Chapter Text
People don’t panic as much as you’d think, in a burning building. Stress and fear don’t turn them into dumb animals. It’s actually the opposite that’s dangerous. When the fire alarms scream but the smoke hasn’t spread yet, a lot of people will convince themselves it’s not serious and just keep going about their day. Evacuation is hard and uncomfortable. Staying in front of the TV is easy and satisfying. And most of the time it’s just a drill, right?
This time, it wasn’t.
The air was thick enough with smoke that I’d closed my helmet, and I could barely see the walls on either side of me as I ran through the cramped corridors of the twenty-storey apartment block. I was almost glad of it. The building was a shithole in the south Docks, on the run-down border between ABB and Empire territory that saw frequent scuffles between the two gangs. Half the windows were boarded up, the carpets were marked with unpleasant stains and the plaster was sagging on the walls even before the flames started licking at it.
“How’s it going, Starlight?” my comms crackled. Gallant’s voice, calm and confident. “Hotspot over on the east side of the building, seventh floor.”
Here’s another thing most people get wrong about fires. In the fireplace or the stove, the pop and crackle of wood is low-level white noise. But a house fire is loud. It’s a constant surround-sound roar; a hungry growl like a whole convoy of trucks driving over gravel, or deep-throated static from the world’s biggest TV set, or a pot of water the size of a city block boiling and spitting and snarling. The little pops and sizzling sounds from a log on the fireplace become deafening bangs and rapid-fire crackling when entire walls burn, and every so often the shriek of tortured metal cuts through everything as I-beams or girders give way. My helmet had sound muffling integrated into it along with the air supply and HUD, but even with the earplugs, it was hard to hear what he was saying.
“Seventh floor east, Console,” I replied. Hopefully he could hear me in return. “I copy.” I was on the eighth northeast corner, and I could sense what he meant as I jogged over to the stairwell. The glow from below me and off to one side was an insistent eggs-and-bacon taste on the periphery of my mental tongue, and I sped up as I took the flight down. It was baking in the windowless stairwell; bare concrete surfaces and right-angled edges had been turned into an oven by the blaze. I could hear crackling from down below, and an experimental prod told me the metal bannister was hot. I pulled - no sense in wasting energy - and savoured the warmth as it flowed into me.
“Exiting onto the seventh floor, hotspot found.” It was the apartment right across from the stairwell - I could feel the heat even through the concrete of the stairwell. I took a steadying breath, and wished I could wipe my forehead. Heat didn’t bother me, but all the running around still made me sweat, and I knew I’d have a horrible case of helmet hair tonight. Urgh.
“Orbital’s on-site, so keep an eye out for her. Console out.”
“Copy that. Starlight out.” I made it out onto the seventh floor, and had to stifle a flinch. The entire wall of the hallway across from me was on fire - it had eaten through the drywall from the apartment beyond - and a cloud of flame was sprawled across most of the ceiling. I was doubly glad of my helmet’s air seal - the smell from the burning carpet alone must have been awful.
I took a moment to steady myself, pushed the memories back and walked into the flames.
However many times I did it, I never got tired of feeding. It was a rush as the energy inside me called to the energy without, and I’d long ago gotten over my flinch reflex as the flames were pulled off the walls and ceiling to spiral in towards me like stars around a black hole. My aura lit up as they made contact; whites and yellows and reds devoured the fire and I felt an all-over warmth like slipping into a hot bath as I drank it in. It only took a few seconds to clear the corridor. Charred plaster and scorched nylon oozed smoke, but I’d ripped all the heat out of them and brought them down to room temperature.
A quick blast of yellow-white energy left a fist-sized hole in the door where the lock had been and I yanked it open, only to be immediately greeted by a roaring burst of flame. Backdraft. Firefighters have to be wary of it and check whether doors are warm or not. If a normal guy in a protective suit opens a door and gives the fire behind it a rush of oxygen, the explosion could kill him.
Me? I devoured that blast like a quarter-pound burger with fries, pulling on the flames it was connected to and ripping the whole conflagration out by the roots. It was no surprise it had been so fierce. Half the window was blown out - it looked like there’d been a liquor cabinet next to it that had caught light from the building cladding going up. That had been tipped over somehow, and the resultant inferno had breached the gas mains.
“Console, I have a gas mains breach here,” I called in. “I can keep the fire off it for now, but tell Fire Services to shut the gas off outside.”
“Copy that, Starlight. Leave it and go down to the third floor north. One of the main evac routes has a collapsed ceiling, they need you to clear it.”
I gritted my teeth. I’d cleared the fire from this room for now, but it was still licking at the cladding below me. It would spread back up and reignite the gas if I left.
But the evac routes were more important. Triage was a dirty word, but it was one I’d had to learn and get used to over two years of firefighting. “Copy that, Console,” I said bitterly. “On my way.”
And I threw myself out of the window, and flew.
Flight was the best part of my powers. Absorbing energy felt good, and blasting things was cathartic, but nothing beat the rush of soaring through the air like one of my childhood heroes. I opened my helmet as I soared a full circuit around the building, trailing light behind me like a comet. I had better visibility now that I was out of the smoke - I didn’t know how the soot didn’t cling to my visor but I didn’t care as long as it worked - and I took in the state of the fire.
It didn’t look good. Three sides of the building were blackened and charred from the bottom quarter of the building up. Smoke was belching out of every window, and a hellish glow lit it from within, bright against the dark sky. It had started around sunset and at this point it had been burning fiercely for an hour. It would keep burning, too - I could tell. It was only five in the afternoon, but the scale of this was going to keep us here past midnight - though I’d probably be ordered back long before then.
I kept moving, swinging further around as I surveyed the efforts to fight the blaze. The firefighters were training hoses on the lower floors, keeping the cladding there untouched and the fires under control, but halfway up the south side there were five floors engulfed in a sheet of fire that burning chunks were breaking away from. I swung past, yanking at the fires, and a cheer went up from below as I drew them off the building and into my wake, spiralling around me as I shed altitude and curved around to the other side of the block.
I’d seen footage of that move from other fires. It looked pretty cool from the outside, if I did say so myself.
There, at the window - people halfway out the window, leaning out so far that I was worried they’d fall out. If necessary I could ferry people down to the ground one at a time, but that would be slow. I dropped down to hover in front of the window.
“Excuse me! Back away from the window, please!” I shouted. “I need to get through!” I was a pretty distinctive sight, my dark blue costume standing out against the reds and oranges and yellows of my aura. When I was powered up like I was now, the white star on the chest and the smaller ones speckled over my shoulders and upper arms seemed to glow. And the people here knew about Starlight and fires. Everyone did. The other Wards got school visits or charity work for their PR events - I saved lives with the fire department.
“Move aside, move aside!” A fireman in full protective clothing pulled them away from the window. He sounded vaguely familiar. I thought I’d heard him before. “Thank the Lord you’re here,” he hollered up.
“What’s the problem here?” I said, slipping in through the window.
“It’s the ceiling grid!” he yelled, muffled through the heavy equipment and mask he wore. I didn’t have that problem, at least - my helmet broadcast my voice clearly, even sealed. Chalk one up for Tinkertech. “It was clear when we came through, but it collapsed down. Take care! We don’t want anything else coming down on us!”
I pulled at the heat all around me, bringing the temperature down in my vicinity. Crammed up by the window were two firefighters and half a dozen scared residents with wet towels over their faces, crouched low to the floor to avoid the worst of the smoke. Most of them were Asian-Americans. Probably Japanese refugees - we weren’t quite in Little Tokyo proper, but we were close enough that most of the street signs had Japanese scrawled under them and ABB tags popped up everywhere - and it looked like they knew what to do in a fire. They’d just waited too long to do it.
See what I mean? Panic isn’t the problem in a fire; people usually make good choices under pressure. It’s passivity that gets people into trouble.
“Don’t worry!” I shouted over the roar of the flames as they streamed off the ceiling and blockage to wrap around me and sink into my costume. “I’m here to help, you’re safe now!”
First, I extinguished the rubble. A yellow-white beam seared the pile in half, and a concussive blast sent the top half flying back down the corridor the way I’d come in pieces. Another body pulse pushed the thickening smoke back, and then my leg lit up in rivulets of light and energy as I hopped forward and kicked the rest of the pile as hard as I could.
It disintegrated like an egg under a hammer, and I gestured to the stairwell door.
“Coast is clear, get going!” I called, ushering frightened people through. “Console, are there any-”
I stopped.
“Starlight?”
“I can taste another hotspot,” I reported. “Above me - fourth floor, I think. I’m going to check it out.”
I heard tapping over the comms. “You reported that when you were clearing the rooms up on fifth,” Gallant said. I could hear the frown in his voice. “You said it was lower priority. Do you think it’s spreading?”
“It’s… it’s just hotter than everything else in the area. Too hot even for gas.” I was already making my way up the stairwell, feeling the updraft. The rising heat was turning all the stairwells into giant chimneys - though at least that was keeping the worst of the smoke up near the top, away from down here. “I think we may have found our source. If there’s nothing else threatening the evac routes, I’m going to see if I can stifle it.”
“Copy that, Starlight. Good luck.”
There was something weird about the new hotspot. I couldn’t put my finger on what, or how, or why, but it felt different in a way some part of me recognised. I advanced cautiously towards the door of apartment 411, feeling the roaring heat behind it. The scent-taste wafted from behind the wall, rich and meaty and loaded with energy like lasagne or a really good casserole. But it was like... it was like it was pulling on me as much as I could pull on it. There was something tantalising about it. Something alluring.
I blasted the door open, and the backdraft that hit me this time slammed me back against the wall hard enough that my helmet dented the drywall. The warmth sunk into my bones as I absorbed it, flaring my aura and washing away the bruise before it could even form.
My unease grew. Something was going on here, I was sure of it. That flame had... had tasted different, somehow. The meaty taste of heat and flame was seasoned with salt and chilli in a way I didn’t recognise.
“Console,” I said, “you said Orbital was on-site, or en-route?”
“On-site, Starlight,” Gallant replied over comms. “She’s helping evac people from the upper floors.”
“Copy that. Get her attention, would you? Something’s off about this fire, and I want her on alert just in case.”
“If you suspect power use, you should wait for backup,” Gallant warned me, by-the-book as always. I shook my head.
“Negative, Console. I have no evidence of power use, and there could be lives at risk in there. I’m going in.”
“... copy that.” He didn’t sound happy about it. I didn’t care.
The apartments in this building were all built to the same plan, with the door opening right into the living room. I ate the few smouldering spots of fire out from the couch by the window and the cladding outside it, blasted a hole in the wall to vent the room, checked the kitchen was empty and opened the bedroom door.
I was lost instantly.
“Starlight! Starlight! Come in, Starlight! Come in!”
I blinked. Gallant was shouting into my ear, he sounded terrified. I felt strange - a little disoriented, warm - no, hot. Usually when I drank fire it was like wrapping myself up in blankets - this felt more like I’d been cupping a mug of hot tea in my hands. That lasagne-and-chilli taste lingered on my tongue, the spice making my eyes water, and my head was spinning. The smoke was so thick I couldn’t see my feet, but I was standing in the middle of the room, not at the door. When had I moved? What was going on?
My hands were already moving automatically to my comms. “Starlight copies, Console. What’s wrong?”
“Starlight!” Near-hysterical relief at my check-in. “You’ve been unresponsive for six minutes. Velocity’s almost there, what happened?”
I gaped. I’d lost six minutes? In the middle of a burning building? When? How? God, no wonder he’d freaked, he must have thought I’d been hit by a falling beam or something.
I pulsed the smoke away and looked around.
There was an Asian girl about my age huddled in front of me on the charred cinders of what had once been a bed. She was bleeding from a couple of shallow knife wounds across her forearms, and her tank top and ripped jeans were smouldering, though something was protecting them from fully catching alight. I wasn’t sure she’d even noticed I was there, she was crying so hard - completely out of it from a mix of fear and shock. She was the source of the heat I was feeling - there was fire flickering around her, shining and beautiful, important, entrancing...
I pulled, hard and fast and ruthless. The flames streaked into my aura, vanishing into the corona. The tug at my attention stopped. She’d burnt most of the bed to ash, and seared a hole in the ceiling to boot - I’d seen a lot of fires at this point, and from the looks of it this one must have been white-hot and twice as tall as me, at least. It had melted the aluminum bars of the headboard into a puddle.
And she wasn’t the only one in the room. There were three... shapes.
For a split-second, I was back in the car, my skin burning, gunfire ringing in my ears, choking on the tangled seatbelt with a body slumped beside me at the steering wheel, my own screams ringing in my ears...
I forced the memories away and bent to check, shaking. It didn’t take more than a cursory look. They were horribly burnt, massive third-degree trauma, and even if that hadn’t killed them, the smoke in here was thick enough that they’d have suffocated by now regardless. My gorge rose, and I’d never been more thankful for my sealed helmet. The smell... I could remember the smell...
“C-console,” I stuttered, falling back on protocol. “I- I think it’s a new Trigger. Pyrokinetic; her flames have some kind of hypnotic Master effect. I opened the door to the bedroom and I can’t remember anything else until...” I looked around again, and had to squeeze my eyes shut as my stomach heaved. “I think... I think I must have walked right into them. There are three burnt bodies here who she... who must’ve done the same.”
“Easy, Starlight. Velocity’s almost there, get out of there and wait for him.” Gallant was still stressed, but he was trying to be soothing, sympathetic. I shook my head. I couldn’t just leave her here; the building wasn’t safe even if she was immune to the fire. A glint caught my eye - a knife, next to one of the bodies - and I crouched down to look closer, still pulling to keep her fires controlled.
It was a quick study.
“... they’re ABB, I think. They are - were - armed. There’s a knife, and I think this is a melted gun. And this one was wearing one of those jackets,” I reported. Fuck. I could see what must have happened here. Three gang members and a teenage girl trapped in a room. She’d triggered, ignited, and the Mastered goons had walked straight into the fire. She’d burnt them to death right next to her while she was screaming. My hands fisted, and I felt tears trickling down my cheeks. Fuck. I was going to have nightmares for weeks about this.
“Starlight, you are compromised and not thinking straight, get out of there and wait for Velocity. He’s thirty seconds out, it’ll be fine. This isn’t a good situation for you.”
“No. No, I can bring her out. No point in anyone else getting dunked in the M/S tank.” I knew Gallant was trying to coddle me - he knew what this was doing to me. But he could butt out. I was fine. I would be fine. I could get the girl into PRT custody just fine.
I sent a short blast out of the open window. A moment later, Orbital rose up outside it, one construct lifting her as a glowing golden breastplate and the other four circling her head in their usual tennis ball forms.
“Starlight!” she called. “Good to see you’re okay! Gallant was going nuts trying to raise you on comms! What happened? I was gonna go in after you but- oh, you got another rescue?”
“I need a temporary mask,” I shouted back, ignoring the rest. “Velocity should be here by now, can you grab one for me? Anything that can cover her face.”
Orbital’s constructs flared in surprise. “Huh,” she said, shaping one into a full-face helmet against the smoke and hovering closer to the window. “This her?” She gestured around at the burning cladding.
“Just get the mask!” I shouted. Tiny cracking sounds echoed in the wake of my words, like fracturing porcelain, and a web of hairline cracks appeared on the closest parts of her breastplate and helmet. Ginger and sugar flared on my tongue as she yelped and drew backwards hastily, another pair of orbs expanding into a gleaming golden sword and shield.
“I can’t help it!” I cut in before she could start yelling. “I’m having to drain the heat off her; I can’t stop siphoning or she’ll go up in flames again! Get me the mask and get back to helping!”
She was probably muttering something unkind as she dropped back down out of sight, but I could deal with that later. She was the only other flier here, and it wasn’t like there was anything left in the room that I could cover the girl’s face with.
“I’ve dispatched a PRT team, Starlight,” Gallant reported. He was using his ‘I disapprove of your decisions as a member of this team’ voice again, and I rolled my eyes. “They’ll be there in ten minutes. Are you sure you’re okay? Seeing those men-”
“I’m fine, Console,” I snapped. “Alert them of a Master classification. Where’s Velocity?”
“Right here, Starlight. Waiting for you to come down.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “You always seem to be the reason I get an emergency call-out. How are you feeling?”
What kind of stupid question was that? I pulled the girl upright and dragged her over to the window, where I could glare down at the red costume far below. He waved at me from the sidewalk.
“Not great,” I said curtly. “How many days in M/S is this going to be?”
“I have visuals on you,” he confirmed. “And you know why it’s the rules.”
“Of course I do. But that doesn’t mean I have to look forward to it. This was just meant to be a regular firefighting gig!”
Orbital was on her way back up, a backup domino in hand. She passed it over, then scooted back before I drained her constructs any further. Great. Because being treated even more like a plague victim was exactly what I needed right now.
Masking the girl up, I took flight through the window and floated down to the ground. Velocity didn’t approach my landing site - protocol was that as a victim of an unknown master effect, I had to be quarantined and kept separate from anyone else it might affect. He smiled at me, though. It didn’t help.
“There’s still more to do,” I complained. “It was just a hypnotic thing; it didn’t compromise me or affect my judgement. I’m safe to keep helping.” I knew it wasn’t going to work, but I couldn’t help it. “Come on, they need me up there. Half the building’s still on fire. And I bet they haven’t got everyone out yet.”
“Rules are rules, Starlight. Besides.” Velocity gave me a reassuring thumbs-up from thirty feet away. “You’ve already done a lot of good getting the fire under control. They can handle it from here.”
I touched down outside, glowering. The heat of the fire had melted the pavements clear and salt crunched underfoot, put down by the firefighting teams so the snow wouldn’t refreeze as ice. Something else white was falling from the sky, though. A soft pattering of ash, bits of burned paper and cladding from the tower block’s walls, descending from on high and lit by the blue lights of the fire trucks. The snow in the rest of the city would probably be grey from soot tomorrow morning. I knew fire well, but this was the biggest one I’d seen in all my time with the PRT. Bigger than the warehouse fire when the E88 had burned down that place near the docks which had probably been holding drugs for one of the other gangs. That had gone up like a torch, but this was… different. There had been people in there. A lot of people.
And now I was being pulled out. Before I could stop it. When there might still be people in there to save. Because of the annoying M/S rules.
It would’ve been nice if the PRT van had shown up just then, to spare me from moping. But of course, I wasn’t that lucky. Instead it was eight more minutes of sitting in the cold, holding the pyrokinetic on my lap while everyone gave us a wide berth, before they arrived. She’d passed out at some point, and I probably didn’t strictly need to keep draining her - it was a rare parahuman whose powers kept working when they were unconscious.
I still didn’t stop, though. Extenuating circumstances or not, she’d started a fire that had eaten an entire tower block and burnt at least three people to death. And she’d mastered me. I wasn’t letting up on the drain until she was safely in custody back at HQ.
PRT vans always smelled the same. It was almost enough to keep my helmet on, but I’d been breathing recycled air since I’d got to the fire and I wanted something fresh-ish. But now the metal-and-cleaning-products-and-rubber smell of the back was joined by the smell of the smoke. I was going to have to put my costume in for a full laundering. Again. Urgh. They better make sure the inner lining was properly dry before they gave it back to me this time. There aren’t many things which suck more than putting on a damp costume. And I probably stank. I’d been simmering in my own sweat there. At least there’d be showers in M/S monitoring.
Another thought occurred to me, and I swore under my breath and pulled my phone out. I hadn’t accidentally drained the battery, which was a small silver lining to an afternoon this terrible. A couple of taps patched it through to my helmet mike, and I dialled home. And got the answering machine. Well, whatever. Aware I was on a time limit, I explained I probably wouldn’t be home tonight and why, then moved onto the next call. It was a number I knew by heart, and this one rang twice and then picked up.
“Emma Barnes,” its owner said cheerfully. “Who is this?”
“It’s me,” I sighed. “Movie plans are off tonight. I’m getting held up at work.”
“Yeah, the apartment fire, right? I saw the news. And the fire! I can see it burning all the way from my window!” I could tell the cancellation hurt, but she was putting a brave face on it, trying to be cheerful and supportive. “There are already some new pictures of you up on PHO! You look totally awesome, as usual. When do you think you’ll get back home? Is a bedtime call an option?”
“I don’t think I’ll be getting home tonight at all,” I admitted. “This is going to take a while to clean up.” Not untrue, though I wouldn’t be helping with the clean-up like I usually did. But need-to-know was another ugly lesson I’d had to learn since joining the Wards, and this was something Emma didn’t need to know. “Sorry. I might be tied up for tomorrow with debriefing. I’ll see you when I see you.”
“Okay. Go be a hero, Taylor.”
I looked down at the unconscious girl in my lap.
Yeah, I thought bitterly. I sure felt like a hero right now.