“Nine hundred and six degrees,” Dell Conagher said, with a vicious flourish of his wrist underlining the number he had just scrawled on the chalkboard. His jacket flared out as he whirled on the administrator’s assistant, the melted teeth scraping the cheap drywall. “Nine hundred and six. Ma’am, magma is the same temperature as whatever you’ve got in there. You do not need firefighters. You need to stop whatever the hell it is you’re doing that’s burning holes in the walls.”
“Is that all?” said the assistant, curiously. “I would have thought the temperature would be higher. I can get you and your men suits rated for volcano work, would that help?”
Dell had been fully prepared to argue for these suits for an hour. “Well,” he said, grimacing. “Yes, I suppose.”
No one was allowed to see what was causing the fires, which was insane. Some kind of experiment, Dell figured; maybe some kind of weapon. They were always looking for better weapons, what with the Cold War.
He followed his guidelines. His team was smart and capable and they built the bunker to the specifications. Inches upon inches of metal, separated by both running water and fire-suppressant chemicals. And once, maybe twice a week they would be called back to patch a hole in a wall. He didn’t overthink it.
Until he found what was unmistakably a hand print burned into one wall.
Well, he was just a contractor. He wasn’t supposed to have access to any of this.
One trip back to fix another buckling, molten wall saw him meandering down the wrong hallway for the restroom. He was curious, he could not help it. And the glow that came from what he recognized as the second, smaller bunker they’d been asked to build led him to think he was headed the right way.
He had expected to see almost anything else, except for the dark woman lying asleep on a cot with a live flame crawling smokelessly over her.
In his startle he slammed his hand on the door, trying to wake her. This worked. She lurched awake, and all at once the flame died.
They stared at one another. She had orange eyes.
In his shock, he told Kieran. Kieran gave him a strange sort of look and asked if he’d gotten too close to the suppressant chemicals.
Dell didn’t tell anyone else.
More than once he crept back. Often the woman was not there. Once she was, and looked utterly normal. She was human indeed, with darker skin than his and scraggly, cropped black hair and a tired expression. Half of her face was all scarred, burns, by the look of it.
He watched her for as long as he could, until she noticed him again. This time she came up to the door and watched him back, unblinking. The door had only a small glass window, and she put her hand on it. As if compelled, he mirrored her. The glass was at least an inch thick, but within seconds he realized it was several degrees warmer than it should have been. The motion seemed to affect her; she smiled, fractionally, and tented her hand so only the fingertips touched the glass. Again he mirrored her, and something like relief colored her face. She said something, but he could not make out what.
“Who are you?” he murmured. And then he heard footsteps, and had to hurry away down the hall, leaving the woman behind.
It was happenstance that he saw her outside of her room. He was adjacent to the testing room (which was small and cramped and echoey), patching what he would have sworn were gunshot holes and definitely not what he had been hired to do. Some order to his men to leave had been made, and he was not privy to it until he walked out to find them gone.
And she was there.
She was in scrub-like clothes, pathetic things, and looked more drawn in the poor light. But she noticed him, and smiled, suddenly, and waved.
Tentatively, he waved back. The trio of people accompanying her—one with an assault rifle, he realized with alarm, turned to see what she was addressing.
Dell was suddenly keenly aware he should never had seen her.
He had time for this and nothing else before the woman turned and reached toward the rifle held by the guard behind her. The guard lurched, but she touched the barrel, and Dell gaped as it simply turned to slag in the guard’s hands, neon with heat and catching the guard’s gloves on fire. The guard began to scream, and so did the scientists.
Of the fight/flight/freeze reactions, Dell tended most often toward fight. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, and especially not now, when he stood rooted to the spot as the woman pushed past the three people trying to restrain her, toward him. Anywhere they grabbed her flame sprung forward, snapping and biting, and as she walked determinedly his way Dell’s only thought was this is what you get for sticking your fool nose where it don’t belong.
He wondered what burning to death would be like as she reached for him, unable to move, like a rabbit beneath a hawk. The pressure of her fingers on his wrist were firm, warm, and he waited for the warmth to become unbearable.
It never did. She said, instead, “Hi. What’s your name?”
Apparently the only thing keeping him from being taken out back and shot was the fact that she liked him, and the powers that were very much tried to keep her—if not happy—at least content. Shooting him for his knowledge of some sort of supernatural being apparently fell under not keeping her content.
“Her,” because she had taken Dell’s name and given him nothing in return. “Her,” because the scientists and doctors and paperwork referred to her as—mysteriously—Bambi. Dell asked the assistant about this, a few weeks later. “Because of the fire at the end of the movie,” she said readily. “And she was found near a dead deer. I think she was eating it.”
“Raw?” Dell asked, alarmed.
“Oh gosh, no. She can conjure fire, I don’t think she’s ever eaten anything raw.”
“Oh,” said Dell. “Wasn’t the deer in that movie a buck?”
“Yes,” the assistant admitted. “The other idea for a code name was ‘April Showers’, just to be cute, but Bambi is shorter.”
He saw the woman intermittently after that first time. Not in the testing areas, anymore, they made sure of that. He mostly saw her in her room, and if he was honest, the first few times felt a bit like being locked in with a tiger. But not a great deal happened, really. She asked him many questions, and answered none of his. She didn’t seem dangerous. “They call you Bambi,” he told her once, having learned that anything sounding like a question would never be answered. You had to phrase it all like statements. “I suppose I could call you that, too.”
“No,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “I hate that.”
“Tell me something else to call you, then.”
She shrugged, picking at one of her cards. Dell was teaching her rummy, and was still surprised the cards had not gone up in flames. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I have a name.”
This struck Dell as awful.
“Well,” he said eventually, and lay down another card, “someone mentioned another code name for you. April, like the month. That could be your name.”
She hummed and said nothing.
“Dragon,” Dell guessed.
“No.”
“Phoenix?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Here’s one,” he said, tracking down the page of the crusty old book he held with one finger. “Salamander. Maybe you’re a salamander.”
“That,” April said, patiently, as if talking to a small child, “is a lizard.”
Dell snorted and turned the page, shifting where he sat. It was a wooden chair, apparently because April was not allowed anything metal in her room. This struck Dell as comedic. The cot frame was concrete, the bedding was all evidently treated to be flame-retardant—as if that would stop nine hundred and six degrees of whatever the type of heat April could generate was—but so it was. “No, they’re amphibians.”
From where she hung upside down off the cot, amusing herself by creating little sparks between her fingers, April squinted at him. “Tell me what that is.”
“You know, like a frog. Needs air and water to survive.”
“That’s most things.”
“Well—” Dell started, and then stopped, brow furrowing as he tried to recall what, exactly, he knew about amphibians. “They start as one thing and end up as another. Born water-breathers, then they grow up and get lungs and have to leave the water. One of the more interesting things that Mother Nature does, as I recall it.”
When he looked at her again she was staring at him intently. She had a strange way of staring at you, predatory, and Dell was still of the mind that calling her a dragon might not perhaps be far off. “Talk more about that,” she said.
Dell was forced to admit he knew very little about amphibians. “But I could find out,” he offered, and felt strangely gratified by her smile.
The question chewed at him enough (burned at him, he thought wryly) that he broke his no-questions policy. The worst she could do was not answer.
(Well. No, the worst she could do was cremate him in a single moment. But he rather thought she liked him, and would probably not do that.)
“So what is it they have you doing in there?”
They were outside, one of the rare opportunities April got to breathe unconditioned air. But only at night, and only, basically, in a kind of military-grade paddock with a roof overhead, and guards with guns and night vision goggles. Dell was privately of the opinion that if April really wanted to leave none of this would stop her. He was also pretty sure by now that he was a kind of insurance, because as far as he could tell, he was the only thing around here she had compulsions about turning to cinder.
She was crouched on the ground, hands on her knees, perfectly still as she watched a cricket under her. It was visible only by a patch of illumination spilling over from the flood lights by the compound, and seemingly ignorant of all the rest of the world as it ground away at its song. If it knew there was a creature that might or might not have been a god peering down at it, it made no sign.
April said, “Are crickets amphibians?”
“No, they’re insects. Six legs.”
“Amphibians have four.”
“Generally speaking, yes.”
“I don’t know a lot about animals.”
He nodded, crossing to look down at the cricket with her. Eventually, she lowered a finger and nudged the cricket, who scuttled a few inches forward before leaping away.
“I think they want me for making something work,” April said, and reached to pinch her thumb and forefinger around the stem of a rusty-looking little weed. It ignited instantly, though it was not consumed into ash at once, the way she sometimes burned things. It lit low and slow, smoldering and gasping and full of curling smoke as the flame ate it down to the root. “Like how you heat a forge. Some days they just have me keeping a fire at the same temperature for hours, trying to see how much I can do before I have to stop.”
Dell frowned. “Are they paying you?” he asked, and she gave him a puzzled look and asked what he meant.
“How are you compensating this woman?”
The assistant blinked at him over her glasses. She looked harried and overloaded, clutching six separate clipboards and a metal lockbox balanced on top of them. “What?” she said bleakly.
“April,” he said. When she blinked at him again, he went on, impatiently, “Your Bambi.”
“Oh! Wait, compensate? We aren’t.”
At the silent glower he gave her, she at least had the decency to look somewhat cowed. “Mr. Conagher,” she started, “Whatever Bambi is, she—I shouldn’t even be calling her a she, honestly—Bambi is not human. She’s something else, something older. Even if we gave her money, what would she do with it? She was living in the mountains of eastern Colorado when we found her. She doesn’t need money.”
“Which one is the better one?” April asked. Her gnawed nail tapped first the tadpole and then the frog on the page. Dell had long gotten over his original flinch whenever she touched paper. “This one has legs, so it must be better, right?”
“Well,” Dell said, scratching at his chin. “I’ve been reading about that. Look at this page, here, the salamanders.”
He gestured, and she looked, doubtful. “Salamanders do all sorts of things,” he said, running down the bit he wanted. “Here. Sometimes they stay larval their whole lives, when conditions are too poor for adult stages. It’s a damn fine trick.”
She looked the page over. “Which ones have fire?”
“Pardon?”
An impatient gesture. “Last time. You were talking about dragons and phoenixes, and salamanders.”
“Ah,” Dell said, suddenly following, “that’s right. See, turns out that was a misconception. Time was, salamanders would hide in firewood stacks, and come running out when people lit the wood up. Folks got to thinking they were born from fire.”
“Oh,” said April.
He got to watch one day.
She never looked so human as she did in the orange scrubs, nor so impotent. And too he saw how they did control her, or tried; gunmen, mostly, and at least one sniper stashed in the rafters. And him, he thought.
He wasn’t sure when he had become important enough to April to warrant the guard at his side, who was very much not for his protection.
It was fine enough for a time. It didn’t begin to go poorly until the sixth hour of it, when April began to flag from the effort of maintaining a fuelless fire the size of a small house. There was no smoke. The heat was dreadful, and every soul in the place had wilted, except for her. And only that was by comparison. He could tell, however little, that she was growing tired from the effort. Perpetual energy, indeed.
Finally she folded her arms across her chest and sagged back in the chair she sat on. The fire guttered. “I’m done.”
“You’re done when we decide,” said one of the observing agents, who Dell had already decided he quite disliked. She was short and narrow and seemed made up of iron. Her heels beat a slow pace on the cement floor as she rounded on April. “Bambi, you will please resume.”
“No, I’m tired.”
The agent hummed. Her arms tucked themselves neatly behind her back, and when she turned to look at Dell every hair on the back of his neck stood on end.
“Ma’am?” he said as she crossed to him, and it was only his polite upbringing that kept him from pulling back when she carefully took one of his hands.
She had long, perfect nails, and they etched faint lines in his skin as she examined him. “You have lovely fingers,” she said, sounding bored. “Not pianist-lovely, but blue-collar. A working man. You’re one of our firefighters?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Interesting,” she said, and snapped his ring finger backwards.
He shrieked in surprise and pain, lurching away and further into the chair even as April snarled, lunging. The woman was unperturbed, looking directly at her. “Attack me and my men will kill your toy,” she said, still sounding bored. The guards shifted, coming to attention, and the one at Dell’s side lifted his gun. April remained where she was, tense, rigid, glaring so viciously that Dell thought she herself might ignite. “And if that does not work, then we shall return to the water treatments,” the woman went on, and at this April cowed. She fell back a step, then another, and finally returned to the testing spot.
The flame roared back to life.
“What,” Dell said, hoarsely, after downing another four painkillers, “are the water treatments?”
He had never broken a bone before, save for his toe some years back, and while that had been painful and a nuisance it was nothing compared to the hurt of his broken finger. The on-site doctor had looked at it and clucked his tongue and said Selena got you, huh? because this was apparently the signature trick of the small woman. Selena was a name he had heard before, but not yet put a face to; Selena was the name of the complex director.
April said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
She was stalking in circles, and Dell wondered idly if she would melt the floor through her bare feet. (She was always barefoot; she had slippers and shoes both, but did not use them. This was something he liked about her.) He was in the wooden chair, same as ever, cradling his splinted hand. Finally she threw herself down in front of him, cross-legged on the ground, and to his distant startle put her chin on his knee. “I want to go home,” she said. He said nothing, only looked at her, and waited. “Only I don’t know where that is anymore.”
“Where they took you from?”
“I don’t know. That’s just where I was—the mountains. Sometimes the forests. There used to be more. There didn’t used to be so many people,” she sighed, “I don’t know what to do about people.”
“Well, if it makes you feel better,” Dell said, “neither do I.”
“There didn’t used to be anyone. Just me and the animals and the earth and the fire.” She chewed her lip. “Sometimes there would be people, sometimes there would be someone who looked like me. They would leave me things or burn things while dancing and ask for favors and I never knew what they were asking for. But I don’t remember the last time that happened.”
Her breath was like an oven on his skin, even through his clothes, and the beat of her pulse in her neck throbbed out of time with his own: slower, stronger. Who are you?
Dell let the fingers of his unmaimed hand come to rest against the side of her head, separated from her dark skin by the gnarled and knotted curtain of her hair. “You could do me a favor,” he said. “You could let me brush this.”
It wasn’t exactly a surprise when he was informed he could find his new quarters waiting for him, because he would no longer be allowed to leave. Truthfully, it didn’t bother him quite so much as it perhaps should have. There wasn’t a great deal for him at home anyway. More he was bothered by the knowledge that his presence kept April on a leash. The danger of his new situation was undeniable, and yet …
Yet it was hard to dwell on it, combing carefully through the thick locks of April’s hair.
She had allowed him his favor, producing a hairbrush from the small wooden drawer she was allowed. Inside he glimpsed a handful of other things, trinkets that flashed silver, a book or two. But then the hairbrush was in his hands and she was watching him expectantly.
Dell had not actually done this before. He had used a comb on his own thin hair back before he took to shaving it, when he was a boy, and once or twice he had helped his mother with her elaborate braids. This was a different animal, he thought as he had the two of them sit front to back on the cot. “It might snag,” he warned her as he started. “Let me know if it hurts.”
April’s hair was long and could have done with a wash, but he made do. It spilled past her shoulders to the middle of her shoulder blades, coarse and wild. He sectioned it out, careful and patient, too aware of his hands and their proximity to her body. Working the knots free required effort and finesse. A particularly mean one grabbed at his attention, and he focused down on it. He did not notice when he leaned too close, nor when he unconsciously tried to brace his elbow against her back.
She lashed out. She ripped free of his hands, shoving at him with violence, and before he knew what had happened he felt the white flash of heat. She had found purchase against his chest with her palm and it burned through his button-down and undershirt both, leaving her hand flush with his chest, and the heat was so great that at first he did not feel the pain. “Oh,” he said stupidly, looking down at the smoking hole, and toppled.
He heard her cry his name once, startled and forlorn, and then he heard no more.
In his dream, Dell flew. He was himself and yet not himself, held aloft by wings that were not his. Below, an ocean burned.
“It looks worse than it is,” were the first words he heard upon waking. “They always do. I’m sure his wife will have questions about the shape.” A pause: “If it’s too distinct, I can add more burns to the edges. Make the shape less obvious?”
“What is the point if the grafts will not take?”
“Ma’am, it’s already improving. I think it’s unlike the others.”
Dell had not thought about his wife in months. He had not seen her in months, which was largely intentional. It had been part of why he’d taken this job, after all. He thought, hazily, about how she would react to a handprint burned into his chest. Poorly, he thought, but maybe that was the resentment. The resentment had been growing for a while, between the two of them. Part of the leaving was to see if space would fix it.
“Well, don’t damage him further, then. We need him.” This, the director’s voice.
Dell looked blearily down at the swath of bandages on his chest, and fell back into sleep. Once, he awoke, and thought the director was standing over him; but she was gone again in a moment.
April was there when he awoke next. Watching, just watching. Their eyes met and no words were spoken.
Until: “I want you to leave.”
Dell was too tired for this. “What?”
“I’ll kill you if you don’t leave.”
In his hazy state, he could not tell if this was a threat or a warning. She glared at him. The mark on his chest seemed to pulse of its own accord. He grimaced. “Hurt too bad to move right now anyway,” he said. “Good God, burns ain’t oughta do that. Feels like I was kicked by a mule.”
Now it was a miserable sort of glare. “You’re just going to keep getting hurt,” she said. “Either by me or that woman. Leave.”
“What makes you think I can?” he said, weary, and she fell silent.
He recovered slowly. April never explicitly checked in on him, but more than once he glimpsed her scarred face in the window of his door.
Kieran came by one day, all slow angles and careful interest. “Heard you were playing with fire,” he said conversationally, the words rolling off his Outback accent.
Thoroughly ensnared by a crossword, Dell snorted. “Ain’t like that.”
It was no secret, now, that the object of interest in this particular facility was a woman; someone had started the rumor that she was some kind of pyromaniac. Kieran already seemed to have pieced together that she was perhaps not human. He chuckled lightly and leaned against the wall. “Secret’s safe with me,” he said, jovial. “Half the men I know are cheating, and none of them even got a fairy tale to fuck.”
“It’s not like that,” Dell repeated, irritable now.
“What’s it like, then?”
“What’s got you so interested?”
He shrugged. “Sucker for a good fable.”
This soured Dell further. “Out of luck, then,” he said, shaking out the crossword. “What’s an eight-letter word for someone biting off more than he can chew?”
“Try ‘Conagher,’” Kieran said, and laughed as he dodged the pen that came flying his way.
Well, it gave him a hell of a lot of time to think. Except for the time they dropped him in a wheelchair and pushed him back out to the test facility, again a latent threat for an uncooperative test subject. April all but burned him again with her eyes, when he was first brought in, and would not look at him after.
The drop-ins from her stopped, the oblique check-ups. She never acknowledged him. It was pretty obvious what she was trying to do. Subtlety was not her strong suit.
Kieran had become an unexpected sympathizer. Dell suspected this had to do with the fact he himself was unbothered by Kieren’s homosexual lifestyle. He had very little leg to stand on, even if he had, with the estrangement and the fascination with someone of questionable humanity. And anyway, Kieran knew more card games than Dell.
“Been a while since I’ve seen her go by,” he observed in the midst of a game of something he called Egyptian Rat Screw. “Start of all this, seemed like she was here any time I wandered past.”
“You saw her in the halls?”
“Sure. Been giving her a little more freedom, they have, I think. What’s her name?”
Dell shook his head and played another card, realizing it was a poor move only after it was out of his hands. This appeared to be the story of his life. “Doesn’t got one, way she tells it.”
“Don’t say.”
“I been calling her April.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because—” He thought of the whole complicated reasoning behind it, a children’s movie, a song, a joke. “—just happened that way.”
In the way of Kieran, he nodded slow and thoughtful, and played a card that instantly won him the game. As Dell shook his head and tossed his hand on the flimsy table between his bed and Kieran’s wobbly chair, he spoke up again. “I expect,” he said, riffle-shuffling the cards together with practiced ease, “and this is if she thinks like you and I, y’know—I expect she’s trying to draw the attention off you. They’ve got you about as locked up as her now, hey?”
“That’s how I see it.”
“Well, that sounds about right, for messing around in the government’s affairs.”
The burn healed slow and it healed messily. It wept and blistered, though it rarely hurt as badly as he thought it should have. The director visited him frequently, strangely interested in his progress. And one day the brusque middle-aged nurse who had been minding him peeled off the bandages to change them and it had simply faded to white tissue, a perfect hand-print splayed over his heart. If not for the puckered and gnarled skin you could have mistaken it for paint, or a tattoo. “Well,” said Nurse Engles, and fetched the director.
The director came striding into his room and brushed the nurse and several curious scientists aside. “What is this?”
Nurse Engles spoke. “His burn, ma’am. By rights, shoulda been another three months before it got to looking this way, at the least.”
“It shouldn’t be looking this way at all. Let me see.”
The director bent over him like he was an annoying felled tree, and the burn was an interesting lichen or mushroom that had the audacity to grow off of him. The finger she pressed to his bared skin felt tremendously cold where it touched the scar. “Do you feel that?”
It took him a great deal of self-control to hold his tongue. “Yes.”
“Has anything else unusual happened?” Her eyes twinkled, suddenly, with possibility. “Increased body temperature, perhaps? A craving for sugar?”
“Uh … no.”
“Ah.” The interest faded again. She straightened and let her finger drop, looking over his fallen-tree body with a personal kind of disappointment. “Continue to monitor him,” she said. “And someone get Bambi to stop sulking and come see that he’s alive.”
Drowning in nurses and fussing scientists, Dell did not see when April entered. It was just that suddenly his nameless captors parted and she was there, standing with crossed arms and her back to the wall, studying the ground. They were not quite alone—a nice young custodian was cleaning things up in a corner still—but he spoke anyway. “How did you get those scars?”
She lifted her head as if she had been waiting for him to speak, and her hand followed shortly after, fingertips pressing to the mountainous range of her burned face. It was a scar utterly unlike his. And she was quiet at first, like she had forgotten it was there. “I don’t remember,” she said. “I’ve always had them. I don’t know.”
“Wasn’t your fire?”
“No.” She went back to looking at the gray concrete floors. Then, accusatory and disbelieving: “You scared me.”
Dell felt rather affronted. “Excuse me, matches, but I don’t know that scarring a man is equal punishment for pulling your hair.”
“No, I thought you were going to die,” she said irritably. “I thought I had killed you. They always die.”
God help him, he could not read her. He could not quite even understand what she meant, and only looked at her for a long time. Silence had never bothered her, but now it seemed to make her itch and wish to be running. “They always die,” she repeated. “They get too close and then they die.”
“Who dies?”
“The people that talk to me.”
“Why?” Dell asked, just as the custodian gathered her things up and slipped from the room. April looked at him a final time before vanishing after her.
Dell’s life returned to its new normal, with less of the fire-woman than before. She avoided him.
“I think,” he told Kieran one late evening, slightly drunk and infinitely tired, “I thought, y’know, we were at least getting to be friends.”
“Bah,” Kieran said. “Don’t dance around it, mate. You’re sweet on her.”
“Ain’t, either. Just, I don’t know, does she think she’s protecting me? I hate it, Kieran, at least before I could talk to her.”
“Seems to me this is the better for you. Eh? She loses interest in you, they’ve got no reason to keep you no more.”
“Loses interest,” Dell muttered into his terrible beer. “Almost told me something, the other day. She never says all of anything in one go. Almost told me, said, people who talk to her die. Wouldn’t say more.”
“You are as smitten as a sixteen-year-old girl,” Kieran mused, and Dell bruised his hand smacking him.
“I’ve never been away this long.”
Oh, so she was talking to him again. Dell hated himself a bit, the way he snapped to attention; not that there was anything else to look at. They had been turned out into the paddock again, like livestock, but it was at least refreshing to breathe fresh air. In the dark April was a vague silhouette, somehow even less human.
“Away?” Dell asked.
“From home.”
She was looking north. “The mountains?” Dell guessed, and she nodded. “Where is it you’re from?”
“I don’t know what it’s called. What people call it. It’s just home.”
“I miss home, too,” Dell said, a little distant, and kept his gaze on the horizon as she turned toward him. “It ain’t far, but might as well be over the ocean for all I can get to it now.”
“At least we’re both missing it,” April said.
The dream happened that night.
It was a hot, confused thing, like a sunstroked animal, bewildered and overheated. He dreamt of the scar on his chest, of her hand over it, hot, hot, threatening to use him as fuel for her impossible flame. When she touched him, in his dream, it stirred up a want he had never known. The fire-woman’s dark hand on his chest, his own hands peeling the ugly prisoner’s clothing from her body, her heat igniting things he had not known were there to be lit.
He awoke sweating, his own hands already on his achingly hard body. The flame proved unquenchable, even when he miserably turned on the light and attended to the aftermath.
The guilt that seeped into him as he thought of his wife had him scrubbing his hands clean for long minutes afterward.
Kieran snorted. “That’s your subconscious.”
“I know that, and it don’t make me feel any better,” Dell said. “Married too damn young, is what I did, didn’t know who I was, what I wanted. Her neither. We’re both miserable in that house.”
“So end it.”
“Ain’t that simple.”
“Sure it is.”
“Dammit, this ain’t like you and your partner. We’re married, it’s legal, there’s laws.”
“Watch it.”
“Sorry.”
“You going to sit there and tell me you don’t have no prenups?”
“Well … no, we do. Made sure of that. Should be a fair split.”
“You’ve got prenups, ain’t seen your wife in months, having wet dreams about the magic woman you found,” Kieran listed off. Dell grimaced. “Said it yourself, neither of you want to stay. Get out of the marriage, man.”
“Over one damn dream? Hell no.”
A shrug. “Magic woman or no,” Kieran said, “seems like the road you’re headed down.”
Well, he was right, which Dell didn’t care to admit. But it wasn’t like he could do anything about it now, could he?
Could he?
“The call will be monitored, of course,” his guard told him. “To ensure you don’t break the NDA.”
That was a pretty thing to call it, he thought irritably, but then he was handed a phone. April was, truthfully, far from his mind. He was nervous, calling Jenny. It had been months. How would it feel to hear her again?
But as it happened, it was a man’s voice that said, “Hello?” when the phone picked up. Dell fumbled.
“Ah, hello. Hello there. I’m calling for Jenny Conagher?”
“Who is this?”
A moment of irritation. “Her husband.”
There was a very long silence that answered all of Dell’s questions.
“I get to feel superior, I guess,” Dell said, flinty, to Kieran as Kieran carried on handily beating him at darts. “But at least Jenny’s no liar.”
“Another month and you two would’ve been even.” Dell aimed a kick at him, which was dodged with ease. “Tellin’ it how I see it, Dell,” Kieran said pleasantly. “I know infatuation. Can see it a mile off. You’re moon-eyed for the creature.”
“Don’t call her that.”
“See what I mean? She back to talking to you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t see much of her, and when I do she seems—faded. The tests are changing, she’s getting worn through.” He wet his lips and tried another dart. It bounced off the concrete wall. “It’s like watching a wild animal in a cage.”
Kieran slid his eyes over him, chewing a toothpick. He plucked it out of his mouth and looked it over carefully. “Well,” he said, “planning on doing anything about it, then?”
Her room seemed different, from before the scar. Somehow smaller, dirtier, darker. April pushed herself up slow when he was let into her room, and despite himself he could not help but watch the way her body shifted under its ill-filling clothes. Sprawled on the mattress, she looked further gone than he remembered. “You,” she said.
“Me,” he agreed, and came to sit beside her.
They looked at one another, Dell trying to pretend he was not, April making no secret of it. He flinched when she spoke. “You want something,” she said.
“What’s got you saying that?”
Her stare became distant. “They all want something.”
“Who?”
“All of them. Everyone, every person that’s come across me. Frighten their family. Power their weapons. Burn their enemies. They always want something. Even the ones who talk to me.” Her eyes refocused upon him. “What do you want?”
It took him a long time to find the right words. She had already lain down again when he did, curled like a dog, half-buried where the bed met the wall. “I do want something,” he said eventually. “I want to talk to you. But I want you to talk to me, too.”
Gingerly, foolishly, he let his hand drift down to find her hair where it spilled like tar over the thin sheets. Even this seemed warm. “If you’ll let me,” he added, and she turned her face to look at him.
Dell did not like the director.
He suspected no one did. She seemed eminently unlikeable, and he was rather sure that was an intended effect.
He did not graduate to hating the director until his next visit to April found her curled in an ugly knot on the floor of her room, flame crawling all over her, a pool of blood pouring from a visibly maligned nose. Her leg, under her, was twisted in all the wrong directions. Dell let the sorry excuse of a lunch he had been given to bring to them drop to the ground and rushed to her side. “April!”
She growled at him and the fire flared, and he grabbed her shoulder anyway. The fire snarled and snapped and he ignored it, hefting her up to a sitting position. Blood soaked the front of her shirt. She was clawing at him, making strange, monstrous noises. Adrenaline masked the pain from the heat. “Calm down, girl,” he told her, like he might tell a panicky animal. “Settle, shh, come on. Come on.”
Her nose was broken, that much was obvious. Vast bruises covered her face and shoulders. Once he put pressure on her side, just by accident, and she barked a warning and the fire loomed and scalded him. A broken rib, he thought, maybe a twisted ankle. “Somebody beat you,” he said, more to himself than anyone, and was more shocked that someone managed to do it than anything. Outrage was not far after.
“Well,” said a voice, and Dell lifted his head. April followed, another feral sound rising as she did. There stood the director, in one of the volcano-rated suits Dell himself had requested, peering at the two of them with intense curiosity. “That’s interesting.”
“What the hell did you do to her?”
“Nothing she won’t recover from. She’s very uncooperative. But I’m very curious about what she did to you.” She smirked at Dell’s incredulous glare. “Or did you not realize you are on fire?”
Slowly, he looked down at himself, at where April’s flame had grabbed at him and not let go. It had gnawed patches through his clothing, but it clung stubbornly to his bare arms, and he felt—nothing. A warmth, at best. April’s fingers dug into his skin.
“That’s very interesting,” the director said.
Well, the thing was that April would let no one near her, and backed it up with the very real threat of incineration. Dell was hastily given some painkillers and bandages for her by a frightened-looking nurse, and then the two of them were alone.
By this time the flame had lulled to a steady crackle, and April had given up on escaping Dell, who was quite firm about making sure she kept her head tilted back until the blood stemmed. He had managed to get her off the floor and onto the cot, and now she was slumped against the wall and his side. It was a trick, getting her to take the painkillers. “Fuck off.”
“And here I didn’t think you knew how to cuss.”
“Fuck off, fuck you, fuck everything.”
“It’ll make the pain stop. I promise.”
“This isn’t pain,” she said, in a much different tone, but she took the pills anyway.
She quieted after that. Her bloody nose stopped, nostrils stuffed up with gauze, and she looked so pathetically, miserably human. He wasn’t sure how his arm got to be around her shoulders, nor when her head ended up in his lap. Her head was too battered to let his fingers stray anywhere near it, but he let his palm rest in the dip of her waist, and he thought.
Of course the director wanted to see him.
Of course they wanted to conduct some tests.
He at least got to stay with April until she fell asleep. He was rousted from his own broody drowsing by yet another suit-clad employee. Apparently their test subject had scared them all into the flameproof suits. Well, Dell thought, good.
As near as he could tell, he felt unchanged. Patches of his clothing were singed through, but whatever had protected him seemed to have mostly spared them as well. He had never asked April how she controlled her flame, because it seemed akin to asking a bird how it flew. Now he wished he had. He had not inherited that, near as he could tell; but then, he had not been able to tell when he became fireproof either.
“Mr. Conagher,” the director said warmly when he was shown into her room. It was sparse and concrete and lit with a greenish light that somehow made his teeth hurt. “Welcome. Please, sit.”
“I’d just as soon stand,” he said stiffly. “Ma’am, before you start, I want you to know I’m not terribly interested in being helpful after what you did to April. I think—”
“I’m not terribly interested in what you think, period,” she said, smiling. “But I hope you’ll choose to be cooperative. It would be so much easier on all three of us.”
Dell’s mouth snapped shut.
Before, he thought after all the poking and prodding and testing had been done, before he had simply been a comfort object for the main event. A pet, maybe, a carrot-and-stick used to control her. Now he supposed he was as much in it as she was.
They burned him. Not badly, not a great deal. It was about as bad as grabbing a too-hot pan. But they burned him nonetheless, in their new trials, writing a thousand notes about his reddened skin and the way he had recoiled in pain. Eventually he was sent back to what he had begun thinking of as the prisoners’ quarters. He was tired and his scalded skin hurt, but he checked in on April anyway. Mercifully, she slept.
He stood in the doorway a long time, looking at her.
It stood to reason the man she killed the next day was not the first causality. It couldn’t be. But it frightened Dell nonetheless when she grabbed the man yelling at her by the neck. Her body was alight with its protective flame, and where she touched him his flesh blackened and warped. He had no doubt she would have held him until his throat burned through. But someone struck her with the shock-stick they had taken to using to control her, and she dropped him to the ground.
Dell was behind glass at the time, the director’s new toy, watching the further tests. The director was there too. She nudged him. “We never got the story of why she burned you out of her. Care to share?”
Dell was rather occupied with staring in distant horror at the way the attacked man writhed down below the observation deck, and how April was being violently subdued again. “Aren’t they going to get him a doctor?”
The director, at his side, leaning on a walking stick, peered down at the dying man. “It would be pointless,” the director said. “The burns she inflicts do not heal. Especially not one that bad—better to let him die.”
“What the hell do you mean, they don’t heal?” Dell said, turning and scowling at her. He thumped his own chest, over his heart. “What do you call this?”
“An anomaly,” the director said, and began to peel back her right sleeve. Beneath Dell could now see bandages, wet and weeping. He knew what he would see before she showed it to him, but that did not make the reveal any more palatable. Like his, a burn in the shape of a hand wrapped round her forearm, but without the pink new skin, the healed flesh. This looked like it might have happened five minutes ago. “An unbelievable weapon in the hands of an uncooperative alien,” the director remarked as Dell stared. “We thought it was a unique trait of the fire, but you seem to be an exception to the rule. I really must thank you, Mr. Conagher, for aiding the cause of science.”
“I ain’t,” Dell said, “aiding you with shit.”
“Oh,” said the director, “you will.”
The next dream still featured her, the fire-woman. Dell still awoke in a sweat. But when he investigated his body this time it was to ensure the only sign of a burn on him was that handprint, that the blackened flesh and sizzling fat he had smelled in his dream were, indeed, only a dream.
He lay awake until his 5:30AM alarm squealed at him, and then he was off.
He had to talk to Kieran.
“April,” Dell said, and heard her sigh.
She was in lockdown, due to how she had literally killed a man. From the wooden chair he once more found himself in, Dell found himself with a multitude of questions and very few answers. Why did you have to kill him? Why didn’t you kill me? What’s keeping you from burning this whole place down? What are you?
So he just said, “We’re going to get out of here.”
April laughed, rough and ugly. She was sprawled on the cot, nursing fresh injuries. “Nice sentiment.”
“I don’t trade in sentiments,” Dell said, gruff. “We’re leaving. Tomorrow. And you’re going back home.”
She lifted her head, equal measures keen and disbelieving.
It was an idiotic sort of plan. Kieran had been slow in accepting it. “But I’ll do what I can,” he said eventually. “They catch me, though, I’m sayin’ I was coerced.”
It was laughable if you thought about it too hard. Sure, just—rig a camera, slip past guards, tuck themselves into one of the firetrucks Dell’s brigade brought with them. The firetrucks were always going in and out, because they were always breaking down. Later there would be investigations and firings, inquiries into just how this facility managed to fail so badly.
It was a laughable plan, and of course it failed. They were caught almost at once, by some poor guards only doing their job. But evidently the existence of any plan at all was the only impetus April needed to light everything on fire and walk out.
Later, in a stolen van, a shaken Dell would ask her if she could have done that at any time. “Yes,” she said distantly, watching the smoke pillar on the horizon. “But it didn’t seem worth the trouble.”
“Why now?”
“They were going to hurt you,” was all she said, and no more.
Kieran dropped them at a little town a few miles from Roswell, and from there they grabbed Greyhounds at random before Dell sighed to himself at the sight of a still-running car someone had left outside a convenience store. “In for a penny,” he said to April, whose brows knit quizzically, and then they were tearing down the highway in a stolen Ford the color of butter.
They abandoned this car and stole another two days later, and little was said between them. April spent much of her time looking out the window at the landscape. Once Dell thought about offering to teach her how to drive. Once.
“I hope your home is big,” he said absently, later. “They’ll come looking for you again.”
“They’ll die.”
“Why’d you let them take you, before?”
“I don’t know,” she said, sinking down into the seat. “It had been a long time. I didn’t know what they wanted—I didn’t know how much things had changed.”
The no-questions policy was just ribbons now. The road arched under their stolen car as the western mountains loomed in the far horizon. “Do you know how long? Like—do you know what kinds of clothing people were wearing, last time you saw them?”
“Leather, I think. Animal skin.”
Dell said very little for a long time after that.