Page 238 of Starside

Right into the City on Fire.

I think I hear a distant bellow, a sound scraped from the sky itself, of pure and utter agony. But it’s too late.

I’m swallowed by the flames, and when I hit the ground, my body breaks.

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Rise, phoenix, rise.

Stellan’s voice is in my head again, the words familiar and from another time entirely.

A shaking girl in a pile of ashes.

A white-bearded man reaching out a hand.

Rise, phoenix, rise.

The world is boiling around me. My senses have been shredded. Slowly, they return. I hear the muffled crackling of the flames that have swallowed me whole. Even with my eyes closed, I see the relentless red and orange, like I’m trapped within a final sunset.

My body—I can barely feel it. My bones must be shattered.

Kira is dead. Dead. She died alone, begging for anyone to save her. I let her down. I let them all down. Every single person who has ever loved me has ended up dead.

This City on Fire should let me burn. My shame and guilt and fury are like these endless flames, forever roaring all around me.

Still, his voice is in my head again, insistent. No one can heal you in here. You have to step out of the fire.

Rise, phoenix, rise.

I can’t, I think. Not this time.

Stellan’s voice is angry now. His words are new. “Every time,” he says, “You rise every time.”

My eyes sting, remembering that hand that reached out from nowhere, toward a trembling girl covered in the ruin of everything she once loved, whose voice had given out from all the screaming.

He didn’t leave. He didn’t turn around. He reached his hand out for what seemed like hours, until finally, mine reached back. He gripped it with a strength I couldn’t imagine ever having. With a firmness that I can still feel in my soul. But he didn’t help me up. He said I had to do that myself.

No matter what, Stellan got up day after day. He was always there for me. Just like they were.

You rise every time.

For all of them, I will try.

The world is burning around me, my body is broken, but I grit my teeth against the pain and splintered bones and reach a hand forward. Another. I lift my head. Every aching muscle is pleading with me to stay down, to stay still, but I do not.

I rise until I’m on my feet.

My clothes are gone. My skin is coated in their ashes and the blood from my fall.

A single step. The first is always the hardest. My shattered knee nearly buckles. My arm is hanging at an unnatural angle. My skull is fractured. My ribs are snapped. It hurts to breathe. But even when I think I’ve reached my limit, my own strength surprises me.

Again. I step again. Once I’ve proven I can take one, the next comes, and then the next, until I’m walking through the raging flames, parting them like a blade that refuses to be melted down.

My flesh is hanging off my bones, I am gaping and bloody and broken, but I keep going, dragging my bare feet through this city, the one that burns with a thousand years of fury, the one that has burned for centuries before I was born and will for centuries after I am just dust in the wind.

I keep dragging myself forward until I reach the edge of the flames—

And then, I step through them.