Not real.
The bedsheets catch aflame.
This is New York, Jessie’s apartment, her new life with James. She is supposed to wake up, hungover, to the smell of Jessie’s chocolate-chip pancakes,notthe smell of smoke.
A scream rips the air from another room, and Nelle’s blood ices over.
Real.
As if she has been floating on the ceiling, Nelle feels herself fall back into her body. With all the strength she can muster, she shoves James off the mattress. He rolls away with the blankets, collapsing on the floor with a harsh thud and a groan.
“What the—”
Fire climbs the walls, the ceiling, the floor, an unrecognizable hellscape, but James assesses the situation much faster than Nelle did, on his feet in an instant. His hand finds hers, she snatches up her canvas bag with her journal inside, and they are out the door, sprinting into the living room. Smoke clogs the room, but Nelle doesn’t need air to survive. She’s invincible. The others aren’t.
Nelle holds the back of James’s neck, pressing her forehead to his. “I can’t die, but you can, so you have to get out of this building right now.”
A far-off siren wails.
“But Jessie and Lena,” he says. “They’re back there.”
“Ican’t die.” Nelle bites the words out. No time to argue with him, so she pushes him toward the apartment door and whirls back to save the others.
The flames flock to her in the narrow hall, but she runs through them, wincing at every lashing burn. It’s a tunnel of fire, and she’s cutting straight through. The metal doorknob to Jessie’s room scalds her palm, but Nelle has no choice. Skin searing, she squeezes the knob and twists. The bedroom is engulfed in fire, opaque with smoke.
Nelle enters cautiously, unable to see farther than a few feet. Luckily, New York apartments are small, so there’s not much ground to cover. She accidentally kicks something both solid and squishy and bends to feel a woman’s body. Another beside it.
Oh God.She leans down, smoke stinging her tear ducts, grabs their hands, and pulls.
“Come on,” she says through gritted teeth. “Comeon.”
Jessie wheezes out a shredded cough, still somewhat conscious.
“Help me,” she croaks, nudging Lena’s motionless body.
Nelle scoops one arm under Lena’s shoulder, and Jessie takes her other side. Lena is taller than both of them, so supporting her is an awkward act of pushing her upward between them. Together, they move to the open door and pause at the fire raging in the hall. Nelle can sprint through, but Jessie and Lena stand no chance.
“New plan,” Nelle says, her voice barely a rasp. She retreats into the bedroom and hobbles with Lena and Jessie to the window, which reflects the orange firelight. Nelle’s right hand fumbles around the edges for a lock until she finds the mechanism at the bottom, near the wooden sill lined with crystals. She tries to twist it free, but it’s stuck.
“Is there a trick to get this open?” She grits her teeth and pulls, but Lena’s weight is dragging her down.
“I never could,” Jessie says. “The wood’s warped.”
“Can you hold her?”
Jessie struggles to keep Lena’s full body upright. Nelle clutches the lock and pulls, but her grip is too weak, or the window is sealed shut, because itjust won’t budge. She cries, more from frustration now than smoke.
So she gets one night, and that’s it? One night with James, with Jessie, with Lena, pretending to live this new life, and then it’s all over, just like that?
Regret washes over her like acid rain, each droplet a painful reminder that none of this would have happened if she had taken Penelope’s advice. She pounds her fists against the window, sobbing, trying to ignore Jessie’s pleas to keep trying, keep trying, as she sags under Lena. But Nelle can’t open a window that won’t open. And she can’t get two people safely through an apartment on fire.
Maybe James made it out.
Even with her unnatural abilities, the smoke is hurting Nelle faster than she can recover. She is too weak to stand, slipping into unconsciousness. She can’t quite heal quick enough.
When a pair of arms scoop her up, when she sees, through the haze, an angel in an oxygen mask, she can’t tell if it’s real or a dream.
The entire building is a feast for the flames. James stands across the street, his view of the front steps obscured by a red fire truck. Everything is chaos. Firemen and police swarm the scene, along with worried pedestrians and residents. Hoses shoot thousands of gallons of water at his home. Then, illuminated by the fire inside, Nelle appears in Jessie’s bedroom window like she’s inside an oven, backlit by orange, banging on the glass to get out.
