. There was nothing to grab, in a house full of needles there was nothing she could get in her hand. She had to - Lynn stopped for a moment, mind whirring. She had to do something, didn't she? But she couldn't remember what. Was it Che? There was someone else. There was a gunfight, and -

"You're safe."

Lynn turned and looked back at him. The woman in his arms was stirring, just barely. Lynn had seen that before, you know, the ones who might need naloxone, who might pull through. "Who's she?" Lynn said. You never answered their questions. You just deflected. Found something else.

"You know."

Lynn stared at the woman. Tattoos. She was familiar. She'd seen her, yes, at the -

"Drink?" Che asked.

Lynn was looking around. "Where's Clarita? Megan? What did you - "

"Lynn," Che said again, and Lynn felt her voice flicker out her like the flames in the pit. The left side of the room was dark, only lit by the fire. Her eye wasn't working right. "Just relax a minute. You know where you are."

"Shut the fuck up."

"Home."

"This isn't right."

"Was it ever?" Che asked, sipping. No matter how much he drank, it always stayed steady. That's not right either, Lynn thought, feverishly. Clarita poured, I never got to, I would've set it on fire, but she's not here, and - "You're dying."

"Nothing can kill me," Lynn said, but the lie felt weak even to her. She was, suddenly, she knew, just as she knew this house was not as she remembered it. She was shivering beneath her jumpsuit, and she felt clammy. The left side of the room kept growing darker. In the fireplace, the logs had burned to white ash. "I don't - let me out of this chair."

Che smiled. "I taught you how to pick locks."

"You taught me to fuck off and die. Give me the key."

Che shook his head. "Doesn't work that way. Don't you want a drink?"

Lynn stared at him. "I'm sick of these fucking games."

"Because you always lose?" Che grinned, cocking his head to a side as he looked her over, and Lynn could only think of the clothes melting off her, how bare and bone thin she was. Not like those other girls. Not like - there was a blank space in Lynn's brain. I should know, she's so strong, she - the first day, she had a collar, a...a necklace, I...and she - she broke my shoulder, she -

Fuck this.Lynn screamed with anger, trying to reach out to the fire, to make it roar up to life, but the flames stayed put. There was a second in-between her willing the fire to life and when it should have happened that she remembered something happening, she remembered reaching out to a flame, farther than she'd reached before - it had been the cafeteria, there were bullets, and -

Lynn looked back at Che. There were bullet holes all against the wall behind him. The woman coughed and murmured something incoherent. He ignored her. He always did. "Drink, Lynn."

Lynn looked down at the cafeteria mug in her hand. Water, boiling, boiling. There hadn't been a mug there before. She was cold. "What the fuck is this, Che?"

"I'm here to help. I can unlock that thing."

"Then do it."

"Not yet."

Lynn stared at him with all the doubt she could muster, but there was some part of her that almost believed it. That was Che's trick. He could tell the devil, I'm so sorry, Mister Scratch, I need my soul back for just one hour, I promise, there's a con job, and I can get us twice as much, I just need a little upfront, trust me - and he could've made it work. He grinned, sipping at the whiskey. From the left, she could hear the glass breaking, and a few bottles rolled into the room. There was the sound of a car screeching and taking off down the street outside. Lynn could only hear - the left side of the room was untouched by the firelight. "Yeah?" Lynn asked, almost wanting it to be true. On the one hand, the prison uniform scratched just as bad as it had that day - that last day she'd seen him, sitting in the courtroom, collar to her neck, shaking, livid - but a part quiet down murmured that there had been no one that had pretended to have the answers since then, either. What was better? That was the question Lynn had wondered about staring at the bunk above her in juvy all those nights. Is it better to have a liar who pretends to give a fuck, or no one at all?

"Yeah," Che said. "I'm gonna get you off the Promise."

All at once. Lynn felt a sudden surge and snap in her gut, like she'd been stopped halfway down the drop of a rollercoaster. The woman in Che's lap coughed and begged for someone to stop, that she didn't want to fight. Lynn looked down at the cafeteria mug, remembering, and something warm started trickling down Lynn's face. "No," Lynn murmured. "You weren't fucking with me, I'm - "

"Half your brains are on the cafeteria floor." Che sipped at his whiskey. She'd forgotten how it sounded, the ice, how many times she'd heard it sitting in that room. "I want to help you Lynn. You need the help, you know. This - " Che gestured with the whiskey glass, fingers twirling the woman's hair, "Is every last little ounce of that parahuman blood of yours keeping you up on the ropes. It's all here in your skull trying to keep a few neurons firing."

She looked over at her arm, handcuffed to the chair.

"Your temperature's eighty nine degrees right now. And you just lost your right hand to frostbite."

The firelight flickered more. When she looked back at Che he was wearing a suit, black and silky and smooth as a raven's feathers. He'd never once owned a suit in his life, no matter how much he'd bickered about needing just one more drop off or a few more pockets picked before they'd have made it. Lynn tore more copper wiring off exposed generators than she could remember to finance that dream, the idea that if Che was successful, he'd pull them all up with him. He's fucking lying, be smart for once in your stupid life and stop listening, Lynn wanted to snap at herself. But the other part of her felt cold. "You fucked me over," Lynn whispered.

"We've all made mistakes," Che said. Somehow, that sounded right, even though the snapping part protested. We all make mistakes but we don't fucking do what we did, it said, but it was quieter, and colder. He gave her a crooked smile. "You don't get anything back at all if you don't let me help."

"I'd rather put a bullet in your - " Lynn stopped. The fever was getting worse. The room was getting hotter.

"Remember?" Che whispered.

Lynn touched a hand up to the side of her head. It was wet. She felt where half her skull should be. There was no more hair on her head. "No," she murmured. She turned and looked at the fireplace, which had crackled back to life. The white logs were thinner, now. They were too thin to be fireplace logs, and white.

"I..."

"You did."

"I didn't know."

"You were happy to do it. What'd you say? Something about the Great Wall?"

"Che, he - Che how was I - "

He held up a hand and Lynn stopped talking. She was little again. But he was listening to her, and that meant something. The protesting part was farther and farther away. He leaned forward, and the woman slipped off his lap onto the floor. She shivered, choking on her spit. Her head looked nearly as fucked as Lynn's. Bruised, beaten in. Her clothes had been melted off. "Lynn, you don't have much time left."

Lynn said nothing, staring forward.

"Even if one of them manages to keep you alive. You have a matter of hours. If none of them sits with you in the hospital - which they won't - they'll pull the blanket off and let it happen. Another tally mark for the terrorists. You know what's coming."

Lynn looked down at the handcuff around the crook of her arm, her head feeling swollen and heavy. She was so cold.

At his feet, Salamandra croaked for mercy and Che put a perfectly-shined shoe to her throat and silenced the noise. Lynn turned to the fire to look away, and the bones of the Chinese boy roasted brighter as she did. The gun melted, it melted onto his shoe and he couldn't - "Christ, Che, I don't -"

"Do I seem better now? Now that your hands got a little dirty?"

"I never - I never fucking - your own sister, Che, your own fucking - "

Lynn's voice trailed off. The bottles from the window rolled further into the room. The geometry of the room was melting and running, but Che hadn't noticed. The firelight burned brighter as the bottles rolled in, oozing out kerosene onto the floor. Her nose hurt, across the bridge. "I know."

There was quiet for a minute. The heat was starting to get oppressive, now, sucking the air out her lungs. She could feel the heat against her but it didn't make her feel any less cold. The handcuff was in her arm, going into one of her veins. Lynn lifted the mug to her lips and stopped before she took a sip. There were cracks down the ceramic. Che watched her curiously.

"You're still alive somewhere, aren't you?"

He shrugged. "Could ask you the same thing."

"You're in my head."

"Never left."

Lynn closed her eyes for a moment. She didn't know if him being a hallucination made what he said more or less true. Are you gonna ignore yourself, Lynn? He only knows what you do. That means what he says is what you're thinking.

The walls started to melt on the right side, but Lynn couldn't see anything on the left at all. She tried to keep her eyes from Salamandra's body or the one in the fireplace or the bottles on the floor and that left nowhere to look but right at Che. "Do you know how many people were in the house? When you made me throw the bottle?"

"Made you?" Che asked, kicking Salamandra over to face her. Lynn steeled herself, even as she felt her head swaying. Her toes didn't hurt any more, and she looked down and saw the black rot of frostbite creeping up to her ankles. Don't be a bitch now. Don't die like a little bitch. "Do you think you get off the Promise without another Salamandra?"

Lynn stayed quiet, feeling the mug in her hand and the sweat that was coursing down her skin. She shivered, her breath misting. The room was so hot. "No," she said, softly. "I have to do it again, don't I?" Somewhere outside, she could hear more gunshots, she could hear screaming in a language she couldn't understand. A woman screamed. There wasn't any pressure on the left side of her skull any more.

"How many more?"

"I don't know, Che."

He leaned forward, and suddenly the floor was melting down and they were being pulled closer, no matter how hard she dug her frozen feet into the bed to stop it. "What if this happens, Lynn? What if you find the kids, and they're all around, Gennedy and the others? What if the woman in the woods comes? What if you have to let them go back into their little cells, or you can - " he sipped at the whiskey. "You can stop all that for them. It's not hard. You know how easy it is now."

He kicked Salamandra and she rolled over closer, through the kerosone and across the firelit floor that was running like watercolor right to the base of Lynn's chair. "Shut the fuck up, Che, I - " But it was like everything he said, it snaked in and coiled around and never, ever, went out. What if, Lynn thought, and she was in a little prison room with Clarita right in front of her, looking up at her with a bloody lip, and there was gunfire outside. You already killed one kid, Lynn, someone said. What's a few more? It's already too late.

Che leaned back. The ice in his drink was still cold. "We didn't want to wind up here, you know. You and me."

"I'm not here," Lynn said. "There's not a fucking we."

"You can go." He gestured to the oozing, utter black of the left side of the room.

Lynn leaned back, closing her eyes. Her eye. Christ, her eye, it was gone, that was why -

"Do you think when you wake up you can ignore it? What happens? Are you just gonna die? That's it. That's all it boils down to. You would rather live and light thirteen year olds on fire than do the right thing and kill you-"

"Shut up," Lynn whispered.

"Four people. Ash." he snapped his fingers. "Because you wanted to feel strong and stand over Salamandra with her skull caved in. And a kid. How old was he? Thirteen? Twelve? You saw the rifle shaking in his hands, didn't you? The terror in his eyes behind that ski mask? You did all that. Not Gary and his wandering hands, not me, not any one of the bitches in juvy. Just you, Lynn."

Lynn stared, her brain running like the room around her. I burned Gary's hand, he tried - I burned someone's hand, recently, the mall, I burned him, I didn't mean to, I shouldn't have, I didn't -

"I meant it when I said I wanted to help, Lynn. You always fought harder than anybody else. It's what made you so useful. Like Smokin' Joe. Tougher every round. Every ring of the bell. Are you smokin' yet, Lynn? It's the fifteenth round. There's no time left." Che stood up off the chair and stepped across the floor, gliding across the ground that melted and ran like molten wax. Lynn could smell, for a brief minute, a dizzying rush of smells - Christmas pine needles, dumplings steaming and sizzling, iron and salt, gunpowder, sweat. Everything was starting to tilt, now. Che alone stood still, like some kind of anchor in all the dimensions of space, as the bottles rolled into the fireplace with the sounds of police sirens and a gavel slamming and the feeling of glass in her face, in her nose, blood running down her throat as she tried to breathe. Everything was cold as the fire spread across the room. Lynn couldn't tell the boundaries between her senses any longer. They fumed and flickered like a fire catching on to deadwood. Salamandra's body went next, and Lynn saw there were four more bodies turned to ash inside the fireplace as she went, ripped up shreds of a Chinese menu. And a Chinese boy, dressed like a toy soldier, crackling, burning. Then Clarita, and Megan, and Eli, and Keaton, and Amelia, and Natalie, and him -

"Stop it, stop it, Che, I don't - "

"It doesn't fucking stop," Che snapped. He was right next to her chair, standing over her, and she was small, small as she ever was, and Lynn tried to shove him away but her hand slipped into the black of the suit and kept going and going and going as the other hand stayed bound to the chair. She pulled back and her hand was gone was like her eye. At least it wasn't cold anymore. Che leaned over her as the rest of the room ran into the fireplace and then the fire started running back, crawling up the walls and across the floor. It flickered in Che's eyes and in the whiskey glass as he poured it into Lynn's little ceramic mug, ice clinking as he filled it to the top. "That's the thing. It never stops. The first time you sat on a street corner and looked for cops when I made a deal. It never stopped after that. Not once."

There was nowhere else to look but him. "You should've just killed me," Lynn finally said.

Che smiled, something wide as his whole face, his teeth now straight and shining. "Maybe. You were never gonna get out, Lynn. That's what nobody told you. None of the guidance counselors or prison therapists or kids on the Promise. You were never gonna catch up. They were nice. They smiled. They ate lunch with you. But none of them were gonna say you were a fuck up from the day your mother left you at the hospital when her baby's eyes changed color."

Lynn stared at him.

"You were never going to get out. Not out of that neighborhood. Not out of juvy. Not out of here. You may as well have stepped into a casket instead of that fucking rocket ship. Even if you get to a pod. Even if you get through the atmosphere. Even if you land." He shook his head, smiling wider and wider and wider. There was no way to tell where the dark of the suit stopped and where the dark from her left eye started aside from when the fire flickered between them. "I'm in your split open skull." The only thing steady was the whiskey in her mug. Her hand was back. It was holding it. The other was still cuffed down by the IV tube. "You killed a kid, Lynn."

Lynn said nothing.

"You burned him alive. He died screaming with metal in his face and molten steel boiling through his feet."

Lynn turned away.

"I never did that. I tried to hustle you all, sure. I even hurt you. I won't lie. But I never fucking lit a kid on fire." Che sipped at his whiskey, still just as full after filling her glass. "Do you think it hurts for long, Lynn?"

"Shut the fuck up," Lynn whispered, the mug shaking in her hands, but the whiskey never spilled.

"This is my help, Lynn. The only thing I can give you."

"You're in my head. This is - this isn't - it's a Salamandra dream, I've had a - "

"You've had nineteen."

The fire grew and grew.

"Salamandra let you hesitate, you know. And that kid. And all the others. But Arianna won't. Gennedy won't. Do you want my advice?"

"How did I live?" Lynn asked. You deflect. You don't let them control the conversation. But it didn't matter, because Che was always the conversation. He could play the game better than she ever could.

"Think."

Lynn closed her eye, the sweltering heat thudding against her, digging its claws in and pulling at her. She was so cold. "Someone got me out," she murmured. "Not Keaton, or Eli, they couldn't have..." she paused, thinking more. "The lizard. He would've killed me." she paused, feeling the whiskey in her glass, wanting so badly to take a sip, to feel something cold, she knew it would make it all stop melting and all hold still. "Spoons would've...gone crazy, I..." It clicked. "Amelia."

"Why?"

Lynn paused. She felt the fire start to creep in the hole in her head, and she could feel it slither down her throat. She was still cold. Why would Amelia have gotten her out instead of saving herself? "She's afraid." Lynn stared. "Afraid of me."

"It never stops."

Lynn tried to breathe but there was no air. She could still speak, which she didn't understand. Cold. "Does Keaton know? Eli? That I...killed..."

"Who? Any of them? Not yet. Maybe Keaton suspects. But Keaton will put it together. The kid. Salamandra."

"How, I - "

Che hushed her with a look, the way he always could, and nodded.

"Gennedy could've given her a tip."

"No, no, she wouldn't - "

"You haven't been caught yet. Did you really think you were that clever? You're fucking failing every class."

The cold got deeper. You stupid girl. You stupid bitch. Lynn lowered her head. "Eli?"

Che looked down at her. "She pities you. She heard what you sputtered out at the party. If she remembered half of it, Keaton knows the rest."

Lynn stared at her glass. What did I tell her? "It never stops."

Che shook his head, and the rest of the room melted away. It was just fire, and Che. "It never stops."

"What was your advice?"

Che smiled at her, and pulled back the jacket he was wearing. His .45 was tucked into his waist. Lynn felt the pain in her knee as fresh as the day she'd gotten the scar. The pistol made her shake and clench. Her knee. Christ, her knee. "Don't turn your back to any of them this time."

Lynn thought he was going to slide the jacket back over, but she realized it was an invitation. Lynn reached out with the arm that was cuffed to the chair, seeing that her right knee was oozing blood through her jumpsuit as she did. She wrapped her hand around the pistol. It and the whiskey. The only cold things in the room. She pulled it out from his waist, uncomfortable with how close it brought her to him, again, and pulled back into her chair. It was cold steel, and there were leather straps binding her to it, and electrodes against her skin. There was talking somewhere out the window. A voice she recognized. A man. She couldn't place it. The sound of something crashing.

"If you wake up," Che said softly, "You'll try and break them out, won't you?"

Lynn nodded, barely. She was shivering.

"And then what? Do you take them home? Do you get them back home? Do you have a plan to get them home?"

Lynn looked away. Her plan was always just...she...

"You never wanted to get them out did you, Lynn? Not really."

Lynn felt sick. It wasn't true. She didn't want it to be true. It just sounded so right.

"You just wanted to feel like a good person before somebody with better aim than me put a bullet in you."

There was nothing for Lynn to say. There was just fire and Che and cold. He always was right. She never could outsmart him.

"What's your plan now, firestarter? If you're unlucky enough to wake up."

"I - " Lynn said, feeling something trickling down the left side of her skull. "I...get the others, out...out the way. On the pods."

"There's something useful you've done, at least."

"Then I - I go. And..." For a moment the room seemed almost steady. The handcuff on her arm slipped away, but Lynn didn't notice. "..and we see how good their aim is."

Che smiled. "Better than me, for sure. Don't feel bad. Maybe you'll do it. You always did pull something out in the fifteenth. If not, hell's warm enough for you." His eyes flickered as the fire started dancing across him, too. He clinked his glass against her mug.

"Have a drink?"

The Promise - Second Star to the Right, and Straight on 'til Morning.

Cordelia Lynn Holmes

Cordelia Lynn Holmes had many faults but being someone to quit easily was not one of them.

The problem was that the part of her that had picked herself back up off the asphalt, or the power-washed concrete of a prison block, or the carpet of that house - that part of her just couldn't.

She couldn't see. Lynn didn't remember drinking. It was all spinning. Her thoughts wouldn't work. Nothing was working. She hurt. She hurt really bad and she wanted to go to sleep. Somewhere she could hear him scream. Pick me up, Lynn tried to say. I have to get him back to the kitchen. They got them out of the cafeteria so I can blow it up now. Freezer, someone, there's -

Someone was holding something over her head and covering her eye so she couldn't see. "Stop," Lynn tried to pick her hand up off the floor and push them away but it wouldn't move. "Shta," Lynn garbled. She was sweating in her mouth. It was hot, and salty. Lynn coughed - pain lanced through the side of her skull - and ash and blood splattered out. She wheezed, and what she could see out of her eye was dark and swimmy and shifting. "Stop I can't see, I can't..."

I got shot again, Lynn thought. I walked in the room and I got shot, from back behind me, there was supposed to...they were supposed to be there and they weren't, and I got shot in the knee. But Lynn's knee didn't hurt. Nothing in her legs hurt. She was just cold. Lynn was shaking and shivering and couldn't remember why her hair was gone. She was barely able to shift her head. There was a girl over her. Lynn couldn't remember her name. She was swimming. There was something she had to say but she couldn't remember but she knew it was important she had to say it. Where did she get shot? She couldn't walk. Was it her knee? Someone was screaming for help. It's a trap, Lynn thought. You're gonna follow them in the door and you'll get shot.

Keaton, Lynn wondered. Or Elly, or... Lynn blinked. Was Amelia there? Amelia was gone. She'd been gone for a month. There was something she had to tell her before they got shot again. Lynn couldn't remember who her was. "Lizard," Lynn muttered, her brain trying to hold all the thoughts that they were leaking out her skull like cupping sand in her cold shaking hands. Why had she been there? Why did she get shot? She wasn't - "docks," Lynn murmured. "Docks, they're bringing..." Lynn tried to remember. The woods. "Dolls," Lynn said. "Kids at the docks, tell denim, it's...they're...the ghost men are watching but she...know," Lynn tried to pick herself up again but her hurtless legs wouldn't work. She was cold. She was so cold. She was so cold. All of her was shaking and shivering and clammy. Someone had burned half her clothes and all her hair off her. She didn't want to be ugly when she died. The part of her that put brick by brick against the part of her that was afraid and fused it in the kiln of the back of her mind was leaking out onto the floor through Amelia's jacket. "Blanket," Lynn murmured. Her words spiraled slower and quieter. "It's cold. Bring the lizard, he'll get cold, it's cold, lizards and cold they...they slow, you can..." Lynn's eye focused on the figure above her, leaning over her. It was a woman. No. "No," Lynn said. "I had to, you were gonna kill me, you were gonna kill me...I had to, I had to, I had to...you were gonna hurt him, you...you and then those four people and the kid, I lit him on fire, I thought...you shot me, why did you shoot me, I never hurt you, I did everything right...they all sat there and lied about me, I just had to watch...I was gonna get needle...they lied...you shot me..."

Everything was dark now and the slurred mess that spilled out of Lynn's bluing lips matched it. This was cruel. Lynn hadn't done this to her. There was pressure on the side of her head. The freezer. She'd pulled her into the freezer. That's why it was so cold. Lynn had killed her but she hadn't been like this. She didn't blind her. She blinded the kid though. She lit him on fire. She melted the gun in his hands. "I didn't know," Lynn slurred. "Get off my eyes, get off my eyes, get off my eyes, get off my eyes..."

The Promise - Second Star to the Right, and Straight on 'til Morning.

Cordelia Lynn Holmes

Lynn chewed again on Amelia's words. Everybody's got something lucky they hold onto, right? Lynn had never felt particularly blessed with good luck - the sole stroke of blessed fortune was getting the single public defender in the continental United States that cared about parahumans assigned to her case, but Lynn had never attributed much to luck. I'd trade luck to be tall enough to ride the rollercoasters, honestly. Besides, there'd been little in Lynn's life she felt like she'd ever held onto for very long. Her hoodie, maybe, one of the few possession that made it through parahuman juvy, but even then, she never felt like it was much in the way of luck. Lynn listened closely to what she said about cults. Sororities? Lynn had really never heard much about them. She knew they were like societies or something, from Italy, maybe? And they were all slutty, but that was about all the intel she had. Lynn considered attending college and becoming President of the United States as equally likely for her, so she'd never looked much into it. Still, that didn't stop her from forming an opinion.

"Well, we should get one started here," Lynn said, in the sort of blank affect tone that was never clear if it was joking or serious, even to herself. "At least we'd be making some money off the brainwashing."

Denim and Denzel came over, and Lynn felt a brief flutter of mercy that he and Natalie weren't anywhere around. Maybe there's some luck after all. Wonder if there's any gambling here. Lynn had been interested in the boxing leagues the Promise had, but they were banned to elemental parahumans. It'd hadn't stopped her from watching as many matches as she could, and offering to spar with any of them behind closed doors. A few had taken her up on it, and it'd been a nice shake-up from hitting a heavy bag. The more violently-minded ones were won over by Lynn's offer they could literally hit her as hard as they wanted and she'd be fine the next morning. Who said I don't know how to win men over, huh?

Keaton and Eli walked up and Lynn's brain jumped between a few thoughts, all of them the sort that felt like the moment right before you take the plunge. What had they been talking about? Why were they coming over? Why were they hanging out for so long? Why - Lynn blinked, and felt her pocket for her phone. It was turned off - and also back in her dorm. Lynn had been forgetting things lately. The one day she made it to class the previous week, she'd forgotten her bag. "I...shit, my bad," Lynn said, blinking. She turned to Keaton as she answered her question, keeping her voice steady but hoping to say more with her now-orange eyes. "Oh, you know. Who knows what kinds of interesting things you might turn up here," she said. Keaton and I need to meet again soon. I have to tell her about the loading docks.

Eli had asked more or less the same thing, and Lynn greeted her - to her own surprise, with a smile. "What's up," she said. Lynn looked around the crowded room and saw Eli meet Freaky D's gaze. Lynn felt her jaw tense. The last time he'd been present when kids got brought in, she'd wound up far closer to death than she'd admit. If he comes here, there could be problems. Christ, why don't he and Cara just fuck already and stop causing problems for the rest of us.

Lynn looked down at her cafeteria tray, freshly devoured. She was still hungry. "You think there's time to - "

The doors opened and Lynn's eyes widened. Her heart jumped and her mind flashed from here to a dozen different places, the sounds of gunshots blasting out glass and windows.

There were few things that Lynn was more qualified at than the other students her age. She was not as gentle as Archie. She was not as profound as Natalie, as sharp as Keaton, forgiving as Eli, artistic as Amelia, or have good watches like Fossil or whatever his nickname had been. She couldn't even flop as good as Fish. But Lynn, for better or worse, was perhaps the single most qualified person to handle a drive-by.

"Get the - " Lynn started to shout, but she was too slow. She'd always been too slow. The machine guns thundered and Amelia's neck exploded beside her, splattering Lynn with blood she did not register she felt across her face. Lynn was already dropping her tray, already -

The blow connected with Lynn's head and she crumpled to the floor, the world spinning. Lynn spat out a tooth. It would grow back in two weeks or so. She looked up.

Che shook his right hand, grimacing. The knuckles were red. "You burned me."

"I'm sorry," Lynn said, automatically - you said I'm sorry whenever you could, because you never knew when you did something wrong, and you wanted to get ahead of it and make sure Che didn't get mad. But this time Che wasn't mad. He was teaching her to be tough. She had to be tough.

"Come here," he said, pulling her back inside the house. Calling it a house was charitable - a few of Che's business partners this week owned it, and nearly everything was in a state of disarray. The TV alone functioned flawlessly, and he sat Lynn down before it. Her backpack with her grade school homework sat forgotten leaning against the couch that had been baptized in cigarette smoke a thousand times over. Che put something on TV. An old fight. Some of Lynn's favorites - though she didn't recognize the fighter.

"His name was Smokin' Joe."

He looked down at Lynn, who grinned, a trickle of blood oozing out. "Like me."

Che nodded, giving her the quarter-smile. She only once or twice got a half-smile - when she'd done a really important job for him and when she'd (for a moment, Lynn thought about the bottle, breaking in her hand, and her face, but then it was gone) - but she got the quarter-smiles every now and then. "Like you. You know what Smokin' Joe did? He never took a step back. Not a single fuckin' one. Always forward. He could take it."

"I can take it too."

"Good," Che said. On the chair beside them, a man in a drug-induced stupor drooled listlessly and stared at the screen, unaware entirely they'd changed it, but to Lynn, she may as well have been in a palace, kneeling before the monarch who was knighting her. "Because when you're a little older, I'll need you to. You have to rush in and keep us safe. Because you can take the hits. The others can't, they - "

Lynn was moving forward when suddenly she wasn't. Lynn was on the floor. Had she tripped? She blinked, looking around. She had been shot before, but not like this. Something was wrong. The center of her chest was a bloody mess, which irritated her more than it did frighten her, and her legs refused to work. Lynn didn't hurt as much as she thought she should, which was to be expected. Just felt like getting punched, real hard, at least until everything started falling out. Lynn grunted and went to pull herself up. She couldn't. The smell of the cafeteria floor being scorched as she cauterized her wounds filled the air along with the smell of gunpowder and blood and the smell of panic, of a hundred people ruining themselves as their bodies shut down and the rest sweating and shaking.

Lynn blinked. "No," she murmured. "No, fuck, fuck, no, damnit, get up!" she tried to push herself up again and nothing happened. She felt down and grabbed at her leg. She felt nothing. She ran her hand over the wound and around to her back. Christ. In the spine. Lynn leaned back down, trying to present as small a profile as possible - which, mercifully, was not difficult for her. She was going to die as a cripple. Weak. Broken. Amelia. Amelia can get me closer. Lynn dragged herself a foot or two closer and looked at the girl in front of her. Lynn's mind had been racing so fast she forgot the girl was shot. She was already pretty pale but she was getting pale a lot faster, and all the hair on the right side of her head was matted thick with blood. Lynn looked up at her for assent, grimaced, and uttered a quick, "Sorry."

She didn't know, in that brief moment, if she was apologizing that it was going to hurt, or if that she was going to look like Lynn after. With the sound of bullets tearing through the air a foot and a half over her head, that thought occurred to Lynn. You're gonna be ugly now, you poor bitch.

Then Lynn grabbed a hand over as much of the wound as she could and grunted. There was the smell of flesh being flash-scorched and the exit wound sealing off as she cauterized as much as she dared. Lynn thought she'd gotten the most of it, and uttered another - rare, genuine - apology as she rolled back over. everything below the sternum was numb. She couldn't crawl closer, she thought, her mind racing. If she did, she'd get gunned down before she ever get close. How many of them were there? Lynn couldn't see particularly well over a corpse next to her, a girl that looked barely older than her.

Lynn shut it out of her mind. She'd seen people who started noticing things like the necklace of the state of Montana around her neck or the t-shirt with a witty caption that was riddled with bullet holes on her. If you noticed stuff like that instead of how many of them there were, or what they were packing, you got killed too. Lynn could see one about thirty feet away. Even if Amelia had been hidden, she thought, Lynn didn't think she could teleport both of them over. She looked back over at them, desperation gnawing at her. Fucking do something, she wanted to scream. You're going to die on the floor like a crippled fucking coward?

Lynn twisted her neck back around the other way with utter disregard for the state of spine. She could see the others, it looked like Eli had been winged, but -

- Archie. When did he - Lynn saw him on the ground, bleeding. If he wasn't turning, then it must be bad, it must be as bad as Amelia's or even worse. She hesitated. She could pull herself over, she could cauterize him. Lynn didn't even know if him turning would be bad. If they were all going to die, at least these machine gun fuckers - Gennedy, if I live, I will burn you worse than you'll burn in hell she thought, amidst it all, furious, furious that nothing had ever worked for her, that she was going to die on the loading bay floors a hundred yards from a box with the proof she needed to find them - at least they might die too.

The guns behind her kept thundering, and Lynn felt her stomach turn cold and sick.

How many people were they shooting?

Archie was only one. Fifteen or twenty feet back from her.

Lynn turned back. Che would've left him to die, too, a little voice told her. And me, a South African voice whispered. And maybe when it's done you can still have your way with him before -

Lynn twisted onto her side, grunting from the exertion. Christ, this was bad. She took a breath or two for a moment, trying to steady herself. She pushed how awful she felt - Archie, bleeding on the floor, staring right at you - not away, but down onto the embers, and she stoked the coals. She could feel herself getting hotter. Wouldn't matter. Lynn reckoned her lifespan was in seconds, and if she withered here at least she'd melt a few - four people vaporized - with her. She stared, looking for anything she could use. They were getting smoked -

Lynn grinned, pain shooting through her as she reached into her pocket. She had to try and balance herself with what few muscles remained functional to her as she drew out her pack of cigarettes, trembling in her hands. You pussy, she thought. Stop acting like you're losing your gunshot virginity and do something. Lynn opened up the packet, pulling out one cigarette. She gripped it for a moment, taking a deep breath. It flickered alight, and she tucked it down in the pack. Timing. Timing was everything. She waited one moment, two -

The cigarettes were half-lit now, and the fire was spreading. Lynn hurled it as best she could at the nearest gunman. She'd never taken into account how much your back and core were needed for a good throw, and it landed a few feet off the mark - but it was close enough. The gunman stopped, turning to look at it for just a bare moment. Maybe he thought it was a grenade, or some kind of trick.

Little of both. Lynn tried to block everything out - the throbbing pain in her core, the screams all around her, him curled up on the floor in his own blood, Eli's leg, Amelia's neck - and focus on the pack of cigarettes. She watched the flame blossom up more and more, devouring the pack through the cardboard. Lynn took a deep breath and felt it flicker closer to her, as if it was pulling and yearning to be back to its master. Lynn could almost feel its heat, she thought. Lynn turned her focus to the machinegun in the man's gloved hands, the barrel already hot from the half-a-hundred rounds he'd rattled through it.

"Holy shit!" He muttered, twisting his .45 to examine it. The barrel was red hot, and it had kicked twice as hard as it usually did. Che rubbed at his wrist and looked at it, smoke rolling off the muzzle.

"Is that bad?"

"No," Che murmured, thinking, and grinning - a half-grin - staring at the weapon in his hand. "It's good. It's very good. We - "

Lynn saw as he kept firing, the barrel getting red hot. It was just water in a mug. She just had to boil the water. Not anybody else near her, not the bodies in front of her twitching and convulsing - not Montana Girl, who probably said smart ass things that would've annoyed Lynn, just the water in the mug. Lynn took another deep breath, pushing it all out. This was like round seven or eight. You were starting to get battered pretty bad but you weren't out yet. Lynn tried to feel the heat, tried to feel it with her own, as if she could set the whole world on fire with just a spark if she had to. The cigarette pack flared up beside the man, jumping to a foot and a half tall before it died back down, the cigarettes burned through. The strain of it was pulling at every inch of Lynn, as if each part of her body had tried to pull against itself, and she could feel her own flames flickering down as she pushed herself too hard. Christ the only class I'm passing is power training, let me fucking do this.

The man screamed in pain, hopping back. The tip of his barrel was white-hot, and some of the metal had dripped down onto his shoe, melting through. Lynn felt as though Spoons had picked up a freight train and beaten her with it. The edges of her vision were darkening and there was a dull thudding somewhere in her skull. Or chest. Both. She kept going. Once Lynn Frazier got smokin', after all, you couldn't stop her, and Eli and Lucy and Clarita were behind her. She bit down as hard as she could to keep from screaming and drawing any more attention than a girl on fire already would, and pushed the heat as much as she could - half her strength gone to fanning the thermal energy, the other to keeping it in the mug, to just the boiling water, to not letting the mug break.

He desperately tried to lift the machine gun and take aim, but the barrel was warping. He pulled the trigger and nothing happened. He fumbled, trying to clear the chamber, and that set it off. The bullet in the chamber exploded prematurely, and its brothers and sisters in the ammo box followed suit. Each one seemed to hit Lynn with a punch in the gut from the force it took to wear down their points of combustion, to aggravate the heat and flame that made them burst open, and to make the steel of the gun melt quicker.

The machine gun exploded in his hands, sending shrapnel back into his chest and arms, and making molten metal splatter up onto him. The man screamed in a language Lynn thought she vaguely recognized. Fish? she thought for a moment, blearily. Everything was spinning. You're joining me soon, bitch, she heard Salamandra giggle, wheezing as she leaned back against the wall. Was someone choking her? Lynn was having trouble catching her breath. The back of her neck felt bare, which didn't make sense, because she had hair there - and her skin felt cold, but there should've been clothes. Smoke clung to her, and the hand she was holding out to the gunman had fallen to the elbow, and then the wrist. No weight Lynn had ever lifted was so heavy as keeping her fingers off the ground, trying to strain her abilities, to hit this man with all the force she had, and more precision than she was capable of. Chinese, Lynn thought. Or, close the fuck enough, no one cares if a corpse is wrong.

"Hey fucker," Lynn wheezed. "I can't see the Great Wall from up here after all, you know, you - "

The man was screaming, reaching up with his mangled hands to his ski mask, which he was able to rip off with scalded fingers. Lynn hadn't been able to see before, but the molten metal had splashed to his face and was fusing the mask to his skin. Fucking right, Lynn thought. You're the sort of bastard who kills -

He looked up at Lynn with wide, horrified eyes. He was screaming. He couldn't have been more than thirteen years old. He was screaming. He had gangly long arms that were longer than his legs, they hadn't growed evenly. He was screaming. His face where he was trying to grow in facial hair was burning, melting through, superheated metal or molten barrel, it didn't matter, he couldn't get it off, couldn't get it out. He was screaming.

Lynn stared, suddenly colder than she had ever been in her whole life. "No. No, no, I didn't, I'm not, I didn't - "

Lynn turned, where one of his comrades had seen what happened. She knew what happened next. She wanted to think of a lot of things, but none of them came to her. Lynn ground her teeth against one another and tried to push herself up, to die on her feet, but nothing was working. The comrade raised a rifle and fired off a burst. Only one hit. Only one needed to. Keaton, Lynn thought, wildly. "The loading docks, the, they're, you have - "

Lynn had been hit very hard in her life. She had taken punches from fully grown men, and had Natalie thrown into her by a full-powered Archie, and been beaten at the hands of Salamandra. She had been shot before this, by bigger bullets at closer range. She'd been beaten in prison, in the ring, and jumped on the street.

Not a single blow to the head rocked her spine as much as that bullet did. If her skull had still been in tact, she might've snapped about how she'd been hit by a .45 round before, and it had hurt a hell of a lot worse. Instead her head snapped. It was slammed against the ground and went still. The world was running in front of her eyes, but half of it was dark. The floor was cool. Someone had spilled something. It felt wet. Warm. Lynn tried to move to get closer to the warm, because she was cold, she was very cold, but she couldn't move. Her legs weren't working. She didn't think any of her was working. Someone had spilled something. Her head hurt. Was she drunk? I killed a kid, Lynn thought, but even her thoughts were slurring. Was she back in the woods? I drank too much, Lynn thought. I drank too much. This was a bad joke. Keaton or Eli or Che would come and fix this. The restaurant, she's gonna get out of the restaurant and get him. She's gonna hurt him. But that didn't make sense. She had to cauterize him. There were lights, flickering, flickering. She couldn't see as good. There was something dripping in her left eye, she couldn't see so good out of it. There was no noise, though, and she thought they should be. No one was screaming any more. Lynn knew that was good.

Lynn blinked.

Or winked.

Name Change Request

Please change my username to "Luminous Beings" because I'm a filthy Yoda stan. Thank you.

The Promise - Second Star to the Right, and Straight on 'til Morning.

Lynn

Lynn looked up at Amelia as she spoke, her eyes doing their usual routine of comparing the girl against herself. As per usual, Lynn came up short. Though Amelia was maybe four inches taller at most, she had a good twenty pounds on Lynn. Lynn tried to puzzle a birth year or something of significance from her as she spoke. She can't be much older than me, Lynn thought. Christ. As she glanced around, it was clear that passers-by thought similarly. They looked at Amelia differently, like she was a teenager, and the looks at Lynn were more mixed. Some looked at her height, or the skeleton arms that extended from the six-times-over rolled up sleeves of her hoodie, and some at her tattoos. I gotta start rolling with some blind motherfuckers or something.

Lynn smirked at Amelia's comment. Well, at least she got it. Getting it was a hard concept to explain. Lynn wasn't entirely sure that Amelia Got It, but she Got It more than Nat, or him, or most. For a moment, unbidden, the drunk-hazed over memory of Watch Boy blurred into her mind. He Got It, Lynn thought. She hadn't really tried to sift through the foggy recollections of that night very much, but as she did, she remembered distinctly thinking there was something about him. Yeah, he walked like he just got out of boot camp. Lynn filed it away for later. He might be something worth looking into. Or, if nothing else, that watch was worth a few days' work at Vaquero. Lynn listened to Amelia's words with great interest, though she continued to eat and rarely looked back up at her once she started talking. It's a joke. But I wanna know what you think the punch line is.

Lynn's attempt at getting a firmer grasp on just who the girl who could teleport anywhere and stayed on the Promise was snapped as soon as she started talking about the jacket. In her algebra class, Lynn felt firmly like someone had picked her up and dropped her into Russia. Lynn's academic career was, in a word, abysmal, and each class the Promise threw at her seemed like some kind of cruel joke. They were talking about all kinds of academic sanctions and other things, or even putting her back a few grades, just because she missed a few (read: all) of her assigned tutoring sessions. The only classes she eked out a respectable performance in were her power training classes and in Spanish, where the teacher at least acknowledged she had a very functional, if crude, grasp of the language. In power training, Lynn was reminded of some of the boxing gyms near where she lived. Those were one of the few ways to Get Out, to find something in your life that had some semblance of discipline and order and meaning. Lynn had always wanted to join. Che wouldn't allow it.

But none of her classes hit Lynn with that feeling of utter helplessness and complete, dizzying confusion as what Amelia was talking about.

There was not a single part of what she said that Lynn could grab onto to understand. Having parents that took you shopping. Their being the worst. Clothes fancier than department stores. Their watching closely enough to force your fashion. Someone shaping you into a lady, which was some ethereal idea Lynn had given up on attaining around the age of ten. Having the money to buy something like that casually - and younger than they already were.

Lynn had thought going up to the Promise was going to be something that was utterly unnerving, the sort of shattering change that upended everything. But it was just a nicer-looking detention center with a better view. The last thirty seconds jarred her more than the rocket trip, than the meetings spent handcuffed to a table talking about the Promise's rehabilitation rates, than all of it.

Lynn wondered what Amelia's parents looked like. Her mom was easy, just - her, but older, more wrinkled, maybe, probably saggy the way old people got. Her father was middling height, his face an unformed blur, the space beyond the edges of the map. Lynn could understand someone's parents being the worst - she'd seen a fair few like that, and to the extent Gary had been a parent, he'd certainly been a strong contender for the worst as well (Again, the thought of him catching justice in prison brought an unconscious smile to Lynn's lips, the mental image of him throwing up a worthless, burned hand to stop an ass-beating the only pleasant vision of violence Lynn's imagination liked to conjure up). But how could parents that took you shopping for clothes be the worst? Lynn had parents, for a bit, the way crutches give you a leg again when you've broken it through and through. Lucy - her family. That had been good. But then Lynn had burned their house down, and the fuzzy haze of what Amelia talked about, of what Amelia had, had burned with it. They'd never said that was why. They'd waited a few months. But the conversation had come with the coded words they always used. Financial limitations and better situation for everyone and you'll always be welcome here. Lynn was angry at Amelia's story, but not sure who to direct it at, which made her angrier.

Lynn stared back at Amelia. Does she have a reason? Is it just being a brat? Lynn's hunch that she hadn't ever seen anything in the way of real shit seemed backed up so far - although in fairness to the girl, Lynn thought that of most people. Maybe she had now. She'd seen a man get his head blown halfway to hell and not lost her shit. She'd stayed in the woods, when Lynn had bet fully on her running.

Lynn swallowed the chunk of her cheeseburger she'd been chewing on for a good minute. "Huh," she said, still trying to process all the nuances and implications of Amelia's story. The last, least important part of the story that baffled Lynn was why Amelia didn't just steal both jackets. That seemed like such a plain and obvious solution to her. She could teleport. The fuck? Had Lynn been given a private moment to jot down her thoughts in her notebook, she would carved out a column on the page littered with lyrics and idle charcoal sketches to label Amelia firmly under the "NO FUCKING IDEA" category of humans.

And last but not least, whatever Amelia thought was pricey was certainly going to be beyond the pale for Lynn. Looks like I'm stealing a jacket, she thought. I could probably turn out Fish and make a few bucks, though. "It's a cool jacket," Lynn said, her tone more or less neutral. When Lynn was busy thinking, she liked to throw out anything non-committal. If they knew what was going on, they had something over you, and she didn't want Amelia knowing how little she understood her. Lynn briefly considered saying something incredibly jarring, to try and see how the girl would take it, but she was too shaken herself to pull that off.

She looked up and saw Keaton and Eli across the way. A quick flash of not jealousy, because Lynn didn't care, but something - flashed through her gut. Well how come they're hanging out and didn't ask me? Lynn wondered. That would complicate things. She needed to tell Keaton about her suspicions about the docking bay. Lynn would not ever have admitted it to herself, but she was practically giddy to tell the girl something she'd puzzled out on her own. I'm not dumb, Lynn thought. No one gives a fuck about algebra or stupid British novels or biology anyway. "Do we get to haze the new fish at all? Maybe that break dancing bastard will come kick somebody again."

The Promise - Second Star to the Right, and Straight on 'til Morning.

Lynn

Lynn looked up from the half-eaten sandwich (it sat atop five chicken tenders, fries, some egg rolls, a cheeseburger, and chips and salsa, all piled monstrously onto a cafeteria tray that even the strength-augmented Lynn seemed to have to trade off hands every few moments to hold steadily) she was chewing on to examine Amelia. Truthfully, Lynn had forgotten her nickname for her. Amelia was a tricky one for Lynn to pin down, which irritated Lynn to some degree. Lynn that she had Amelia on lock from that day in the woods - she saw too much, got scared, and ran on home. Lynn was fine with that, because running on home meant she wasn't in Lynn's way for anything. Admittedly, Amelia kept trying to start up conversations with her, which Lynn didn't fully understand. Lynn eyed over her leather jacket and thought for a moment as she chewed. As equal parts hunger and power move, Lynn rarely responded to people as soon as they talked to her when she was eating. In her experience, it fucked with them a little bit when they had to wonder if cafeteria food was more immediately important than they were.

But then Amelia had gone and not been an absolute pussy the night with Arianna. Neither she nor Eli had. Eli she figured was a fifty-fifty chance. The sheltered ones always think they have to play the hero. But Lynn had Amelia pegged as the type who liked to play at scoundrel but ran home when things got a little too real. She'd stuck around for the real. Lynn wouldn't have faulted anyone for leaving the mutilated Radvi when they saw that. Even for Lynn, that was some rough shit to look at. It made you kind of a coward, but that was Lynn's baseline for anyone who hadn't been to prison. Amelia had even come out into the woods after her, which irritated Lynn, but she had to admit that was because she had been a little bitch that night, and the presence of others to serve as witnesses to her bitchery only cemented it. Had they left her alone, she would've kept Schrodinger's little bitch locked in the box and away from prying eyes. Lynn knew the minute any of them thought she needed a get off the streets program or an inspirational talk about how much she could be, they would never leave her alone.

So when Lynn looked up at Amelia, it was with a hint of curiosity. Was she growing some balls? Or did she just want to play a hero? And why did she keep talking to Lynn? Lynn couldn't figure that one out, either. She must've wanted her food. There's, like, literally infinite food over there, though.

"Love horse," Lynn muttered. "That's what I oughta call that hostess." she swallowed and rolled her neck, stretching idly. "Oh, you know. Just seeing the sights." Lynn baptized a fry in ketchup and chewed on it. "Maybe I figure when the next lizard rages out on day one they'll need me to kick his ass again." Lynn funneled more food into her mouth with no regard for table manners. "Or maybe," Lynn said, figuring she'd toy with Amelia - or, at least, get a feeling for what she was here for - "I want to see what kind of jewelry's all the rage on Earth now." she swallowed and slurped at the largest size cup the cafeteria offered, filling her stomach with Coke. "You know. Necklaces. Bracelets. That sort of thing. I hear the cops practically hand them out to paras these days."

Lynn picked up the burger, leaning comfortably against the wall. They had about an hour or so, Lynn figured. Waiting didn't bother her. She'd done a lot of nothing but waiting in juvy. Now, though, there seemed to be more...company...in her thoughts when she waited. She didn't like that. So if Amelia wanted to distract her for a minute, that was fine, but Lynn was still unsure of this girl's motives.

That jacket. Lynn looked back at her, curious. "That jacket," Lynn said, curious. "You..." she examined it for a minute. "That from like a motorcycle or something?" Those things could take a little punishment, tough leather, lots of pockets -

There was a click in Lynn's head, and she grinned.

Knight takes fucking pawn, Gennedy. She had an idea. As always, Keaton could workshop it. The jacket wouldn't matter if she got captured trying to slip into the docking bay, but still - still. Something there to tuck away for later.

"Where'd you get it? Is there a store for it here?"

The Promise - Second Star to the Right, and Straight on 'til Morning.

Cordelia Lynn Holmes

Pork stuffed dumplings. They sat in the center of the table, sizzling hot. Lynn couldn't have any.

Archie had ordered them. Lynn sat next to Keaton, who picked at her meal dutifully, and Natalie rattled on about how she’d only told the truth. The truth, Lynn wanted to scoff, but knew not to start shit here, not when they’d just gotten in the clear for a few more precious hours. When Lynn moved her shoulder, pain rocketed down the joint, flaring up her entire shoulder blade. Lynn gasped with surprise.

“Aw, fuck,” she muttered, wincing and reaching with her good arm to massage it. How had she hurt it? She looked down at her arm, hanging limp and loose. The door, Lynn thought. Archie threw me into the door, I caught Spoons in the air. Lynn looked up, blinking. That wasn’t right. She still hadn’t been served yet, and the growling in her stomach grew louder and louder, like a prisoner rattling her ribcage like the bars of her cell. “Hey, how come - “

Archie was across from her. “"Shit, that sounds a lot like how dad used to be. Sorry you had to deal with that. At least the power was coolish, right?" Lynn zoned out for a moment, the gears in her head whirring as best they could with the pain of her arm, wretched and worthless, at her side. She’d heard all this before. She turned to Keaton, some kind of sinking feeling dragging down her starving stomach. “Keat,” she murmured, “I need you - I can’t figure out why - “

Archie had kept talking. “ - hope my incident on the first day isn't too much of a red mark. Worst I've had up until now on any kind of record was a detention in 10th grade." Lynn turned back and stared at him, ignoring Spoons and Denim alike. She could feel her hair, mousy auburn and not glowing at all, falling over her face in messy strands, disorganized as the thoughts in the head of the girl who had them. Why can’t anyone see my fucking arm? one half of her mind thought. The other focused on Archie. I don’t know if a deadbeat father is better than a revolving door of replacement ones. Or...Christ, nothing on your record until tenth grade? I didn't make it to tenth grade. Lynn could only think of her own record, a mountain of detention slips and elementary school write-ups before they’d transitioned to court orders and penitentiary forms. She bet Archie had good grades. Not as good as Denim, but okay, and okay was better than Lynn’s, and he probably never got in fights, he brought people flowers, and he never - the glass bottle hot as a sun for a moment before it burst, a shard firmly lodged in the bridge of her nose, clothes burning // a house, burning, burning more than a bottle of kerosone and dish soap should’ve // the gun barrel red as her hair, someone shouting “ìMátenlos, mátenlos!” and - //

Lynn remembered. This wasn’t right, there was going to be something bad, the breakout, or at least something like that. Arianna. The blue woman. She was small and scared but that wasn't right, the shovel, the flash, the burn. “Archie shut the fuck up, there’s - there’s a guy outside, some skull motherfucker, he - “

Keaton kept eating, and Spoons kept talking about some Spoons shit, the silver collar on her necklace beeping every few moments. Archie looked over at her with that look, bored and utterly fascinated all at once.

“Archie she’s - she wants to - “ Lynn couldn’t bring herself to say it. Her mind went to Gary, and the brutal shock he’d been in for when he’d gotten creative ideas, but Archie wasn’t like that. This was her. It had been the grace of God or the luck of the devil, whichever had felt more inclined to help Lynn that day, that had let her take out the lizard the first time. She could do it with a hand tied behind her back. Feverishly, Lynn tried to massage feeling back into her arm but it wouldn’t move. “Archie, please! Both of you, two, we have to fucking go!”

Archie turned to Lynn and gave her his characteristic, goofy grin. “Why?” he said, lighthearted as always. “You wouldn’t stop if we were here or not.” He looked down at the dumplings and shook his head. “You hate me. You burnt me.”

Archie’s chair was pulled backwards suddenly, and the legs of his seat were broken by a well-practiced axe kick, splintering the wood and causing the young man to fall onto his back as the seat fell apart. A hand, dark and glowing as magma fell against the table, and Lynn could- for the first time in her life- feel the heat behind her. She felt breath against her left ear. The drinks at the table were hissing as the liquids boiled. “You can’t burn me, though.”

Lynn turned to grab Keaton, to tell her to go, but it wasn’t her anymore, it was Lucy in an oversized denim jacket, threadbare and worn, a stained shirt pulling at the seams across her protruded stomach. Spoons was gone too, a Hispanic girl about eleven years old in her place, pulling at the cold silver around her neck. Lynn had the dropping feeling, the right at the top of the roller coaster drop feeling, of knowing that the worst is not about to come, that it’s there, waiting. She let her eyes pass over Archie - who should have been Archie - but it was Che, sitting as casually as he always did, his dark eyes boring back into her own and making hers look away, making them cold and small. The hand on her shoulder burned, and she understood why Archie hated her, why they all looked at her how they did. Lynn shrieked, trying to shove back but her arm wouldn’t work. It did nothing. Even if it would have the woman was too strong. Lynn struggled to push herself up out of the booth but a thunderclap of pain burst open in her knee and she crumpled back down, her right leg suddenly as worthless as her arm. “No, no, that’s not right, it - “ she looked down at her leg. All that remained of her kneecap was a bloody ruin of cloth and bone and bullet. Lynn wanted to look up at Salamandra, to stare her down as she did it, but her head wouldn’t turn. She couldn't look at Salamandra and none of them would look at Lynn as she looked to each of them, begging for help.

“You want so badly to be like them.” the voice said, still hot against her ear. “You want your perverted sense of normal. But you’re not. You wanted my help.” A hand, hot as burning coals against Lynn’s skin, grabbed her by the hair and twisted her head until she was staring down eyes as angry and yellow as the sun. There was a crunch of wood below her and the chair collapsed, but she was held up by whatever had its ironclad grasp of her head. She lurched, and was thrown away from the table like a dog discarding its chew toy. Lynn his the ground in a mess of limbs, but she had full view of Salamandra- the woman made of fire, with her foot against Archie’s chest and a predatory look on her inhuman features. The twin suns shifted from the boy to her once again, and she grinned. “You wanted to be just like me.”

“Don’t,” Lynn said, her voice croaking as she suffocated on the smoke. Salamandra stomped down on him - but she couldn’t tell if it was Che or Archie, or if there was any difference anymore. Keaton sat, pregnant and tired-looking, doing nothing as it went on. Behind her, the back of the restaurant was full of Christmas trees, and Salamandra had lit them all ablaze before walking in. Or did I? Lynn tried to remember. She burned a Christmas tree, one time. It had burned the house. It was Lucy's house. Her brain wasn’t working. Somewhere, deep down, she knew none of this was right - she should be healing, she shouldn’t be burned, she - Salamandra should be dead - but her brain was a small scrap of meat being pulled at by the mad dogs that were all the injuries on her body. Lynn struggled to pull herself up with one decent arm and leg and couldn’t, even with the wall behind her for support. She turned, grateful at least that it was her useless arm that had been scalded, and saw a dent in the restaurant’s wall, where someone had smashed something into it again, and again, and again. The linoleum floor below it was melted and hardened back over, an ugly scar of synthetic magma. Lynn looked back. “I didn’t…” she wasn’t sure what she wanted to say. She was going to be sick. “Che,” Lynn said, feeble even to herself. He was under Salamandra’s foot, looking at her, bored and fascinated at once, and pulling the petals off flowers. He held them against the woman's skin one by one and they caught fire, ash dusting down over him. He didn’t see to mind. “I need your help with something, Lynn.” He'd said that before, too, she knew.

“Che, Che I’m gonna die, she’s gonna - “

“The warehouse. I need you to come down with me and take care of something.” His voice was the way it always was. His tone was completely urgent and completely relaxed. She didn’t have a choice, because you never did with Che, but why would you want one, because he knew what the right thing was, and he had kept them all together so far. You just had to trust him. Even if it seemed wrong, it was right. For a bewildering moment, Lynn’s dizzy eyes noticed the hint of pudginess on his features, and the quality of the clothes he wore. That’s not right, though, Lynn thought. We had to steal just to get by, that’s why we all went hungry - he wouldn’t have...he didn’t have any more than we did. He rolled a quarter over his hand, because he was always doing something like that, fidgeting or playing with one thing or the other. Lynn felt like he was always bored with life, even though she had seen him angry, so furious he put holes in walls, or so furious he didn’t even raise his voice, he just spoke in a tone so cold and neutral they all wanted to curl up inside themselves. They had to do that sometimes. Lynn taught Clarita and Megan. When you saw things you weren't supposed to. You just went somewhere else. But that didn’t matter, because - well, his voice was never sweet, but there were times it was something like that, and that evened it out. But this Che was more like Archie, she thought, and she didn’t get it. Che would’ve helped fight Salamandra. Would he? Lynn thought, trying to remember. He didn’t at the end. Something at the end went wrong. None of them would help. Some sobering thought came. They wouldn't help, she remembered. They fucked me over. All of them fucked me over.

Lynn knew that had happened before too, they’d gone to a warehouse, it was the one the fight club was at, but she couldn’t remember what or why, or why Che wouldn’t help her. Salamandra was going to kill him, and she was going to do things to Archie, but he just kept pulling flowers, doing nothing. Amelia wasn’t even here. Eli was somewhere, and Lynn tried to figure out how she knew both that Eli existed and that she hadn’t met Eli yet. Lynn’s orange jumpsuit was singed and shredded, struggling to offer her any privacy, and she could see through the window a crowd was gathering, staring. Lynn turned back to Salamandra. “You were gonna kill me,” Lynn said, her voice wheezing. “You - when Gennedy put me away. You would’ve shivved me.” It sounded like a lie, even to her. She knew it was at least a little true. She knew because she would’ve done the same thing to her. “I…” Lynn’s voice trailed off, lost between the pain in her knee and her nose and her shoulder and all the burned skin on her neck and arm, the scarred marks where Salamandra had lain her fingers.

“I told you to leave.” Salamandra said to her. Archie, or Che, or whoever it had been was gone now. “But you didn’t. I didn’t kill you.”

There was an earth shattering roar from somewhere within the bowels of the restaurant, out of view. It was enough to make even the living flame before her uneasy. Salamandra shook her head and locked eyes with Lynn. “I didn’t kill you.”

She approached with purpose to every step until she was right on top of Lynn, six or seven feet over the girl on the floor. Lynn threw her good hand and the woman didn’t even attempt to block it, her hand hitting the woman’s calf and doing nothing. She had Lynn by her collar- somehow burning the skin against her knuckles but not the clothes she wore. With her off hand Salamandra forced her against the wall where the dent was. For a brief moment, Lynn was aware of how painfully tight the skin around the bridge of her nose was, of how opening her mouth to scream pulled the gash apart even further - but then the woman’s burning fingers were on her throat and smoke was in her mouth and she could not even scream. Salamandra had her by her hair, the slight sting of knotted tangles being ripped lost in the frenzy of everything else. Through Salamandra’s legs, she could see Archie on the floor, unharmed but for a hand that was completely burned off. Keaton and Natalie had just gone. The crowd outside lost interest, and the Christmas trees burned farther and farther away as Salamandra’s hands tightened. She saw shapes, but it was hard to make out where colors began and ended. Lynn couldn’t hear in the ear against the wall anymore, and was only vaguely aware of something running out of her ear and down her cheek before sizzling and scalding her skin.

“I didn’t kill you.”

Somewhere, Che was telling her she was a pussy, that she wasn’t even fighting any more, but Lynn’s fingers couldn’t find anywhere weak or exposed on the woman, everywhere she touched only burned.

She felt the pull of her hair again and a pain in her eyes as she realized they were boiling, and the world was dark and on fire before her skull dented the wall again, her throat tighter and tighter.

“I didn’t kill you.”

Again. Lynn didn’t feel the pain in her knee any longer, and she could remember the warehouse and the pistol blast for only a moment before it was gone too, and her weak arm wasn’t even her weak arm anymore, because the other one was burned useless from trying to pry the devil’s hands off her throat. She didn’t feel anything but her head, the way the skin on her lips peeled back and the blood thundered in the vessels around her skull.

“I didn’t kill you.”

Lynn felt her head go back against the wall one more time and blinked.

She was on the floor of her dorm room. Her clothes were burned off. She had not woken in a cold sweat, but her whole body was steaming, and there was the smell of burning synthetic fabric from where she’d scorched the mattress before falling over. The back of her head smarted from where she’d hit the floor, and Lynn pulled herself up against the base of the bed, knees to her chest, gasping. She’d disabled the fire alarm on her room on day one - one of the few security oversights the Promise had caught and fully decided to ignore - and Lynn was free to fumble at the pile of belongings next to her bed that had scattered when she fell. She grabbed a pack of cigarettes and got one into her mouth, the end lighting as soon as her fingers wrapped around it.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Lynn muttered, rocking back and forth. The Xan was right there. Right there. She just had to grab it and take one and she could go back to sleep.

Lynn grabbed the bottle and hurled it across the room. She’d probably ruined the fucking thing with the heat anyways. The cigarette was burned out about thirty seconds after Lynn put it to her lips, and she grabbed for another one, breathing deep. As she did, her skin and hair shimmered like coals, surging back to life with a blast of air and dying back down as it went away. Lynn idly ran her thumb, nail chewed to the cuticle, across the jagged scar on her kneecap.

Lynn sat still for a few minutes, breathing. She grabbed for her phone and flipped it open, eyes watering from the bright light. ”Hey I know this is really weird but can I just come over and sleep on the floor or something I won’t make any noise I just - Lynn stopped, watching the line flicker as she thought of the next letter. She deleted the message and shut it, putting the phone back down.

She climbed back into bed and stared up at the ceiling.

After an hour of that, she got her things and went to the gym.

in collaboration with JunkMail

---

The time in the hospital had been frustrating. The doctor patiently explained the concepts of healthy self-image and proper, balanced diets to Lynn, and marvelled at how quickly her appetite seemed to return. Lynn's stay was only two days, but she was able to have a bit of fun with it. Lynn, in a tearful display of thanks, palmed the doctor's wallet from his lab coat and ordered flowers to her own room. She left the wallet on the table next to some brochures ("I'm so forgetful!") and went down to the front desk.

"He's not supposed to have visitors," they told her.

"Please," Lynn said. "I helped save him and I just want to be sure he's okay. I promise I won't get him sick. My temperature's too high."

The woman relented - Radvi had stabilized, after all - and permitted Lynn a short visit.

"I think the docs here are as dumb as the cops," Lynn said, throwing the flowers down onto the bedside table and lounging in the chair next to Radvi. It seldom happened that Lynn was wrong - in her experience, she was right about nearly everything - but she had been wrong on this one. He had survived. His face was bandaged and gauzed so heavily you could barely see the eye that he had left, and he had all those Darth Vader machines hooked up to him. "You shitting in a bag and all, I guess?" Lynn asked, staring at him. No response.

"Well, I'm a woman of my word. Flowers. You can thank the pediatrician they have on staff. If I really wanted to do Arianna's job for her, I'd just get him assigned to take care of you." Lynn stared at the body and the machines that breathed it. "Jesus. You're fucked." Lynn leaned back in the chair, resting her feet on the hospital bed. "You know, I figure this is the safest place on the Promise right now. This room. Because I remember - " she almost said Keaton telling me, but Cara was always, always listening. Her gloating had almost gotten her. "I remember someone telling me that after that little event at the mall, the cops had come after that robot. And yet you come running through the woods with him. And Gennedy tells me that robot's dead when he did his illegal shakedown, which you seem to be fine with." Lynn rocked back and forth, sipping on the weight gain shake she was required to drink every four hours. Admittedly, they did taste good, but Lynn was sure that was only because that doctor had nothing to do with their preparation. She brushed a glowing white strand of hair out of her face and kept talking. "So I think maybe all you uniforms aren't on the same page. I think maybe you found out some shit, which is why only you came out in the woods, what with those trackers and whatnot. So if I was Arianna, and I'm not, for whoever's listening - I'd try and make you look as crazy and dumb as possible. Which is pretty easy, given, you know." Lynn shrugged. Lynn chewed on her lip. It wasn't fun when he was asleep. In fact, she felt like a bit of a bitch.

Not enough to stop, but still. Lynn crushed her guilt, the way you were supposed to do. He's a part of it, Lynn told herself. It doesn't matter Eli doesn't see it in him. He kills kids.

Then it felt sweet again.

"You know, I didn't get a good look at you in the station. Surprised I'm not already hauled back in. Probably guilty of keeping too much blood in your body or something. But you're older than I thought. I guess, you know - " Lynn shrugged. He would've gotten it if he was awake. "But still." Lynn leaned over and picked up his hand. Cold. "No ring. So - " she paused, looking. On the table was a necklace, which men shouldn't wear in Lynn's opinion unless they had giant clocks attached to them or were made of pure gold, on which a ring rested. A bracelet, too, not entirely unlike - Lynn shifted on her feet, letting Radvi's hand fall from hers. She hadn't pulled that bracelet out in...in a while. Lynn looked back at him, embarrassed for feeling embarrassed in front of a half-dead man. "...divorced, then?" Lynn asked. "Not surprising. Probably a revolving bedroom door back home when you're up here and she's down there. Shame about the kid though." Lynn stared down at him, feeling her blood literally boil. How do you be a part of this when you have a fucking kid, Radvi? Lynn stood up. The nurses would come soon. She looked down at him. He looked weak and broken and pathetic. It scared her. That taser, she thought. That taser is the only thing between you and him. Except they won't spend the money to keep you alive.

"I don't know your first name," Lynn said softly. "Don't really give a shit. But I'll level with you. If you hadn't come, there's a good chance Arianna kills me. I'm not saying I owe you one. Maybe so, maybe not. There's a lot more on that scoreboard to sort out. But when I see her, I'll get one in for you." Lynn put her hands in her pockets and turned to walk away.

"Because fuck knows you won't be able to shoot her."

---

The restaurant was busy, as always.

Lynn was scraping food off into the trash. How do people throw away this much? Shit doesn't grow on trees. Well, she supposed some of it did. Not the chickens and cows or whatever thou-

"Ignacio," Lynn asked, eyes widening. "Where do they keep all that shit?"

Ignacio looked at her tentatively, not willing to give an answer that may incriminate him in a court of law.

"I mean, like - food."

"The fridge."

"No, fucker, I mean, like - " she paused, mind racing. Of course. It's how D got on. "Where - where does all this come from? Do they grow it here? Like is there a farm section with cows and stuff?"

He looked at her like she was insane. "They just ship it all up. I've got a friend who helps move all that stuff. Para. Strong guy. It's easy for him."

Lynn turned back to the plate, grinning. "Huh. Interesting. Where do they unload it?"

"I guess same place the kids come on, I don't know. You going to do your job or you gonna ask about how they keep the lights on next?"

"No problem," Lynn said, smiling.

---

Lynn knelt in the forest, rolling over a tape measure in her hands. The taser had been gone when she'd gone back. She'd scoured the area, but someone else had gotten it. Arianna. She turned her mind to the question at hand.

"This is fucked up," she muttered to herself. "Alright, I guess a twelve year old's probably, like, I dunno. Four and a half feet?" Lynn looked at the tape measure. "Well, shit, I could've just laid down." She knelt, staring at the tiles, visualizing it. "And maybe, like, a foot deep?" she chewed on the back of her hand. "I'm not really a good frame of reference there. But would they...would it be in like a pod? Like some Matrix shit, or..." Lynn's mind wandered off. They'd need to move people in bulk. They got food in on the Promise once a month. Would they move in more people with the other students? That was probably too high-profile. Or was that exactly the point? To smuggle in the test subjects while everyone else was having fun?

Lynn drummed her fingers on her hands. Kids are gonna die because you're too dumb, a voice told her. It had a vague South African accent.

Lynn stared back at the dirt. "So...I guess this doesn't matter if I don't know, like, the ship size." she closed her eyes and tried to remember the shuttle up. They'd fit about fifty kids in there, she thought, but maybe more or less. Surely they could fit more if they were all unconscious. "No, they have to be strapped like that, or they'll just get killed by the recoil when they hit space." Space recoil. That wasn't right. She needed to bounce this off Keaton. "So...are there secret shipments? I'd hide them in the other stuff, personally. So they must be paying off these dock workers." Yeah, that seemed right. "Even if, like, there's just two really strong motherfuckers carrying all these bodies, they gotta - " Lynn stopped, thinking. No, that wasn't right. If it was hidden as something else, maybe they really wouldn't.

She hadn't established much, least of all the volume of a twelve year old, but it was a start. While Lynn's spatial reasoning needed fine-tuning, she was confident she was on, if not the right trail, at least a trail that might at one point intersect with the right one. She'd need Keaton for the rest of this.

---

"Be at the loading bay or be square!"

Lynn had looked at her phone. "Huh. So Cara was white."

---

Lynn leaned back against the wall of the Loading Bay. She felt safest with her back to a wall. "They really cleaned this motherfucker up, huh?" she muttered, looking around. She was waiting for the new arrivals, a tray of food from the cafteria in one hand, the other shoveling it into her face. Lynn did not turn down any opportunities to eat, particularly if it was out in public. I just need to shut that doctor and his emails up. Lynn swallowed. She would rather have been around the more private areas of the loading bay, but they were tricky to get to, and security was too high since the breakout. Eyes were everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. This would have to do. She could pass something useful along to Keaton if nothing else. I'll count the number of kids, Lynn thought. Maybe try and get back towards the shuttle if I can. I bet I could get one of them to claim he dropped something in the hallway back. Lynn didn't like that. Too many things could go wrong. Still, Lynn was starting to bet against the Promise's security whenever she could.

She leaned back, chewing, the fork and knife on her plate unused and forgotten. There'd be something useful out of this.

If nothing else, she wanted to see the ones who came on in chains, in collars, who had as much hate across their faces at this pretty prison as she had.

The Promise - Second Star to the Right, and Straight on 'til Morning.

Cordelia Lynn Holmes

Lynn had seen and done a lot in her sixteen (potentially - Lynn's birth records were neither the most accurate nor the most accessible) years, both those spent on the earth and above it. She had many what she may call "four a.m." experiences - those being times or instances when something was so strange and twisted and warped, it could not have happened at any other time. It was the sort of thing you could only experience with someone else because it was so singular - just a brief, fleeting minute. Seeing a crackhead in a Gravity Falls t-shirt trying to break open a soda machine for money and getting baptised in Fanta. Seeing someone attempt to start a riot, slip, and instead create a strange, prison-wide moment of unity in laughing. Seeing a boy turn into an eleven foot tall lizard after a metallic robot dropped down, music blaring, and kicked him in the head.

"We should - "

Lynn was in the hospital. It was four a.m. in her head.

Lynn would've felt bad for Radvi if he was awake, because she instinctively seized as tight as she could onto whatever she was holding, which happened to be an exposed part of his jawbone. Lynn had taken some nasty punches that left her head spinning but nothing like this. The air was all of a sudden different, clean and sanitized and bleached, and there was fluorescent light stabbing into her eyes, and they were surrounded by people. It was like going from being asleep to all of a roller coaster in under a second, and when the rollercoaster ended she was back asleep in a bad dream.

Lynn stumbled up from the body. Had she entered the doors normally, she would already have been restrained by doctors and checked for injuries. As it was, the sheer element of surprise had stunned the nurses nearby and Lynn was able to make it to the closest trash can where she hurled what little material was still left in her stomach. Lab coats had swarmed Radvi already and taken him away, and Lynn washed her hands of it. He was a dead man, but the others were welcome to try their best. She planned on walking home, showering, and sleeping.

"Go straight to hell, Amelia, what, what the fu-" Lynn's chest clenched. Her chest and belly were sore from the vomiting and she heaved again, her heart rate finally starting to slow down from the complete panic.

Lynn turned and looked up, thin wisps of smoke curling off her lips. A doctor had turned the corner due to all the clamor. Wait, she recognized him. The motherfucker with the puppets!

"Lynn," he said, a look of concern on his face - one slightly more paternal than any given person may have at seeing a person covered in blood. He fumbled in his pocket for a brochure, one she'd read out of boredom and burned out of greater boredom - Healthy Weight Goals and Dangerous Weight Loss. "You don't need to vomit, you -"

"I hate this motherfucking station," Lynn whispered to herself, fingers bending the metal of the trash can.