“Right. I’m ready.” She drank it, making her lemon-eating face. “Ugh, never gets better.” She wiped her lips and handed the empty vial back to him.
“Let’s go.” He trotted down the steps, into the fire. I followed him.
The fire felt like a tickle, and for a moment, all I could see were the red and amber flames. We passed through it and then waited for Gabriela. And waited.
“She’s not going to do it,” Maximus said.
“She will. Just wait.”
We waited.
“What happens if she doesn’t believe it will work?” I whispered.
“Then we’ll hear a lot of screaming.”
Through the earpiece, Gabriela said,“Not helpful. I just…need a minute.”
Plunging back up through the flames, I found Gabriela on the other side, huddled against the wall. I took her hand. “Hey, you can do this.”
She shook her head. Tears were welling up in her eyes. “I thought I was ready for an adventure. I wanted this, the excitement, the magic—my life was so boring. I wanted special. I wanted to prove to you that I’m worthy of having impossible dreams. But now that we’re here, and you’re depending on me—”
“Quit it with the melodrama,” I interrupted. Pulling her forward, I drew her hand into the flame. She resisted, but I kept pulling her closer. Her feet began shuffling, like she wanted to bolt. I made more soothing noises, as if she were a horse I was trying to coax with an apple. “I’m right here. You can do this. It’ll be okay.”
She squeezed her eyes shut but stopped trying to yank her hand away.
Flames licked over her fingers and her wrist. But she didn’t cry out—the spell was working fine. “You know the spell will work, right? You tested it. You trained with it. You believe in it, don’t you?”
“Yes, but…Sky, it’s me. I don’t believe inme.I’m just ordinary, boring Gabriela.”
“You are anything but ordinary and boring.” I clasped her hands and stared at her until she reluctantly met my eyes. “Would an ordinary and boring person have wanted to join my crew? Would an ordinary and boring person have trained for two weeks to do things she thought her body could never do? Would she trust someone who made outrageous claims and promised impossible things?”
She had fresh tears in her eyes, but she was nodding a little, listening.
“Hold my hand, and we’ll do it together, okay?”
Hand in hand, we walked through the flames.
On the other side, I heard her exhale in a whoosh that sounded like a gust of wind. Her smile was so bright that I was half surprised she wasn’t glowing. Maximus knelt and extinguished a bit of flame that had nested on her sock. She bit back a shriek, letting it out as only a smallMeep!
“We’re down,” I whispered to Ryan. “Are these camerasout?”
“Hold,”he whispered back.
We waited on the third-to-bottom step, jumbled together. I heard Gabriela breathing close to my left ear and felt the warmth of Maximus’s arm pressed against my shoulder.
Again, I touched Gabriela’s hand with mine and glanced at her. In the shadows of the stairwell, I couldn’t see her face, but she squeezed my fingers.
“You did it,” I told her.
“I’m sorry I hesitated. It was just…Fire. Spells. Suddenly, it hit me that this is all real. And I’m doing this.” Gabriela was smiling. I was sure of it—I could hear it in her voice.
Maximus drawled, “Great. Congrats. Now could you do something about that wyvern detection spell, please?”
“Oh! Yes.” She stepped forward and knelt in front of a camera that we knew was active with the spell—her job now was easy. Just block it from seeing us. Blind it with her humanity. Ryan had already taken care of the actual security feed. To neutralize the spell, she just had to be herself.
And now it was my turn.
I tossed flour into the corridor. It lingered on the laser beams, and I began to move, cartwheeling forward, holding, and then ducking and stepping. Another cartwheel. Lean back.
