Ignite Me
Authors: Tahereh Mafi
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Juvenile Fiction, #Love & Romance, #Social Issues, #Adolescence
For my readers. For your love and support. This one’s for you
.
CONTENTS
I am an hourglass.
My seventeen years have collapsed and buried me from the inside out. My legs feel full of sand and stapled together, my mind overflowing with grains of indecision, choices unmade and impatient as time runs out of my body. The small hand of a clock taps me at one and two, three and four, whispering hello, get up, stand up, it’s time to
wake up
wake up
“Wake up,” he whispers.
A sharp intake of breath and I’m awake but not up, surprised but not scared, somehow staring into the very desperately green eyes that seem to know too much, too well. Aaron Warner Anderson is bent over me, his worried eyes inspecting me, his hand caught in the air like he might’ve been about to touch me.
He jerks back.
He stares, unblinking, chest rising and falling.
“Good morning,” I assume. I’m unsure of my voice, of the hour and this day, of these words leaving my lips and this body that contains me.
I notice he’s wearing a white button-down, half untucked
into his curiously unrumpled black slacks. His shirtsleeves are folded, pushed up past his elbows.
His smile looks like it hurts.
I pull myself into a seated position and Warner shifts to accommodate me. I have to close my eyes to steady the sudden dizziness, but I force myself to remain still until the feeling passes.
I’m tired and weak from hunger, but other than a few general aches, I seem to be fine. I’m alive. I’m breathing and blinking and feeling human and I know exactly why.
I meet his eyes. “You saved my life.”
I was shot in the chest.
Warner’s father put a bullet in my body and I can still feel the echoes of it. If I focus, I can relive the exact moment it happened; the pain: so intense, so excruciating; I’ll never be able to forget it.
I suck in a startled breath.
I’m finally aware of the familiar foreignness of this room and I’m quickly seized by a panic that screams I did not wake up where I fell asleep. My heart is racing and I’m inching away from him, hitting my back against the headboard, clutching at these sheets, trying not to stare at the chandelier I remember all too well—
“It’s okay—” Warner is saying. “It’s all right—”
“What am I doing here?” Panic, panic; terror clouds my consciousness. “Why did you bring me here again—?”
“Juliette, please, I’m not going to hurt you—”
“Then why did you bring me here?” My voice is starting
to break and I’m struggling to keep it steady. “Why bring me back to this
hellhole
—”
“I had to hide you.” He exhales, looks up at the wall.
“What? Why?”
“No one knows you’re alive.” He turns to look at me. “I had to get back to base. I needed to pretend everything was back to normal and I was running out of time.”
I force myself to lock away the fear.
I study his face and analyze his patient, earnest tone. I remember him last night—it must’ve been last night—I remember his face, remember him lying next to me in the dark. He was tender and kind and gentle and he saved me, saved my life. Probably carried me into bed. Tucked me in beside him. It must’ve been him.
But when I glance down at my body I realize I’m wearing clean clothes, no blood or holes or anything anywhere and I wonder who washed me, wonder who changed me, and worry that might’ve been Warner, too.
“Did you . . .” I hesitate, touching the hem of the shirt I’m wearing. “Did—I mean—my clothes—”
He smiles. He stares until I’m blushing and I decide I hate him a little and then he shakes his head. Looks into his palms. “No,” he says. “The girls took care of that. I just carried you to bed.”
“The girls,” I whisper, dazed.
The girls
.
Sonya and Sara. They were there too, the healer twins, they helped Warner. They helped him save me because he’s
the only one who can touch me now, the only person in the world who’d have been able to transfer their healing power safely into my body.
My thoughts are on fire.
Where are the girls what happened to the girls and where is Anderson and the war and oh God what’s happened to Adam and Kenji and Castle
and I have to get up I have to get up I have to get up and get out of bed and get going
but
I try to move and Warner catches me. I’m off-balance, unsteady; I still feel as though my legs are anchored to this bed and I’m suddenly unable to breathe, seeing spots and feeling faint. Need up. Need out.
Can’t.
“Warner.” My eyes are frantic on his face. “What happened? What’s happening with the battle—?”
“Please,” he says, gripping my shoulders. “You need to start slowly; you should eat something—”
“
Tell me
—”
“Don’t you want to eat first? Or shower?”
“No,” I hear myself say. “I have to know now.”
One moment. Two and three.
Warner takes a deep breath. A million more. Right hand over left, spinning the jade ring on his pinkie finger over and over and over and over “It’s over,” he says.
“What?”
I say the word but my lips make no sound. I’m numb, somehow. Blinking and seeing nothing.
“It’s over,” he says again.
“No.”
I exhale the word, exhale the impossibility.
He nods. He’s disagreeing with me.
“No.”
“Juliette.”
“No,” I say. “No. No. Don’t be stupid,” I say to him. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I say to him. “
Don’t lie to me goddamn you
,” but now my voice is high and broken and shaking and “No,” I gasp, “no, no,
no
—”
I actually stand up this time. My eyes are filling fast with tears and I blink and blink but the world is a mess and I want to laugh because all I can think is how horrible and beautiful it is, that our eyes blur the truth when we can’t bear to see it.
The ground is hard.
I know this to be an actual fact because it’s suddenly pressed against my face and Warner is trying to touch me but I think I scream and slap his hands away because I already know the answer. I must already know the answer because I can feel the revulsion bubbling up and unsettling my insides but I ask anyway. I’m horizontal and somehow still tipping over and the holes in my head are tearing open and I’m staring at a spot on the carpet not ten feet away and I’m not sure I’m even alive but I have to hear him say it.
“Why?” I ask.
It’s just a word, stupid and simple.
“Why is the battle over?” I ask. I’m not breathing
anymore, not really speaking at all; just expelling letters through my lips.
Warner is not looking at me.
He’s looking at the wall and at the floor and at the bedsheets and at the way his knuckles look when he clenches his fists but no not at me he won’t look at me and his next words are so, so soft.
“Because they’re dead, love. They’re all dead.”
My body locks.
My bones, my blood, my brain freeze in place, seizing in some kind of sudden, uncontrollable paralysis that spreads through me so quickly I can’t seem to breathe. I’m wheezing in deep, strained inhalations, and the walls won’t stop swaying in front of me.
Warner pulls me into his arms.
“Let go of me,” I scream, but, oh, only in my imagination because my lips are finished working and my heart has just expired and my mind has gone to hell for the day and my eyes my eyes I think they’re bleeding. Warner is whispering words of comfort I can’t hear and his arms are wrapped entirely around me, trying to keep me together through sheer physical force but it’s no use.
I feel nothing.
Warner is shushing me, rocking me back and forth, and it’s only then that I realize I’m making the most excruciating, earsplitting sound, agony ripping through me. I want to speak, to protest, to accuse Warner, to blame him, to call him a liar, but I can say nothing, can form nothing but sounds so pitiful I’m almost ashamed of myself. I break free of his arms, gasping and doubling over, clutching my stomach.
“Adam.” I choke on his name.
“Juliette, please—”
“Kenji.” I’m hyperventilating into the carpet now.
“Please, love, let me help you—”
“What about James?” I hear myself say. “He was left at Omega Point—he wasn’t a-allowed to c-come—”
“It’s all been destroyed,” Warner says slowly, quietly. “Everything. They tortured some of your members into giving away the exact location of Omega Point. Then they bombed the entire thing.”
“Oh,
God
.” I cover my mouth with one hand and stare, unblinking, at the ceiling.
“I’m so sorry,” he says. “You have no idea how sorry I am.”
“Liar,” I whisper, venom in my voice. I’m angry and mean and I can’t be bothered to care. “You’re not sorry at all.”
I glance at Warner just long enough to see the hurt flash in and out of his eyes. He clears his throat.
“I am sorry,” he says again, quiet but firm. He picks up his jacket from where it was hanging on a nearby rack; shrugs it on without a word.
“Where are you going?” I ask, guilty in an instant.
“You need time to process this and you clearly have no use for my company. I will attend to a few tasks until you’re ready to talk.”