I can hear again. A little.
Standing straight, reeling, Sophie took a deeper breath, and—
Vertigo.
Her arms slowly lifted up into the air, like it was sleepover again and she was playing the “light as a feather” game with Jolynn and Margie and Sara, light as a feather, stiff as a board, catch me, catch me—
What am I thinking? She wondered. And then, worse: Who am I?
She fell to her knees. She convulsed. Her bowels released, she could smell herself.
Can’t breathe.
She lay there, gasping. The floor was thrumming still, somehow, with the massive explosions outside. More? How can there be more?
How long… how long was I…
Her head throbbed, eyes pulsing through light and dark as she looked around. She retched as the stench of her defecation crept up through her sweaty clothing. The great room of the shelter was intact, but hot. Sweltering. She could feel the heat surging through the cracked concrete beneath her body, warming the entire room.
Two of the walls had cracked, framed maps and a bulletin board had fallen out of their bolted sockets onto the work table and the floor. Off in the back rooms, some kind of air conditioner was filling the air with vapor and chemical-tinged moisture, straining and keening into life. Dust was still filtering down, it was pooling on the floor, into the puddle of blood and filth she had left beneath her. Her urine was trickling down a drain.
She tried to say, “Thank God. I’m alive.” But she could not say anything. Her vision faded away.
Lacie. I’m coming.
A light, then. A tunnel. Lacie was there. She was holding her hand back out to mommy, she was running. She was running away.
Lacie my love,
honey no,
stop running.
Stop running away,
for mommy.
Please?
Please wait for me.
Sophie started to run, to run after Lacie, out of her body. Lacie looked back at her, a tragic and poetic smile upon her cherubic face. Golden hair, Tom’s wispy fleece of gold, spread in a wind-spun halo about her face. Somehow, Sophie’s daughter seemed ancient, unfathomably wise. A light around her blossomed brighter.
No! Stay with me. Lacie!
Lacie turned away in tears. Slowly, stuck in the glue-like radiance of the air, Lacie kept running on.
Stay.
Sophie took a faltering breath, and felt something wet, some tangible flesh made all of energy deep inside her snap and squelch back into place. Whatever bodiless part of her had tried to flee, she clutched at it, tapering and squeezing all its threads. She rolled onto her back, brought two closing fists full of “threads” up to her breast, and held that lace of invisible fire, pulling it back inside of her.
Another breath. She opened her eyes.
Think of Lacie. Live for Lacie.
She knew then, she was not going to die. Not as a sacrifice for the hungering White Fire, not on the threshold of Zero Day.
Flesh.
Her thoughts slowly began to coalesce.
This is me, I am me.
This is my body.
I.
Having forced her to stay awake and alert long enough to free herself and to breathe, Sophie’s body at last surrendered the adrenaline surge into a nothingness of exhaustion.
The world is burning now.
She could hear, somewhat. The explosions had turned to silence. The air conditioner growled, something beneath the floor went drip, drip and became a song, a lullaby.
A strange thought, not one of vengeance but merely one of morbid serenity, was the last thing Sophie contemplated on that day. The men who had shot her husband, who had murdered him for trying to save her life and that of Lacie, all of them would be dead by now.
All burning.
Goodbye.
A strange smile crept upon Sophie’s face, one twitching end of it tilting up and then the other, where a little blood had burbled through.
And then she fell into the black mercy of unknowing. Everything, every thought and every part of her turned to liquid and cascaded down into the darkness.
Lacie.
That day, unlike six billion and seven hundred and eighty-three million other souls, Sophia Ingrid Saint-Germain lived on.
Goodbye.
Her daughter smiled. In the fading radiance, Lacie waved to her mother one last time before she ran out of sight.
Goodbye.
Staring at the crumbling ceiling, Sophie smiled back.
I will come to you, Lacie.
I promise you I will find you.
Alone, exalted, sheltered for rebirth and so fallen in preconception of the Awakening, Sophie of the Black Hawk touched unfeeling fingers to her lips, and with a gentle smile she closed her eyes.
I-6
CODA
To Be Continued
(The survival story of Sophie St.-Germain continues, when she rises and finds herself no longer to be alone in FROM THE FIRE, EPISODE II: THE CAGE, also available from Wonderland Imprints and the Kindle Store on Amazon.com.)