So I breathed in all the fresh air I could and listened. Above the crackling flames, I could hear sharp, excited murmurs echoing back and forth through the alley, although the gunshots had stopped. The cops were still stationed out there, waiting for me to stumble outside and die. Even if they weren’t in Madeline’s pocket, they’d want revenge for my supposedly killing Dobson, and they’d be all too happy to empty their guns into me until I was dead.
BOOM!
Something exploded inside the storefront, the flames spewing all the way back here and cranking up the heat that much more. I sucked in another lungful of air, then turned back to face my makeshift fort.
There were so many bags of ice and boxes of food that they hadn’t started to melt yet, but it was only a matter of time before they did. So I reached out with both hands and touched the closest one—another box of frozen peas—then focused on my Ice magic, on all that cold, cold power buried deep inside me. I concentrated, and silver lights flared in both my palms, centered in my spider rune scars. I drew in a shallow breath, not wanting to inhale too much more smoke, then unleashed my magic.
I sent my power racing through all the bags and boxes stacked around me, filling in all the cracks and crevices between them with my elemental Ice. Slowly, the cold crystals of my power began to spread, until I’d sealed all the bags and boxes into a solid, frozen mass around me. But that wasn’t going to be enough to save me from the fire, so I pushed out another wave of Ice, making the crystals spread out from the top of my frozen-food fort and the brick walls all around me at the same time.
It was difficult, especially with the smoke washing over me and the flames creeping closer and closer, but I forced the Ice out in wave after frosty wave, until all the separate sheets met directly over my head, completely sealing me off from the fire, and creating the crudest sort of igloo.
But I didn’t stop there. I might be walled off from the fire, but the flames still flickered outside my crystal cage, casting bright, twisting glows in all directions, as though I were staring into the center of a lit candle. Before long the fire would wash over my igloo, cooking the food and me too if I wasn’t careful, so I poured all my strength, all my energy, all my power, into making all those sheets and layers and wedges of Ice as thick and cold and hard and solid as I could.
I didn’t know how long I did that. It seemed like hours, but it couldn’t have been more than a minute, two tops. But all too soon, I exhausted what magic I had, and I slumped back against the wall. This was the choice I’d made, for better or worse, and now all I could do was hope that I’d been clever and strong enough to save myself.
Otherwise, I would soon burn to death, just as my mother and sister had before me, and die in the Pork Pit, just as Fletcher had before me.
So with my frozen-food fort complete, and my magic gone, I put my nose and mouth up against my breathing hole, closed my eyes, and waited for the flames to come.
* * *
There was nothing to do but keep breathing, hoping that every lungful of foul, disgusting, garbage-scented air I drew in wouldn’t be my last. I didn’t know if it was the smoke or my exhaustion, but I found myself thinking back to the fight at the warehouse all those years ago. I didn’t think that I was dreaming, but I fell into the memories all the same. . . .
We’d gone from being in trouble to being buried alive.
I didn’t know how long the explosions had ripped through the building. It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes, but the concussive boom-boom-booms seemed as though they would never end. Just like my joyride inside the barrel, which rocked and rattled like a roller coaster as it was pushed every which way by the force of the explosions. All I could do was brace my arms and legs against the inside of the container and hope that it would soon be over.
And it was.
One second, I was listening to the roar of the warehouse shake, quake, fracture, and blow apart, with chunks of concrete, rebar, and more bang-bang-banging against my barrel like it was the centerpiece of a drum set. The next second, everything was quiet—eerily so—the barrel was still, and the only noise was the too-loud thump-thump-thump of my racing heart.
It was so dark that I couldn’t even see the clouds of concrete dust that choked me as I sucked down breath after breath. Slowly, my heart fell back down into a slower, more natural rhythm, and my desperate pants for air eased as the dust dissipated. I huddled inside the barrel, straining with my ears, hoping to hear something, anything that would tell me that I was still alive and not just dreaming that I’d survived.
Silence—complete silence.
That hot, sweaty panic rose up in me again, but I ruthlessly squashed it. Breath by breath, the roar of the explosions leaked out of my ears, and small noises bubbled up to fill in the silence. The steady hiss-hiss-hiss of water from busted pipes. The crackle-crackle of a fire burning nearby. Other moans and shrieks and creak-creak-creaks, as if the warehouse were a wounded animal in the last dregs of its death throes.
When I felt steady enough, I stretched my hands out into the waiting blackness. Rocks, pipes, and slabs of concrete covered the opening of the barrel, but they were a loose, jumbled heap, and it was easy enough for me to claw my way through them, grab hold of the edge of the container, and pull myself out of it. I slid forward, surfing down another pile of rubble, and lay there panting amid the crushed remains of the cinder-block walls, extremely grateful to have survived something I shouldn’t have.
All of the lights were gone, destroyed by the explosions, but small fires burned here and there in the debris, along with the occasional blue-white spark of a live electrical wire, ripped free from its source. The full moon and sprinkling of stars in the sky added a pale silver glow to the ruins, softening the harsh edges and making it seem as though I were lying in the middle of an exotic lunar landscape and not the utter demolition of a building. Still, as I looked around, there was one thing I didn’t see—the barrel the old man had taken refuge in.
“Fletcher!” I hissed. “Fletcher!”
He didn’t respond. He might be experiencing the same ringing ears that I had and couldn’t hear me. That was what I told myself. Not that he was dead. Not that his barrel had caved in and that he’d been crushed to death by the falling debris. I couldn’t let myself think that way. I wouldn’t.
So I wrapped my hands around a length of rebar and pulled myself up into a seated position so I could take stock of my injuries. I was in pretty decent shape, all things considered, mostly just bruised, battered, and achingly sore from all the rolling around in the barrel—