Illuminate (56 page)

The ballroom was ablaze!

Half of it was already burning, and a chain reaction set off around the rest of it: each flower arrangement and centerpiece exploded one by one into flames. Still, the room remained half full with people who appeared in no rush to leave despite the chaos around them; even the DJ continued spinning. It took only a moment to realize why: he was one of the Outfit. The remaining Outfit members continued serving drinks and canapés and danced as though nothing was wrong, and because they did, at least a few dozen of our classmates stayed behind as the rest ran for the doorways. They clustered in the center of the dance floor, the safest spot, as the flames burned along the periphery. It was as if they thought this pyrotechnics display was just some very elaborate part of the decoration. A new fire ignited, and my eyes darted toward it. No, it couldn’t be—but it looked like Mirabelle. On fire. And then the same thing happened to the Outfit guy who had followed us to Dante’s house. One by one, the Outfit members were bursting into flames. No warning, they just began sizzling up.

A chunk of the ceiling crumbling from flames tumbled down to my feet, making me jump. I gave the TV one last tug—hopeless—as I noticed my more successful counterparts, Lance and Dante, fleeing Alcatraz, leaving Etan and his friend sparking and beginning to ignite back in the cell. The heat and smoke rose, as the entire room crackled and spit around me, the fire spreading so haphazardly now, out of control. My heart sank: I had to give up on this passageway; it wasn’t opening. Maybe Aurelia had discovered it and had it sealed when she replaced the TV. It didn’t matter—I had to get out before I burned to ash. Aurelia, whose own flames were burning brighter, her form creating a blockade at least three feet high and growing near the front door, was slithering toward me, slowly, slowly. The conflagration had nearly reached the front door of the office now too, but it was the only way out. I would be boxed in within minutes. That was it: I’d have to jump over Aurelia to get to the door.

Sweat dripping off of me, I gathered everything I had in me and ran the few steps I had room to run, then launched myself up, springing on legs that had never been asked to take such a leap. I tucked my legs up to clear her as she clawed at me, trying to grab hold and singeing the soles of my shoes to the point it felt like she burned right through them. I landed on the other side and wound up my leg, kicking and kicking at what little of the door hadn’t been burned up. At last it crumbled and I fled the inferno, racing out into the relative safety of the hallway, coughing and panting.

35. Be Strong . . . and Be You

I could hear the screams before I even reached the lobby—the shrieks and clomping of shoes that tend to accompany a mass exodus. A sea of our classmates fleeing the ballroom, and other hotel guests, who must’ve smelled the rising smoke, vacating their rooms and spilling out of the stairwells.

Looking straight up to the skylight, I could see people scurrying on every floor, knocking on doors, alerting each other since, mysteriously, not a single fire alarm had sounded. But down in the lobby now, it was just too many people, everyone pooled by the front entrance waiting to trickle out into the street. Everyone had a sense of frenzy, yet it didn’t translate into any rapid motion because the crowd was too enormous for the space, so they sifted one by one by one through the front doors, barely moving. The backup was so great that there was virtually no movement on the packed grand staircase either, everyone inching along, anxious to leave.

At the top of the mezzanine, leaning over the railing, I caught sight of a jumping, waving figure. Dante. He placed his hands around his mouth and shouted over and over to be heard above the clamor: “HAVEN! HAVEN! UP HERE!” I waved both arms in the air. I had never been so relieved to see him. I pushed through the crowd to get to that ottoman and once there I climbed up to the top of its raised center, elbowing anyone in the way, anything to be closer to Dante and get a better vantage point above the masses. “You get her?” he shouted down.

“Got her!” I yelled back up, raising my arm in a thumbs-up. My voice, despite a smoky rasp, had never felt stronger or more proud. My heart was still beating so fast from all I’d accomplished against Aurelia, a sense of supreme invincibility washed over me. Even as these frantic bodies surged around me, I allowed myself just a second to savor the stunning truth: I had somehow come through that battle with Aurelia and won. I felt so powerful thinking about it, it almost made me forget my aching muscles, my scraped and scratched and torn flesh. It seemed like that had been accomplished by someone else but, no,
I
had done that.

Dante put both arms in the air in a victory cheer. “Yeah!” But the celebration had to be brief.

“Do you need me up there or the Vault?”

“All set here. Try the Vault. With Lance. Use this to get people out!” He held his hand up, about to throw something. I steadied myself on the top of the ottoman, praying to make the catch. He lobbed something the size of a grenade over the balcony to me. It was a good throw, right on target. I saw it coming at me and needed it to not explode in my face. I held up both hands making a landing cushion and caught it firm and tight in my palms, breathing a sigh of relief. Green and riddled with bumps, it looked like some type of exotic fruit but was actually from that mysterious garden. Dante had said last night that he had stolen as many of the rare plants as he could find: all you had to do was smash them into the floor, shattering them, and they would release a sort of tear gas that could not only get people to disperse, but also neutralize any poisons in the air.

“Be careful!” he yelled back.

“You too!” I called out, just as a huge crash erupted in the ballroom. It sounded as if some part of it had caved in. The crowd yelped, pushing forward, a stampede overtaking the stairs.

I leapt off the top of the ottoman, twisting my ankle as I landed on the ground and feeling the slightest crunch—my high heel—but remaining on my feet. I felt a superhuman energy. I reached down and pulled that broken heel clean off and then with all my force yanked off the other one too. Now I had flats. Thank goodness I’d gone with Mary Janes; that ankle strap was handy.

I had to wrap my head around this one final task—the only thing that stood in the way of us getting out of here alive. It needed to be done, that’s all there was to it. I took off, back through the lobby to the stairwell down to the Vault. I had it to myself, which was a bad sign: no one was clearing out of the club yet.

I ran through that light-splashed tubular entranceway and couldn’t help but slow to a halt when I reached the club. The place was packed, the DJ still spinning, music thumping. Everyone still drinking and dancing. No one here seemed to have any idea the hotel was on fire. I wondered where Lance might be and, as if answering my thoughts, an explosion sounded in the far back corner of the room and a cloud of smoke engulfed the area. As Dante had promised, the haze sent revelers scrambling for the exit and covering their faces, leaving those standing near me wondering aloud to each other, “What was that?” “What’s going on?”

“Fire,” I told the group nearest me, prom-goers who had filtered down to this underbelly. “You’ve gotta get out. Over there, go!” As they headed for the exit, I slipped through the crowd, to the opposite side of the back area, over by that blazing wall of fire.

I was about to throw down that sphere Dante had given me when I heard my name from the space behind me.

“So, it’s Haven, right?”

I turned around to find Jason Abington standing there, hands in his pockets, looking oddly shy. This obviously could not have been a worse time. I just stared for a moment.

“Can I get you, like, a drink or something?” he went on.

“Jason, hi, wow, really? Now, of all times?” I shook my head. “I’m kinda busy, but thanks. And don’t take this the wrong way, but you’ve gotta get outta here. Like, now. Trust me, you’ll thank me. Go.” And with that I slammed Dante’s plant into the floor and a puff of stinging smoke exploded out of it. The people standing around me began flowing toward the front exit, a relief. Another tear-gas bomb went off in the distance, echoing mine. Then I felt a tug on the skirt of my dress. Maybe he thought I was playing hard to get?

“Jason, you have to—” I started as I spun around. But it wasn’t him. A hot poker wrapped itself around my calf and another clamped onto my thigh, melting my skin and forcing me to the sticky, drink-splattered ground as I let out a scream. Crumpled on the floor, gripping me, was the charred, twisting mass of what was left of Aurelia, embers still glowing. Amid the chaos, she had slithered down here, following me, not ready to let me get away with what I had done. I kicked and crawled, trying to wriggle out from her grasp as she tried to drag me closer to that wall of fire. I had no doubt that if she got me near enough, she would find the strength to throw me into it. My beat-up palms, ravaged from this night of horrors, clung and dug into the floor as my legs scissored trying to buck her off me. A scream rose to my lips again but was instantly drowned out by an explosion shattering the air, like the crackle of a firecracker. I knew that sound by now.

I looked up to discover a body of one of the few remaining Outfit members combusting above in the ring of fire. A collective, primal scream broke out and then another body exploded into flames, then the DJ. The dozen people still on the platform flew down the spiral staircase and pushed their way into the crowd leaving the club, pushing, pushing, making the whole mess of them spill out faster and with far greater urgency than they had upstairs. The entire space was consumed by a thick, suffocating cloud now. Hard to see. No one to help.

All I could do was keep fighting for my life. Punching and kicking, I knocked Aurelia off me for a split second and tried to get to my feet. But she launched herself at me once more, pulling me down again, clutching my aching leg in her searing grip. I flailed messily to break free, and just when I thought I couldn’t hold her off any longer, I felt it—the slightest loosening of her grasp. She was weakening, her charred, disfigured body growing more brittle. I delivered a final swift kick, sending her sliding across the floor and turning her to sizzling, simmering ash.

A strong hand grabbed my arm, pulling me away and lifting me to my feet.

“Nice job,” Lance said. His tuxedo jacket and bow tie were long gone, his shirt was untucked, torn and dirty. He had mostly dried from his dip in the Alcatraz moat, but he looked just as weathered as I did.

“Thanks,” I panted, steadying myself on bleeding legs. Even in this smokiness, I could feel that we were alone now.

“Ready to get the hell out of here?” he asked. In the space behind him, the flames of the Outfit members had spread, joining the ring of fire’s perimeter. The whole platform looked like a blazing cauldron. I froze.

“Only if we can run and not walk to the nearest exit.” Lance followed my line of vision.

The entire platform, a ball of fire, crashed to the floor.

Lance and I looked at each other with knowing eyes. And we took off speeding, out the back exit, into the tunnels. We bound down those corridors just like we had all those nights blowing off steam and making ourselves strong. Behind us, the fire rolled and rumbled, spitting at our backs, the thick smoke hanging in the air like a net trying to stop us. Blood raged in my veins, and I felt a superhuman surge. Though I had been beat up, battered, and bruised, I felt stronger than I ever had before. We sprinted at a speed that I didn’t even know we were capable of, generating so much wind it felt like we were riding in a convertible.

The fire was catching up with us, threatening to overtake us, sweep us into its blazing maw. Through that tunnel we soared, until we reached that hidden door into the pantry of the bar we had pillaged nightly, and raced up the steps, taking them two at a time until we emerged directly behind the bar, knocking into the bartender who had once kicked us out and toppling over a whole shelf of bottles that crashed and shattered in our wake.

“Fire! Fire! Get out!” we yelled as we rammed straight through the dense crowd of drunk patrons looking for their Saturday night fix. They all scowled at us like we were playing a prank and they didn’t move an inch.

But by the time we had cleared their front door and thrown ourselves into the warm night air, we heard the manic rush of the herd storming out.

We kept running down the narrow alley between the worn brick buildings, running and running as shrieking sirens pierced the night.

It took several minutes before it occurred to us that we had made it. Lance and I didn’t even slow to a walk until we had run almost to the other side of the block, back to the hotel. Then we let our bones and muscles cry out; we let our feet drag so it was almost as if we weren’t moving forward at all. I had the sense that I could drop right there, just collapse in the alley and sleep for days and days. The volume turned back up on the rest of the world, reminding us that we were still a part of it: the murmur of a thousand nervous strangers asking one another what happened and that befuddled shuffle of all these confused bodies standing around getting in the way. An ambulance whirred and whistled, shaking us both awake, and came screaming down the alley. Lance took me by the wrist, yanking my whole body over to the side of one building, sending himself stumbling too, to let the noisy, bleating monster pass without hitting us.

We smashed against the wall, tripping messily, practically drunk with exhaustion. And as we recovered our footing, he grabbed me to steady me against the brick wall of the building. Before I could even process it, his lips were on mine as he pressed against me, stealing my breaths and making me dreamily dizzy. Like vines, his arms wound around me, pulling me close, his hands webbed in my hair. I didn’t even feel the bricks against my back. I didn’t feel anything but him.

Slowly, he inched back, loosening his hold on me. As soon as our lips parted, in awe, I couldn’t keep it in: “It was you . . .”