Heart of Fire | ONC 2020

6. smoke

Aera found herself entranced by the dancing flame. She lost herself in its flickering orange glow, her mind free of all thought. 

Gradually, the flame before her was replaced by the blinding brightness of rapidly approaching headlights. She heard the earsplitting, urgent call of a car's horn, growing quickly in volume. 

She gasped, unable to react before she was struck by a powerful impact, throwing her against the asphalt. She felt the skin of her arm being grated off by the roughness of the road as she was violently thrashed to the ground. 

Around her, there were piercing screams and cars blasting past frighteningly near her head. She lay there breathing heavily for a moment, unable to move. 

Her heart was racing, but her brain was moving very slowly. She gradually realized the object that had collided with her was moving—breathing, even. She had not been hit by a car—she had been pushed out of the way, just in time.

Then Aera recalled where she was—or rather, how she had arrived there—and prepared at any moment to be unwittingly catapulted back to her reality. 

"My God, are you alright?" A teenage boy knelt over her. 

He had pushed her out of the way of certain death, she realized, judging by the speed of the cars racing past them on either side. At least, if the laws of physics still applied at wherever it was she had appeared at the stroke of a match.  

In her mind, at that moment, she was certain the scene surrounding her was real. The air whipping at her face every time a vehicle went by, the stinging of the fresh road rash on her arm, and the boy's sky-colored eyes gazing into hers—it was all too sharp and detailed to be only something her mind had conjured up. 

But why was she sticking around so much longer this time?

She sat up so suddenly that the boy nearly jumped backward into traffic, his heel landing on the inner edge of the painted white line that separated them from the cars.

Then he returned to her side, looking relieved that she hadn't been more seriously hurt. He grabbed her hand and helped her up, then they waited for a gap in the cars to cross the lanes onto a sidewalk. He sat down with her at a bench. A small crowd of concerned people gathered, but Aera paid them no mind.

"Please tell me, right now, what's your name and what year is it?" she said.

"Shouldn't I be the one asking you this?"

"Please, just tell me," she implored. She stared deeply into his eyes, realizing that his face reminded her very much of someone, but she couldn't place who it was.

"Draven Caulfield is my name." He looked serious, as if he could see by her expression that she was in no way joking. He told her it was the current year, which Aera wasn't sure what to make of. 

Aera took in her surroundings—she was on a street lined with dozens of busy shops. People who hadn't just witnessed her near-death experience were wandering about, smiling and laughing. The sun was out and there were no clouds in sight. The sky was clean—perhaps not as pristine as the meadow on her birthday, but much better than the hazy, grey sky she was used to. 

She turned back to Draven and said, "Thank you for saving me." She grabbed his hand and gave it a squeeze just as she felt herself begin to fade away from his world. This time, she tried to relax into the feeling, closing her eyes and allowing herself to begin to fall. 

Soon enough, she could feel the cool underground air in Jackie's office. Her body had gone limp and sunk back into the padded chair. 

"Ow!" Mason exclaimed, jolting Aera's eyes open. 

She saw that the cigar had burnt down to his fingers, and he was flicking the smoldering remains out of his hand. 

He stared at Aera with wide, shocked eyes. "I have no recollection of ever smoking that cigar." He frowned at the ashes before him. "I feel cheated. Those were expensive."

Aera laughed and, to her surprise, Jackie joined in. 

Then they were all stuck in a fit of giggles. They would gradually stop laughing until one would start up again, reigniting the others' amusement. This went on until Aera's face began to hurt from smiling so hard. 

Then there was a knock at the door, and all three froze and went stone-faced. A young man popped his head in the door and said, "We just got a—" He went silent when he noticed Aera.

"Go on," Mason said, almost starting to laugh again at the young man's bewildered expression. 

"We just had some unusual activity that I thought you or Jackie should take a look at." His eyes flickered to Aera with uncertainty. "I mean . . . if you're not busy."

"Certainly," Mason said, rising once more from his chair with a groan.

The young man walked with them down the hallways, back to the rooms Jackie had shown Aera before. "It's the most massive and sudden spike in signal I've ever seen," he said, his voice trembling with excitement or nervousness, or perhaps both. 

They crowded into a cramped room with several large computer monitors. The man pressed a few buttons, materializing a graph on the screen before them. Jackie and Mason were quiet, both leaning forward and staring intently at it. 

Faced with silence, Aera tried to decipher the graph herself. Most of the line was very flat horizontally, with only a few small deviances in the form of what Aera would describe as squiggles. She realized that the unit across the bottom was time, measured in minutes. 

Just a few minutes ago, the line had shot up to the very top of the graph, almost completely vertically, then directly down again. 

Mason turned around and smiled at her. "I think you did it. I was watching the clock in Jackie's office, and this spike lines up exactly. You proved—for now, only to me, but maybe soon, everyone can know—that what you've been experiencing is a very real phenom—"  He stopped. "Good lord, what happened?"

He grabbed Aera's wrist ever so gently, raising her arm. There was blood dripping from it onto the floor, already forming a puddle.