Page 165 of Flint’s Strike

He’d be somewhere hard to get to. A closet. A locker room. Or worse—a crawlspace I have no way of finding because my phone is outside on the pavement somewhere.

At the end of the hall, the fire door’s propped open. Twenty feet away, flames dance along the ceiling. It’s hotter now. Sweat beads on my forehead, and I can’t get a full breath. More open classrooms. And there—two closed doors: a teacher’s lounge, and a second with an old, scratched sign.

Janitor

The knob won’t turn. I wedge the flat end of the tire iron between the frame and the strike plate.

Please…please be alive.

The building screams, light and sound everywhere all at once. The tire iron clatters to the floor.

The power. Somewhere beneath the wave of panic pulling me under, I know it’s the power. Fire alarms.

But all I can hear is Prophet.

“Your pain ends when you accept your new life.”

A wail fills my ears. I don’t realize it’s mine until I cough so hard I almost throw up.

No. Prophet isn’t here. I’m not in the box. And my new fucking life has Eliot in it.

I fumble for the tire iron, force it back into place, and throw my weight against it.

The door swings inward, bangs against the wall, and a stack of boxes topples over.

Oh, God.

Eliot.

He’s on the floor, his back to a pipe running up to the ceiling, with a respirator strapped to his face.

But the part that makes my blood run cold is the thin line of orange flame crawling along the ceiling behind him.

Chapter Sixty-Six

Eliot

Time stops.

Parker.

She’s here. Drenched in sweat, her white shirt gray with ash and soot, standing in the doorway beyond the boxes like some sort of avenging angel.

Tears carve pale tracks over her cheeks. Her eyes…they’re wrong. Pupils blown. Lips parted, breathing in all this shit as the light from the flames along the ceiling plays over her face.

My heart cracks in two. She came. She found me. But if she doesn’t move, we’re both dying. Fast.

A piece of burning insulation drops onto one of the boxes. It catches instantly, eating away at the cardboard in seconds.

“Parker! Move!” The mask swallows my words, and the fire alarms clash against the sounds of the building.

Please. See me, Parker. We’re so close…

She blinks, and whatever memory she was trapped in loosens its hold. Shoving one box after another out of her way, she drops to her knees at my side. Her hands run along my arms, down to the hard, plastic tie around my wrists.

And then she’s in front of me. Trying her hardest to cup my cheeks around the mask.

“Gonna hurt!” she shouts, then starts coughing hard enough, I know she doesn’t have much time before smoke inhalation takes her down.