The Shattered Lid

Malik counts the breaths. Nine. Ten. Each number weighs a little less air.

I knew it before he did. This lid of concrete is digesting us slowly, and my throttled heat rocks them toward a sleep no one climbs back from. A makeshift stove. A lukewarm gravedigger. The light I hold back opens no door.

I rise.

The child slides off my flank, groping for my ember. I lay him against Jolanda. "The drum." My throat rasps. "On your feet, all of you."

They groan, haul themselves up onto the rubble. Lio grabs his bar. Jolanda wedges the instrument, smeared with her own blood, between her ruined knees. Her eyes find mine in the gloom, read what's coming, and her jaw locks.

"Strike."

Boom-tak.

The first blow lands crooked. The second finds the cadence. I let the Flame climb — no longer the stove that lulls, but the forge that delivers. My obsidian knuckles redden, whiten. I tune my wave to their rhythm; the infrasound swells beneath the filthy boom-tak, marries each strike, and I hurl it against the vault.

The stone groans. A crack races from pillar to pillar, spitting its dust. Jolanda pounds harder, palms open, blood spraying on the taut skin. Lio bellows a word the din swallows. The Forgotten hammer whatever they find — sheet metal, bones of concrete, their own fists.

I push again. The heat gnaws the ceiling from below. The concrete runs in orange filaments, then gives all at once.

Daylight drops on us. Raw. Grey. Hard.

I strike the ground. Climb.

The rock is scalding. They know it. Jolanda hoists the child ahead of her, then tears herself up bare-handed onto stone that bites. No one stops. We rise toward the sky with ash filling our mouths, our dead on our backs.

Above, already, the drones of Stability wait. How many heartbeats before they count our heads?