met·a·noi·a (1) |ˌmetəˈnoiə|
1. a spontaneous attempt of the psyche to heal itself of unbearable conflict by melting down and then being reborn in a more adaptive form.

"Where are we going?"

Engie didn't answer her, he just sped up, and the Pyro was confused.

They were out past dark again and it was cold and she wanted to be inside. Demo was going to tell her a story about a sea monster tonight he'd said and now she wasn't going to get to hear about the sea monster because Engie was taking her somewhere. It seemed kind of familiar like maybe they'd done this before, and not long ago, but she wasn't sure if she had made that up or not, sometimes she made things up. He'd said Pyro here, and given her her flare gun, and then he'd put his little silver gun in one of his pockets and put on his coat and everything. Then he had taken her by the wrist and they were walking outside, in the dark, in the cold.

It was hard to see. Engie had a little flashlight but he wasn't using it, she'd seen him pocket that too but even though it was dark he hadn't turned it on. The stars were hiding and she kind of wondered if maybe they were hiding from Engie because he was in one of those moods where he didn't talk. They were kind of scary moods because he always went really fast and he never explained anything and mostly the Pyro just kind of tried to stay out of his way when he was like that.

So when he'd pulled her out into the snow and left her to plod behind him she didn't say much. But after a while they'd walked way past middle, they'd gone right through the cliffs and up to the building where the Pyro and everyone else had spent days and days trying to catch the big circle inside it. She had never been here when it was dark, before. A single white light glared out at them from the building's exterior as they drew near. "Engie?" the Pyro said.

"Shh," he said sharply. He was looking around, all sharp edges. "…Pyro, look here. We're—we're doin' a new game, okay?"

"Game? Really?"

"Keep yer voice down," Engie said. "Yeah—a game, yeah. With RED. S'a different game from normal, so the rules are different."

The Pyro stared at him in awe. A new game with the redthings? They'd never once played a new game, not that she could remember—they played get-the-papers and catch-the-circle and stop-the-cart, and a couple other ones, but they were mostly just different versions of the same game. "What're the rules?" she pressed. Maybe it was a game you could only play at night.

"First rule is you got to be quiet." The Pyro nodded. "Second—you don't shoot at nobody 'less I say so or I do it first. Nobody, got it?" She nodded again. "Okay. Them's the big rules. There's prob'ly other ones but I'll tell you 'em later if they come up, okay?"

"Okay. Is this a sneaking game like when Scout takes stuff outta the fridge at night?"

"What? Sure."

The Pyro wondered if he'd actually heard her or if he was just saying that. She thought about repeating herself when Engineer looked up at something over her shoulder. She turned around to see what it was and every muscle in her body went stiff and tense all at once like something had twisted a knob and yanked them tight.

The redmask was coming towards them through the snow. The Pyro growled and almost reached for her flare gun, then remembered what Engie had said. He hadn't really meant redmask, had he? Redmask was different. Redmask was bad.

He stopped a few yards away, a cigarette smoking in his hand. Next to her she hear Engineer sigh. "Stay put," he said, and he started off through the snow toward redmask.

The Pyro whined to herself, but did nothing else. What else could she do? But if this was part of the new game, she didn't like it.

Nothing happened when he got to redmask. She watched them so closely she thought her eyes might fall out of her head, but still nothing happened. They were just … talking. No fighting, no weapons drawn, though once Engie made a sharp motion with his hand like he was brandishing his wrench. She jumped at that, but the redmask stayed still and said something, and Engineer dropped his hand.

Then Engie was coming back, leaving redmask behind him in the snow. The Pyro huffed to herself. Why were they talking all of a sudden? It was dangerous. Someone would get hurt.

When he reached her she wanted to grab his hand and run back home but she was cold and the suit and her joints were all stiff and Engie usually didn't like it when she did things like that anyway. So instead she stood in the snow and shivered and was unhappy. There were Somethings creeping around the edges of her mask lenses, the same Somethings that always came back whenever she was upset about something, and they always just made her more upset until she never ever knew even how she stopped being upset at all.

But then Engineer was there and she could stop focusing on the Somethings. "What are we doing?" she asked, desperately hoping the answer would be "Leaving."

It wasn't. "We're playin' that game I told you 'bout now, remember?"

"I—" She looked at the redmask, standing as stock-still and poised as a cat, "I don't wanna."

"Well, we got to, sorry. It's—it'll be alright, Smoky. This is a good game, okay? If you do all what I say things are goin' to get better, promise."

Better? Better like Engineer would stop talking to redmask and they would go home and they would win the fight and they could go home-home, their real home in Texas where it was warm and she could play with Engie's dog? Better. "Okay," she said. One game and things would get better.

"Good girl. C'mon, then."

She followed him crunchcrunch through the snow, all the way over to redmask, and as much as she wanted to hit him just because he was redmask and he was awful she didn't because Engie said. She kept her hands to herself all the way through the snow and just followed Engie who was following redmask who had his own tiny flashlight. She was a good girl.

They went way, way around the bases and the cliffs and kind of looped some and Engie once broke a branch off a tree they passed because he was very strong and that was a thing he could do, and he used it on the snow to make it look like they hadn't walked through it. She had wanted to know if that was part of the game, but Engineer just grunted and threw the branch over into a snowdrift, and then they were following redmask again.

They walked for a long time (but maybe it wasn't, the Pyro wasn't very good at time really) and then they stopped, just outside some old brown cabins that had so much snow on their roofs that they looked like the horse Engie had to put down for the neighbor lady last summer. It was an old horse and it had been brown too and the Pyro gave it some sugar and petted its head while Engie and the lady talked, and they didn't talk a whole lot, and they mostly did it in quiet voices. The lady had been sad, she remembered. The old horse was sick and its eyes were all cloudy and dark and Engineer had said it had "colic" and that it was "swayback" before he shot it in the head. That's what the cabins' roofs looked like, like they were swayback. Maybe they had colic, too. When she asked where the respawn for the horse was Engineer had just sighed and taken her by the arm and marched her outside and told her to sit and wait.

Most of the doors were shut, ice glazing the handles like wet sugar, but redmask brought them to the most swaybacked house of all and its door swung open with a touch. Inside they went, and the Pyro thought it was somehow even colder in there than outside. Beside her, Engineer rubbed at his arms, and when he cleared his throat he puffed out dragonsmoke. "This it?"

"Indeed it is."

At first the Pyro couldn't see what they were talking about, not until redmask reached up to the crumbling mantlepiece of the cabin's fireplace. He lifted down a very familiar object. "Medigun?" Engie said, and he sounded surprised.

Redmask turned, the backpack dangling from one hand and the gun itself in the other. "I suppose you were expecting a dispenser?"

"'Spose I was."

"Mm. No, our medic incorporated it into his standard kit after it succeeded on me. Much more efficient, more portable." He set it down on the remnant of a table, propped up by a bunch of bricks. The Pyro shifted her weight from one foot to the other. This game didn't make sense.

"So you just—y'goin' to turn it on, let it go? How long's it take?"

"On myself it was a matter of perhaps forty minutes' time. For her…" Redmask was looking at her. The Pyro bared her teeth at him and was glad Engineer couldn't tell her off for it. "…Significantly longer."

Engineer answered in his irritated voice. The Pyro tensed up at the sound of it, but he wasn't aiming it at her. "And how much longer is that? An hour, five hours, all night? She was on it approachin' seven, seven an' a half hours at least, an' that was after she'd been on it for five already—"

"Don't get testy with me, please," redmask said. "I am neither a doctor nor a man of science. All I can assure you of is that it will work, though the case may be such that it will not be done over the course of a single evening."

The Pyro was still trying to figure out what they were talking about. Engineer shoved his hands into his pockets and looked at the medigun. After a moment, he said, "All right. Let's get to it, then."

It took a solid five minutes to get the Pyro to sit quiet in one spot, and Dell wished he'd brought something to distract her with. In the end it was the spy that solved the problem: he produced his cigarette lighter, a flawless silver thing, and put it in her hands. She went very still, then began flicking it on and off, on and off, on and off, as easily as she used to. There was an eerie grace about the effortless snap of her wrist.

When the spy pointed the medigun at her and locked the handle into its "on" position she stopped, for just a moment. She looked at the medigun, and then at Engineer. "…Hht hhr hwe dwhng nhw?"

"Part of the game, still," he said.

"Oh," she said. Half a second later she went back to huddling over the lighter, a little tenser than before.

"Well," the spy said. "Best make yourself comfortable. We may be here for some time."

Dell didn't give him an answer, just leaned back against the frozen wall with his arms folded. The medigun's red beams threw eerie lights across the room, mixing poorly with the Zippo's flame and the little moonlight that crept in through a miraculously intact window. It left the Pyro looking small and haunted, the way she was curled in on herself. It reminded him of the night he had found her under the mess table.

That night. The way she had looked at him, her face the first time he had ever seen it. Dell hadn't undestood, hell, he still didn't. She had guarded her face so jealously for so long, and then to simply give up her secret? What had she even been hiding? All he had seen was a young woman—a tired and frightened one, sure, and with scars, but not ones as bad as he had anticipated. And the way she had acted...

If he'd just gone after her.

An hour passed by them in silence. Dell was actually debating the pros and cons of starting a conversation with the damn spy when the Pyro coughed, hoarse and heavy. She was shivering, he realized, and badly. "...All right," he said, pushing off from the wall. "It's too damn cold to be out here. We can get back to this tomorrow."

"Agreed," the spy said, surprising Dell with his cooperation. But sitting around in the cold would leave anyone ready to go inside, wouldn't it. The spy rose and shut the gun off, and Dell help the Pyro get to her feet. Even her hands were shaking when he took the lighter from them.

He sighed. "Tell me you're gettin' cold next time, alright? Don't need you gettin' frostbite." Not that she would, he realized after he said it, with the medigun on her, but—even so. The Pyro mumbled something even he couldn't decipher and nodded.

"We will reconvene tomorrow, then," the spy said, "provided that was not long enough."

"Right," Dell said, with a private opinion that there was no way on God's green earth an hour would have been enough time. With a sinking sort of feeling in his stomach, it occurred to him he now had an invested interest in prolonging the match.

"If I may inquire," said the spy the next night, startling Dell from the stillness that had again come over them. "What is the reason for your dedication to her? I have my theories, but I prefer to know the facts."

"...Beat you half to death for me, for one," he said. He glanced over at the spy, and then back to the Pyro, who sat absorbed in the picture book he had thought to bring this time. Probably she couldn't she even see the pages, but it occupied her anyway "And on account of the facts bein' she wouldn't have ever got into this mess if not for my machines. I ain't one to leave my messes unfixed. I like to think I'm a decent human being."

The spy hummed contemplatively. He had a cigarette in his mouth, unlit, same as Dell had seen BLU's own Spy do even if there was no lighter to be had. "I confess that the story you told me in your workshop left me intrigued. How is it she came in contact with the altered substance for so long?"

For a long time the only sound was the hum of the medigun. Dell exhaled, feeling his resolve slip away. The spy had taken them this far, after all. "I don't got all the details. All I know is it wasn't an accident."

"As in..."

"As in I told her to stay away from it an' she used it on herself anyway." Dell wet his cold-cracked lips, watching the Pyro, wholly absorbed in the pages of her book. "I don't know why. My best guess, I ... when you used the thing, 'fore you got fixed back up, you have any memory trouble?"

"None such as I can recall." The spy paused. "But that itself may mean nothing."

"Right, well. Whatever the hell Medic used in that concoction of his, he told me it had a reputation for memory loss. An' a'course I told Pyro, figured she had a right to know if she noticed anythin' weird since she got a dose of the stuff already." He shook his head. "Near as I can figure, I said that, said it could make her forget—and one night she goes and decides she wants to forget everythin'. Her, she had herself more trouble than a dog's got fleas."

The Pyro moved on from the book and started playing with the spy's lighter again, running her gloved fingers through the flame over and over.

"I see," the spy said at last. "Have you considered that you may be doing her a disservice?"

"...What?"

"You are undoing her last wish, as it were. To forget."

Dell turned his head and fixed him with a stare, daring him to expand on the thought. The spy met his gaze in the same calm manner he did everything else. "To be certain, no one would wish her fate upon themselves. But whatever her problems may have been, she has certainly forgotten them."

"She wasn't right in the head."

"Perhaps not, but—"

"No," Dell growled. "You weren't there. You didn't see the way she was actin'. She wasn't eatin', I don't think she was sleepin'. And I think whatever happened when she got put on the dispenser the first time is what pushed her to that, and I think it pushed her right off the edge in the end, because I have never seen so much fire in a woman before or since, and I will not believe that she would just give up like that unless she was not in her right mind."

When the last words came out of his mouth a wash of dizziness came over him, and he had to stop entirely to catch his breath. The spy was quiet. Neither of them said anything further, until they parted ways when the cold became too much to withstand any longer.

"Your resolve is admirable," the spy said as Dell helped the Pyro (shivering again, her suit icy to the touch) to her feet. "Presumptuous, but admirable. I hope, for your sake, that you are right."

"See you tomorrow," Dell said, and pulled the Pyro out into the snow with him.

Tomorrow started earlier than anyone would have liked. It was still dark when a huge bang from the mess, loud as a gunshot, rang out through the building. It dragged the team out of their rooms almost as one, but Dell staggered in last, groggy from the late night before. They had crowded just inside the door of the mess, and he had to push through Sniper and Spy to get a look at what the hell had caused the noise.

It took him a second or two of squinting to understand what he was looking at, and even then it seemed too bizarre to be real. The massive oak table had been knocked over onto its side and lay like a ship run aground in the middle of the room. Scout had already darted past all of them to get a better look. "Leg give out?" Dell said.

Scout leaned over the broad side, peering over the edge, and scowled. "Nah," he said, "just your pet freak."

Dell blinked and found himself crossing to see for himself. The rest of the team followed him. He put both hands on the edge of the heavy wood and looked down, and sure enough there was the Pyro, hunched into a ball against the far end of the table where the leg met the top. She had her mask on, as always, but the suit seemed to be missing. Instead she was knotted into a thick blanket with just her bare feet and fingertips sticking out, and her shoulders trembled. Scout swatted at the air in front of her face, but she didn't seem to notice.

Dell could feel the team's eyes on him. He ignored them and stared down at her, as if someone else would do something about her if he didn't.

No one did. Dell bit down on his lip and circled around the fallen table to drag her out of the room. When she got up it was slow and clumsy and not a word left her, nothing at all even in spite of the rough way he hauled her along by the arm. The only sign of life he got was when they stopped in front of her room. He let go of her arm and she took two steps away from him, rubbing where his grip had been. She was still shaking, and the blanket had slipped off her shoulders enough he could see her ratty t-shirt and shorts beneath. The effect was eerie with the mask.

"...Go get ready for work," he told her, and she disappeared into her room without a word.

That night Dell dragged the space heater and a battery pack cannibalized from one of his projects out with them to the cabin. Even in the dark, he caught the look of relief of the spy's face when he set it up.

The silence this time was even shorter than before. RED's spy was a curious bastard. "She tried to set your house alight, you said?"

Christ. "Yeah," he said in spite of himself.

"Unusual mode of introduction."

"Strangest damn thing I'd ever seen. Turns up in the middle of the cotton fields draggin' that flamethrower around, mask on, all of it. Tried to torch me. Would've if she hadn't been outta gas."

The Pyro had claimed herself a spot on the floor nearest the window, tonight, and between playing with her lighters and fiddling with a stuffed bear—the very same she'd presented to Dell that night he destroyed the poisoned dispenser—she watched the moon. It watched her back, and through the frosted glass and shattered timber it drew a chiaroscuro across the planes of her mask.

She had been doing that for a few minutes as they spoke, unmoving. Now she shifted, looking down at the bear. She lifted her head and gazed over the room, her movements sluggish, until she came to the spy.

A strangled kind of noise escaped the mask. Before Dell could so much as open his mouth she had scrambled backwards, spine slamming into the wall. She kept trying to push herself further away, feet feebly skidding across the wooden floor, staring at the spy. "...Hey," he said, getting up and going to her, "now, what's—"

She latched onto his arm the moment he came within reach, burying her face in the crook of his elbow. The edges of her mask dug into his skin. He grimaced, trying to pry her off. "Dammit, Pyro, you're fine. You're fine."

Unresponsive. Her shoulders trembled, her hand dug into the meat of his arm and the mask pinched his skin. Dell shut his eyes and stretched out his free arm to turn off the medigun. "Step outside," he said over his shoulder.

"Pardon?"

"Leave a minute. Think you spooked her."

It was too dark to tell if the spy's expression changed. After a moment, though, Dell heard the floorboards creak and the door swing open, then shut.

It took a long minute of forced reassurances that she was okay before she let up her death-grip on his arm. Her breathing still came hard, and she stared wildly around the room, but he managed to get her to let go of him. He stood up and backed away a step to get out of her range. By the time the spy came back he'd quieted her and gotten her focused on the lighter again. She was twitchy for the rest of the night.

The Pyro wasn't right after that day. She near about quit talking entirely. Sometimes he'd see her spook at shadows, at air, and there were two more occasions where she panicked and clung to him for refuge, once on the field. Demo asked him if she'd been feeling alright, and Soldier made mention that neither of them had been around much afterhours.

When Dell laid it out for the RED spy almost a week after they'd begun, the son of a bitch had shrugged. "The damage was extensive," he said, turning the medigun on. "And we have not been able to treat her longer than an hour or so each night. Give it time, Conagher. It will work."

"How damn long is it supposed to take?" Dell answered, guiding the Pyro to her now-customary spot on the floor (away from the window). The medigun's beams razed across his skin before he stepped back. "Our team's startin' to notice we ain't around. They're goin' to be askin' questions before too long."

"I have already said I do not know. I can hardly involve my own team in this venture. We are all three of us breaking contract as it is."

"Contract. Right," Dell muttered, dropping into a rotting wooden chair.

The Somethings had come back. They had come back and they wouldn't go away.

The first time they had come back was fuzzy and a blur of being scared and upset and then there was a big bang and she wasn't in her room anymore because they had chased her out of it, she was in the kitchen feeling sick, and then everyone else was there and Engineer made her go back into her room. The Somethings hadn't been there so it was okay but then they were out in the snow with everyone else. She tried to keep still and quiet to avoid them, but that didn't work. They would rear up in front of her whenever they liked, on the field, at dinner. The only thing she had discovered that kept them at bay were her stories. When she had a story to think about the Somethings wouldn't be as loud or as huge. The books helped, some, but she couldn't make sense out of the black smears on every page. She felt like if she could just get someone to read to her or tell her a story she might be able to ignore the Somethings long enough that they would go away.

But everyone she went to brushed her off. She was afraid to ask Engineer because he'd been so mad about everything lately. She couldn't remember him ever being this mad this much before but her memory wasn't so good so maybe this was normal? Demoman, in his bright, sulfury workroom, sent her away with an apology when she came to him with a book, said he was too busy making more ammo. Spy and Soldier and Sniper didn't want to either. Medic started to lecture her out of one of his medical books once, but then one of the white owls Pyro had seen around outside burst out of the headless cadaver he had been doing things to and that distracted him too much to finish. When she asked Heavy he just gave her the same distracted kind of look Engineer sometimes did, and shook his head without a word.

That left Scout. She mostly didn't like asking Scout anything, not even pass the salt or anything, because he always glared at her and usually he would say something that got Engineer mad at him. And the last time she had said anything to Scout he had hit her with his bat and he had yelled at Engineer and she just didn't really want to talk to Scout. She couldn't even remember what she had said to make him so mad.

So the Pyro just kept to herself, trying to read her books, making up stories about the pictures of the animals and people inside the pages. But the Somethings were still there, and they got closer every night.

More nights went by, and they all seemed to stretch into one another. They would go out to the swayback house and she would sit and have something like Medic's heal-gun go over her, except it was red and not blue. Then Engineer would help her up and they would go back to the base and he would go between asking her how she felt and ignoring everything she said.

She didn't know how she felt. Wrong. Nervous. She wanted the game to be over. She wanted to get out of the cold, but even when she went to her room and curled up in all the blankets she had she never seemed to get warm. There was a tiny crack in the window that used to have something plugging it up but she had mistaken it for a ... for something and pushed it all the way out and now her room was cold all the time. Probably she could have gotten Engineer or Demo or somebody to fix it but she kept forgetting until she was already out of her suit and too sleepy to get back in it.

One day—she couldn't have said how long after the game had begun—one day she was doing just that, had knotted herself up in her blankets after one last tour around the base, trying to get someone to read to her. No one had given her a second glance, and she was getting so desperate she almost asked Scout. She hadn't but by the time she got to her room she wished she had. The Somethings hadn't been around all day, and somehow that made her feel worse than knowing where they were.

The cold still eeked through the windows to claw at her. It was cold enough she had just taken her mask and boots and gloves and things off and not her whole suit. Eventually she got bored and shrugged her way out of the top half of the suit and knotted the sleeves around her waist the way she had seen Demo do sometimes with his jumpsuit so she could run her fingers over her arms. Everyone else had arms that were mostly smooth and mostly one color all the way down, as far as she could tell, but hers were laced with textures and shades of deep red and pale white against her copper skin and they were interesting to look at. Engineer had said they looked like topographic maps, once. She wasn't sure what that meant, or what a topographic map was, or how her arms had gotten that way.

She could only do that so long, though, and then Pyro was digging out her book from where she'd hid it under her pillow. The colors inside seemed duller than she remembered as she balanced it on her lap. She tried turning the pages slowly at first, and then flipping through them so fast they blurred, but the colors stayed the same, and none of the pictures moved like they sometimes used to. The words stayed as fuzzy nonsense, though if she stared hard enough at them sometimes she thought she could almost make them out.

Outside, a wind snarled against her window, slamming the glass in its frame and blowing cold air into the room. She winced, and pulled her head under the covers. Everything was dark, and for a minute or two she pretended she was in an egg, just like the story about the phoenix. The last time Engineer had told her it he hadn't told it right, he had said the phoenix just burned herself up and floated away as smoke in the end. He used to say, after the flames had ate her up, that in the ashes there was beautiful golden egg that hatched into another phoenix—the same phoenix, but different. Better.

The blankets weren't as warm as a phoenix's egg probably would be. The Pyro huffed out her breath to see if it might light up the dark. Maybe it would be aflame like dragon's breath. She wished she could be a dragon. Demo said dragons were big and strong and smart and never had to do anything they didn't want to. A dragon could have quit playing Engineer's game any time it wanted.

But nothing happened except the air getting a fraction warmer. Pyro sighed and took the blankets off from her head, and after a second of shivering pulled her suit back on all the way. Maybe she would go and ask Scout to read to her after all. Maybe he would know a dragon story.

She looked around. Her room had become so drab and gray over the last few days. The walls were painted concrete, and the paint was flaking everywhere, in some spots gone entirely. The drawing she had taped to the walls weren't as vibrant. She didn't remember if that was new. Her mask and flamethrower and boots were on the ground, where she'd left them, and next to those was—

—Scout.

Scout was in her room.

He just stood there, watching her. She couldn't remember him coming in and he wasn't saying anything, and she had kind of an idea that he wasn't supposed to be here. But despite herself she leapt out of bed, dragging the covers down to the floor, ignoring the chill that hit her bare feet. She almost tripped over the blankets but kept her balance, and with her book held tight to her chest she stumbled toward him. If he was here already maybe he'd...

"Scout," she said, stopping in front of him. He was taller than her, much taller than she remembered him being, tall like a stork or a heron. The Pyro curled her fingers around her book, staring up at him, trying to figure out what was wrong. His teeth were bared, like Engineer's dog when it was angry or afraid. He was wearing red—he was red, red all over, red dribbled out of his nose and ears and pooled in the corner of his lip, where the flesh had been torn, and that was why his teeth were bared, he didn't have any lips to cover them anymore. Red poured from the big hole in his chest, over his heart, gushing out in gouts to soak his clothing.

The sick feeling came back, like when the Somethings were around, though when she looked she couldn't see them anywhere. Just Scout. Pyro swallowed hard. Scout didn't say anything. "Will," she started, and wished she hadn't spoken. She couldn't take it back, now. "Can you tell me a story?"

"You want me to tell you a story," Scout said. "Me." She nodded. Scout laughed and he sounded all wrong—he sounded familiar but in the wrong way. "Yeah. Yeah, okay. So once upon a time, not real long ago, there was a girl who wasn't really a girl." He tilted his head way to the side, too far, like his neck was broken. "She looked like one and talked like one but she wasn't really."

"What was she?"

"A monster." Scout tilted his head to the other side. "A horrible evil dragon that had disguised herself as a woman so no one would know."

The Pyro felt her expression knot itself into something unhappy. Dragons weren't evil, she wanted to tell him. Even in Demo's stories, he said most of them were just upset about something, or misunderstood. But maybe there were evil dragons, so she didn't say anything. "And," Scout said, "one day she met a boy who could make fire dance. The dragon loved fire, and the things the boy could make it do, so she let him be, for a while. But monsters are monsters no matter what they look like." Smoke was beginning to drift from his mouth and nose. "And dragons are jealous and greedy. She wanted the fire all to herself. So she ate the boy, and took his fire from him."

"No," she mumbled. She didn't like this story. From the moment Scout had begun to talk her head had started pounding, and he didn't really look like Scout anymore. He looked ghostly and pale and bloody, or sometimes he looked like the dragon he was telling her about, or sometimes he even looked like the woman the dragon had pretended to be. "You're telling it wrong."

"But the fire saw what she did and it got angry," Scout said. "It tried to eat her, to get back at her. It bit off both her wings and then spat her out because she tasted so bad, she tasted like ash and charcoal. So the dragon escaped. She crawled off bleeding and dragons bleed lava. Everywhere she went, she set fires and destroyed homes and gobbled people up, crunch, crunch, crunch. She hurt everyone she ever came close to and the boy's fire chased her the whole time, until it drove her to the ocean. She didn't have her wings anymore, so she couldn't fly away, and the fire had grown so large that even a dragon couldn't escape it. The only thing she could do was run into the sea."

Pyro blinked, flinching when she found her eyes wet and stinging, salt water rising to swallow her. Her head was swimming. She lifted a hand to steady herself, and the book she had forgotten she was holding fell to the floor with an ear-splitting crash. She glanced down at it and then at the rest of the room.

All the color had gone, leaving her with drab concrete. Her head felt clearer than it had in ages—like she had just woken up after sleeping too long. Her breathing was the only noise.

She fell back a step, and another, until she hit the bed and collapsed on it. For a few seconds she just sat there, staring at the spot where Scout had stood. He was gone now, a smear of red on the concrete floor the only indication he had been there, and even that vanished the next time she blinked.

He hadn't finished telling the story. She would have to do it. The weight of the thought settled on her like a vulture.

She tried anyway. "So the dragon stepped into the sea," Pyro told herself. "She let it swallow her up, and the fire—the fire watched as she drowned."

Her head was throbbing.

"And everyone else lived happily ever after."