“Get up, get up,” he said when they hit the bottom, half-pulling, half-leaning on her.
They got their feet under them like an ungainly, newborn four-legged creature, and limped into the cover of close-growing pines.
Last light flared orange in the tree tops, lighting them from beneath, but down amongst the trunks it was all a shifting collage of shadows. The air was cooler here, and smelled of nearby fresh water.
Water might mean a stream, which could help them hide their tracks.
“Smell that?” Rooster asked.
“Yeah.” She turned toward it, and Rooster’s arm slipped off her shoulders. He went down hard on his knees with a curse, and she turned back to him.
He swayed back and forth, his face an eerie bone-white in the gloom, hair glued to his temples, and forehead, and the back of his neck with sweat.
“I have to help you first,” she said, reaching for him again. And again, he batted her away. “Rooster.”
“I’m fine.”
“You can’t even walk! Let me see it.”
“We don’t have time.” He glared at her. Or attempted to. He was half-a-head shorter than her on his knees, and he kept swallowing like he was fighting not to be sick.
“You can’t keep going like this,” she tried to reason.
He nodded toward her hand. “But you can?”
She frowned down at the cuff. No, not effectively, she couldn’t. The numbness was crawling up over her shoulder and spreading across her chest, cold but relentless, like frost across a windowpane. If left unchecked, it might move down her other arm, shut off her abilities completely.
They’d been made for this purpose, she realized: something in the throbbing points that pierced her skin, or the metal itself, was designed to contain her power. The Institute was getting smarter, bolder.
But there wasn’t much that could controlfire.
“I’m going to try something,” she announced, and sparked a flame in her left hand.
“Red,” Rooster said like a warning.
“Shh.” She brought the flame to the cuff on her other wrist, touched it to it, and thenpushedwith all her might.
Light flared, bright enough to make her eyes water, and the heat burned her skin. She’d never managed to scorch herself; never found a single blister or even a pink patch, but the sensation was there: of roasting flesh, and melting bone; of being burned at the stake like the witch she was.
“Red, stop.” Rooster sounded scared now, but she kept pushing. Kept funneling more and more of her power into the heat. She wrapped her fingers around the cuff, willed all of her fire and her fury into it. Her scalp prickled; tears streamed down her cheeks. She became aware of a high whining sound, and finally realized it was coming from between her clenched teeth.
“Red.”
The cuff fell to the forest floor, and sensation flooded her arm, painful and wonderful. Red drew back on the flames, let her power ebb, and blinked down at her wrist.
Her skin was pink, but not burned like it should have been. She rubbed the bones, smearing blood drops into a grisly bracelet, and tried to catch her breath. She trembled, drained in the low-sugar way that always followed a power usage of that magnitude. But she was still on her feet, and she cultivated a little flame, no bigger than that of a cigarette lighter, in her right palm.
She looked at Rooster.
He was gaping at her. “Your hair…” he said.
He sounded delusional; blood loss. There was no time. “Your leg,” she prompted. “Rooster, come on.”
He moved to comply, wincing.
And sheheardthe bullet take him in the shoulder. The soft, fiercethumpas it bit through meat and muscle. He shook, pushed forward by the impact. Red grabbed at his shirt, tried to catch him, and only succeeded in slowing his face-plant.
He landed on his side with an animal sound of pain, teeth gritted, face white from blood loss and shock.
