"He was the color of blood, not the springing blood of the heart but the blood that stirs under an old wound that never really healed. A terrible light poured from him like sweat, and his roar started landslides flowing into one another."
As the elevator approached the ruins of test chamber 19, the temperature slowly but steadily increased. Still dazzled, Wheatley would never have noticed on his own – but he did notice that Chell grew more agitated with every passing minute. Her unease alarmed him and snapped him out of his daze.
Suddenly, GlaDOS's voice pierced the air. "What did you break this time? I'm being inundated with distress signals from the incinerator room-" The robot stopped very suddenly as she realized that Chell and Wheatley were still in the elevator. Despite the rising heat, the grim silence that hung around them froze the air. "Oh my god. Is that- No. That can't be right," she said, and added quickly, "I need to check something."
The elevator doors opened, and not a moment too soon. Chell stepped briskly through the small corridor, eager to get away from the claustrophobic lift. Wheatley stumbled nervously after her. A horrible smell hung in the air, hot and thick, and as they rounded the corner into the dilapidated test chamber, they were greeted by a ghastly orange glow emanating from the empty moat channel that led to the incinerator. It glinted in the broken glass that hung in the windows, and danced in the dark haze that curled out into the test chamber like the breath of some terrible beast.
And they heard the fear creeping into GlaDOS's hushed voice: "Oh… oh no. I've been sitting on a time-bomb. It's not four-thousand kelvin at all. That means- Blue, Orange, I need you at the incinerator overlook immediately." But it was when she addressed the humans by name that they realized how dire the situation truly was. "Chell, Wheatley – I'm going to be honest with you: we're all in grave danger. One wrong move and the entire facility goes up in smoke. So for the love of science, don't touch anything. Just let me deal with it."
"Wait!" Wheatley called after her. "Why're we- What's the problem? What's going on? What are we supposed to-" He interrupted himself with a surprised yelp as the Adventure Core smashed the observation room window with his optic plate, sending broken glass raining down all around the poor man.
"Up here! Come on, move, move, move!" Rick urged them, jerking to the side to indicate direction. Chell responded right away, placing her portals and stepping through into the observation room.
"B-But she just said-" Wheatley started to protest, still recovering from the shock, but Rick cut him off.
"You really wanna leave your life in her hands? Come on, move it, kid; we don't have much time!"
Wheatley stepped through the portal without further argument. "What's going on?" he asked again, stumbling over his own feet as he and Chell followed the Adventure Core. Wherever they were going, they were going there in a hurry.
"Fire got outta hand in the incinerator room. 'Thormide' or somethin'. Nasty stuff; burned right through the floor. Now the fire's spreadin' all over the place."
Chell's gut twisted into a knot and Craig's words rang in her head: thermite is a mixture of metal and metallic oxide, usually iron(III) oxide – commonly referred to as rust – and aluminum. All the rust that Wheatley had knocked into the incinerator chute, the ground up aluminum casing of the rejected turrets – all of it sent down to one room to be lit on fire. All it took was some unlucky positioning and bad timing. GlaDOS was right – the whole facility was a time-bomb waiting to go off!
Rick veered suddenly around a corner. "This way, quick! Come on, keep up! We need to stop it before it spreads any more than it already has!"
"What?!" Wheatley skidded to a halt as if something horrible had leapt out into his path, and the Adventure Core turned to look back at him. "You're mad! We-We've got a portal gun! We can outrun the fire and get away! There's still time! If we turn around now-"
"If you turn around now, the smoke'll kill ya for sure. Putting that fire out ourselves is the only way – unless ya wanna trust GlaDOS to save you!" Rick turned away and continued along the rail without waiting for a response. He didn't need to; he saw his words strike Wheatley like spears, and knew that it would spur him to follow.
The Fact Core's voice repeated itself over and over in Chell's mind: it is extremely dangerous, as it burns at almost three thousand kelvin, and cannot be stopped once it ignites except by scattering it thin enough that it can't react with itself. But how on earth were they going to do that? She coughed dryly; the haze was getting thicker. She could see the beam of green light from Rick's eye illuminating clouds of hot smoke, and an ominous orange glow ahead.
Then, they rounded a bend into the clearing overlooking the incinerator chamber. Chell and Wheatley shielded their eyes from the inferno's blinding glare and struggled to breathe. Sure enough, the thermite had burned right through the incinerator floor, and molten metal dripped onto a support beam below. It creaked and deformed in the blaze, threatening to collapse. Pneumatic tubes, catwalks, and test chambers were wilting shadows wreathed in leaping flames and swirling embers and great plumes of black smoke, and the heat was unbearable even from where they were standing.
As her eyes adjusted, the woman peeked out between her fingers, covering her mouth and nose with her other arm for what little good it did her. The smoke and intense glow stung her eyes, but she stared out into the burning clearing anyway, looking for something – anything – she could use to try to scatter the thermite or extinguish secondary fires.
"There! Conversion gel!" Rick shouted from somewhere in the haze, his general location revealed by a vague green glow in the smoke. "Just need to find some way to break the glass! No bombs, no guns… Damn it all, there's nothing to work with down here!"
Shielding his mouth and nose with the crook of his arm and coughing violently, Wheatley tried to find the gel pipe the robot was referring to. His lungs and throat were burning, and his head was spinning. Every breath felt like a million tiny knives in his chest. His vision seemed to lag, slow and blurred. But there – there it was, a shadow in the flames, the gel inside the pipe warping and gleaming in the orange light.
He reached for an arrow, his last arrow, and nocked it. He was dizzy, but he knew it was his only chance. He couldn't afford to screw up now. He held his breath and suppressed the coughs as best he could, though they kicked in his throat like wild horses. With all his strength he pulled the arrow back to a full draw, and with shaking hands, took aim. No sooner had he loosed it than he began to choke again, stumbling weakly against the wall.
But his aim was true. The arrow shattered the glass tube, and conversion gel cascaded down into the blaze. It splashed down onto the top of a burning test chamber, extinguishing a swath of flames in a hissing cloud of smoke and bubbling gel.
And Chell knew what to do. Covering her mouth with one hand, she shot one portal onto the top of the burned chamber under the broken gel pipe, and the other into the thick haze. Another column of black smoke swirled upward as a fire went out. Her vision whirled, preventing her from aiming, but she didn't let it stop her from shooting one portal after another into the black clouds, even as she relied on the railing to support her. The conversion gel that spilled from each new portal smothered flames where it could, and where it could not, it took the thermite with it like sand in the tide, to be spread and scattered along with the boiling white gel, leaving small crests of flames behind.
It was the distant metallic creaking that called Wheatley back from the void he was drifting into, as though he had stumbled in a dream and startled himself awake. A support beam tilted precariously, some lower part of it melted and weakened by the blaze. Chell didn't even notice, leaning her entire weight against the railing, choking and gasping weakly for air as the beam fell toward her.
He acted without hesitation or regard for his own safety. Without a second thought, Wheatley was now completely willing to lay down his own life to save the very woman he had once tried to kill. He didn't notice much else as he began to slip back into the darkness; all that mattered was that he got Chell out of danger. Pushing her out of harm's way was the last thing he was aware of before his vision went black.