Approximately twenty hours later: the evening promised to be perfect. The air was still and smelled clean. There was no threat of rain now, hadn't been all day. She had watched her neighbors leave in twos and threes for the city festivities. By her count, she was alone, or nearly. That suited her just fine. Now, as she stood with her arms slung over her rusting front gate, purple bruises lingered in the sky and a sliver of sun sat on the horizon. It was almost time.

The gate creaked as she leaned first forward and then back, its rusted hinges complaining as she pulled it around. Tobias would find his way in, she was sure. Then she trotted into the shed and pulled out as many fireworks as she could carry in one trip, fireworks of all kinds: little ones, big ones, snaps and sparklers and roman candles and three truly monstrous bottle rockets. She nearly dropped the whole collection twice before she made it to the middle of her dirt yard, next to where she'd kept the flamethrower after spending the day fine-tuning it. Here she left them, and ducked back into the house as evening drew on.

When Tobias wandered in through her gate and then her open door, about five minutes later, he found her muttering angrily under her breath. A plastic cup sailed past him. "Fuck," she hissed, whirling, and stopped dead as their eyes met. "Uh."

Tobias lifted one eyebrow, pulling one hand out from his varsity jacket to wave at her. The dog tags were back today. "Hey-o, firebug." He leaned back on his heels. "Problem?"

She regained her composure quickly. "Lost something," was all she said, stalking past him.

He leaned over her shoulder as much as he dared, watching her tear through empty drawers and rifle through old boxes. "Lost what?"

"My lighter."

Tobias' gaze cut to the prodigious collection of lighters strewn along the top of a coffee table that stood in one corner of the room. There were dozens of them, Zippos, Bics, a rainbow of Clippers, and more unidentifiable to the untrained eye. "Somethin' wrong with those?"

"They're not right," she ground out.

"Whas' that mean?"

"They just aren't right. I need the God-damn 1948 Zippo with the eagle on it and it's not anywhere."

He squinted at her. "Why the hell does it gotta be that one?"

"I can't just use any old lighter," she said acidly, throwing the drawer shut with a bang. "It's bad luck."

"Bad luck," Tobias snorted. "You superstitious or something, really? You?"

She didn't answer, and instead stormed deeper into the candle-lit house. Tobias followed a respectful few paces behind as she dug through her sparse belongings, watching her grow angrier with every passing moment. She had just gone into her own room and resorted to upturning everything in there (not behind the books, not under the traffic cone, not beneath the bed) when Tobias held something up in front of her face. "Look, just use mine."

It was his Zippo. She glared at it, and then at him. He shrugged, waving it at her a little. With an exasperated grumble she snatched it out of his hands. It was the 1951 model she'd suspected after all, cool to the touch and dented everywhere. The engraving on one side was so worn down and scuffed as to be nigh-illegible, but she could just make out a word and a number: Psalm 23.

She knew that one: The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want. She'd heard it in the orphanage.

A lot.

It left a bad taste in her mouth.

"That fine?" Tobias said.

"No," she answered, throwing it back at him. He scrambled to catch it while she investigated the top shelf of her closet, and had just slipped it back into his breast pocket when she growled and grabbed one of the books of matches from the overstuffed purse. "I'll just use these."

"Cool," Tobias said. He'd picked up her gas mask and was turning it over. "Where'd y'get this?"

"Flea market. World War II, S6 NBC Respirator, British standard-issue. Tinted lenses. Still works."

"No foolin', huh. Crazy." Tobias put the black rubber to his face, and the straps hung down around his ears. "Mhow d'I luk?"

"Creepy," she snorted. "Come on."

When they got back outside, it was fully dark. Only the weak little lightbulb fixed above her door fought off the night, and it flickered when the door shut. She sat herself down next to the pile of fireworks and Tobias finally took off the gas mask, tossing it down by the flamethrower. He whistled, long and low. "I gotta say I ain't never seen a pile this big outside'a work. That ain't even half what you bought, is it?"

She shook her head, already fighting open the packaging of the selfsame box of sparklers Tobias had opened for her just a few weeks ago. She thought it was the same one, anyway, though there were several more like it scattered on the ground. She might've bought too many. Impulse purchasing had always been a flaw of hers. But really, what else was she going to buy? Clothes? No. This was a much better use of her dwindling funds.

She plucked out a red sparkler and spun it slowly between her fingers. It needed to be appreciated. They were such marvelously simple devices! Just wire and some pyrotechnic composite. Add a flame and you get a booming, crackling vision of beauty, a flower in fast-forward. There wasn't anything that couldn't be improved with fire in some form, she was pretty sure.

Then she pulled out four more, and lit them all at once.

Tobias whooped, and she passed him one (a little begrudgingly) when he held out his hand. "Watch this," he said, backing up, and began to paint the dark.

Tiny sparks flew, and it took her time and some squinting at the smoke to realize he was writing his name in the air. Then he wrote hers. He was halfway into what she assumed was meant to be "HI MOM" when his sparkler burned out, and hers followed shortly after. "Talent," she said dryly, lighting two more and passing them over. He gave her a gapped grin.

"I been doin' sparkler tricks for my brothas since I was like twelve, awright, best in th'business." He flicked his wrists, and the sparklers twirled in his fingers. He kept twisting them as he talked, burning afterimages into her eyes. "An' my boss Chaz, he's this nutter right, been doin' fireworks since the forties. Hoo-ee, crazy son of a bitch right there. I think he's doin' the show after the Pops tonight, actually, part of it. Oh man, no, wait wait there was this one time I was with Chaz an' some'a my brothas—"

He cut himself off with his own squall as he fumbled, the sparklers shotgunning a spray of stars over his shirt and face. He threw his hands up in a panic, and the sticks spun away from him in a mesmerizing cartwheel—right toward the pile of tightly-packed gunpowder and bright paper. "Oh, shit—"

She watched them fall, beautiful and dangerous. Without quite deciding she was going to, she reacted. She reached out and snatched the burning metal from the air.

For one white-hot instant there was nothing else in the world but her and the fireworks. She was holding them upside-down, and they spat bright sparks down her wrists. Her hands were doused in light and color, made new by the fire. The rest of her seemed as dull as ditchwater by comparison. The way it lit her skin turned it gilded, beautiful. It was the Big Bang. It was Genesis, it was holding the Holy Grail between her fingers. It took her breath away.

Then her nerves came alive with screaming agony, and with a hoarse cry she flung the blazing metal aside. They landed in a patch of dirt some ten feet away to sputter out harmlessly. The pain felt like it was everywhere, frying her every vein and synapse.

She jerked her hands close to herself, and then held perfectly still, not sure if she could have moved more if she wanted to. Eons passed, and slowly, it faded. She became aware that Tobias was cussing up a storm: "—fuckin' hell, are you alright, oh my God—"

Delicate, she put her hands where she could see them. Even in the near-dark she could make out two livid, angry lines of red crisscrossing each palm, with more rising up on her fingers. Pain splintered through her senses, dizzying her. She was breathing strangely, in a tight, tense way. Burns never felt any less awful no matter how many you got. "I'll be fine," she eked out, once she could speak again. "Shit. Water. Burns go under water."

"Water? Okay, I, uh—freakin', shit, tell me what to do," Tobias said, skittish and putting her on edge with his stress. "I ain't never done no doctorin'."

"I—okay, there's a. A spigot on the side of the house." She shut her eyes hard, denying the threatening tears. "Fuck. Come on."

He followed her like a lost puppy to the spigot and the tarnished blue bucket under it. It was rusted and creaked at Tobias' efforts to wrench it open, but gave at last after he gave it a particularly nasty snarl and a vicious twist. The water sputtered out weakly, and she stuck her hands beneath it. "Sit down," she told Tobias, who was fidgeting like mad, wringing his hands like a nervous housewife, "it's going to be a while."

Sit he did, long arms slung over his knees. It only took him a few seconds to start to mess with the dog tags around his neck, his hands apparently desperate for something to do. For her part, she pressed her forehead against the cool metal of the spout and closed her eyes. The water slipped down between her fingers, awful and clammy, but the immediate pain was beginning to dull.

The jingle of his dog tags being rubbed together faded after a minute or so, and Tobias said, "I'm sorry."

"Mmph."

"Really. I shoulda been the one got burned."

She opened one eye to look at him. "Keep trying, it'll happen."

He gawked back at her in surprise for a moment, and then laughed, a little. "Could be."

They fell again into silence, and a few minutes later came the first faint sounds of the Boston Pops in the distance. Only the heaviest bass booms and loudest trumpet-squalls reached their ears, leaving them with a staccato impression of a half-forgotten rhythm, the remnants of some ghostly parade.

"Sparklers are a lot more dangerous than just straight fire," she said aloud, after the band had gotten just loud enough to almost find the melody of. She pulled her hands out from the water, inspecting them. "They get you closer than you should be by being fascinating."

"I guess so," said Tobias.

She got up, slow and clumsy for lack of the use of her hands. Tobias rose, too, and looked as if he was prepared to clear the water pump to grab her if she fell. When she didn't (thankfully), and instead headed back toward the unsteady light that marked her doorway, he turned the spigot off and followed.

When he got inside, she was leaning against her countertop, gingerly rubbing lotion between her palms. She didn't look up when he came in, just sighed and said, "There's gauze in that cabinet over there. Get that, please. No, the other one. Yeah." When he gave it to her, she wrapped it around her hands and each individual digit without so much as wincing. Tobias watched in silent fascination until she tucked the last length of cloth into itself. She flexed her fingers in an experimental way, and then dropped her arms to her sides. "Okay," she breathed at last.

"Okay?"

"Okay. Let's go."

"Wha, jus' like that?"

She glanced at him, visibly confused. "Yes…?"

"Yeah but your hands!"

Looking down at her gauze-swathed hands, she lifted one eyebrow. "I still have them. Look," she said, wiggling her fingers at him, "they work and everything. Come on." And, saying this, she went back outside, leaving Tobias scratching his head in her kitchen. He joined her a minute or so later, hands shoved in his pockets and with an odd look on his face.

They lit and watched most of the remaining fireworks in a relative silence that eventually warmed back into Tobias' waterfall voice over the next twenty minutes, until the used-up shells and boxes were forming a kind of nest around the flamethrower and the gas mask.

All that was left were the bottle rockets. They were huge, over half the girl's height and as thick as her forearm, and she eagerly planted all three of them in an angled row while Tobias told her about the time his youngest brother faced down four guys twice his size with nothing but a baseball bat and a wrapped fish, and won. She scarcely heard the story; even hurt, her fingers were itching to light rockets, watch them soar. She was crouched down and adjusting the second one for the third time when Tobias, who had finished his story (or just stopped, she wasn't sure) and was now just watching her quietly, said, "Hey, where're the rest'a the fireworks?"

She paused, concentration broken. "Uh. In the shed. I'll grab them in a minute."

"Nah, I'll get 'em," he said, standing.

It took her a moment to realize he'd offered. "…Sure," she said finally, after straightening out the fuse on the third one. "They're uh. Oh, they're pretty obvious, you'll see 'em."

When she looked up again, he was already across the yard. She couldn't remember if he'd said anything more.

One more ten-degree twist, and she was finally satisfied with her work. She pulled out a book of matches from her jacket and struck one, clumsy with the gauze but careful enough.

She reached forward and lit each rocket, revenant. The fires fizzled and hissed, taking ages to climb up the fuses, and she ached with impatience as she put out the match. Sighing, she shifted her weight, and then paused—the second rocket still wasn't aligned properly. She bit her lip, looking at the length of the fuses—yes, she'd have time. There was time yet.

With both hands she carefully twisted the middle rocket a bit more yet, and discovered the whole stick was slightly bent. Irritated, she reached down to try and fix it, forgetful of the fuse itself.

There—nearly—

The flame sputtered, and coughed up a collection of sparks onto her hands.

She jerked away, more from surprise than pain, and in doing so knocked the whole thing out of alignment, its nose horizontal. "Fuck," she snarled aloud, and now the fuse had grown dangerously short, but she tried again anyway. She pulled it up two full inches before she realized it was too late.

The fuses shrank up into the fireworks, and great tails of sparks gushed out over the sticks and her hands. She yelped in shock when the sparks nested in her gauze like fireflies. With a terrific shriek all three of the rockets took off, lighting up the night sky. They were all too low, she realized. She'd overestimated the lift. Not a disaster in and of itself, but the middle one—

It was the middle one that exploded across the lawn at a fifteen-degree angle and slammed directly into the roof of her shed.

Her heart nearly stopped. Time stood still as she watched, all else forgotten as the shed shuddered. Its whole structure, already weak from age and neglect, could not bear even that little stress. The rocket had partially embedded itself in the shingles, the flares still driving it forward. She heard something within give a cannon-loud crack, and then the walls gave way.

The crash was so loud it nearly drowned the other sound that came in the same instant, something loud and chilling. For a moment she wondered if she had made it, but it came again from within the collapsed timbers, piercing and scared, and she remembered:

Tobias.

She was up and running. She was not five feet away when what was left of the building exploded. Every propane tank, every bottle of lighter fluid, all the firewood and kindling and remaining fireworks she had been so careful with for so long erupted outward and upward. The burst of fire it made stretched out across the yard like a monstrous hand, seizing everything it could: the plants, the vines on the fence, the roof of her house. Hell had opened up around her. The noise deafened her, and the force threw her to the ground, clothes and hair and skin aflame. Wooden debris and cement rained onto the dirt all around her, slamming into the earth with horrid shattering sounds.

It was no longer night. The blaze had lit up the sky, and thick smoke rose up like a heavy, ashen cloak. The shriek of the fireworks drowned out every other kind of noise. They were going off all at once, screaming like unholy things. Her whole world had become an inferno, and it was trying to swallow her up: she was blinded by the smog, and choked on it, and she couldn't hear Tobias anymore.

She tore the gauze from her hands and stripped off her burning jacket, flinging it to the ground. It took far too long to beat the flames off the rest of her, and by then so much more than just her palms and fingers were seared to an angry, seething red. Her eyes ran freely from smoke and shock. Fear gripped her like iron shackles. She looked up at the bones of the burning shed.

The fire looked back at her. It looked into her. It was huge, an imperious blaze outstripping anything she had ever seen before. It made the fire she'd set last night look like a match, a lantern-flame. It was yards up in the air, too hot to approach, heart-breakingly beautiful. The wind had picked up, and lashed it about, sparks falling like snow. This was something treading near the divine. Her mind had gone empty with its power. She had found her God, and hers was a god of wrath.

Then another explosion threw more flaming timber at her, and she scrambled away, shaken from her reverie. The fire was growing, faster and faster. It had consumed half her house now, was chewing through the dry brush of her yard. She staggered to her feet, gasping and pained. She stumbled backwards, tripped over something that had not been there a minute ago, fell down hard.

A thing was lying there. It was heavy and dark and burning, longer than she was tall. Her legs were draped over it at an awkward, uncomfortable angle. Timber from the shed, she thought. The explosion must have hurled it here. Then she rubbed her eyes and looked again. No, not wood. It almost looked curled up on itself, and it was too lumpy and soft to be wood. She pulled herself off it, and realized it had a face.

It lay in a tangled-up, sideways sort of way, slouched with a bony shoulder jutting into the air, like it was propped up on something. It didn't move when she knelt at its side, hand shaking more than she thought it should be. It didn't move when she touched it. It didn't move when she said, "Tobias?", as loudly as she could muster with smoke in her throat.

The thing did nothing.

Something familiar and suffocating and electric was settling over her. Not revulsion—not fear—something else. "Tobias," she said again. "Tobias, hey."

The thing did nothing.

She sat back on her heels, mind reeling. Her head was filling up with static, pressure. She looked around, and there was her flamethrower, in its nest of used-up fireworks. Next to it sat the gas mask. She leaned over and grabbed the latter, pulling it over her face. Suddenly she could breathe again, and the whole world got dimmer, blurrier. Less real. Less real was good.

She looked back at the thing. It was still burning, low and steady, feeding the demon she had unleashed. She lifted one hand, as if to put the fire out, and stopped. She let her palm hover in the air for a few seconds before slowly dropping it down to her knee. No. No, she couldn't.

It had Tobias' clothes on. It had his long limbs and his dog tags and probably his hockey-player grin. But it wasn't Tobias. She found it hard to believe it had ever been Tobias at all. What skin it had left was charred to black and red, and what wasn't exposed skin was exposed muscle. Fractured rebar tunneled through its abdomen, more unidentifiable metal bit down deep into its hip and bicep and thigh. Something dark soaked its clothing, dribbled thickly down its forehead, glistening on its way out the thing's mouth and nose. Its shredded face was pressed halfway against the ground, and the side of its head she could see was missing its ear—it was simply gone, and in its stead was a slowly congealing mass of burnt hair and viscera.

She reached out and pulled it onto its back, carefully. Heavy and limp, it rolled into position without any sort of protest, not even a sound. Nearly a foot of splintered wood, big around as her fist, was lodged deep in its unmoving chest. Scant threads of fabric stuck to the timber, like thin and blackened cobwebs; the rest of the letterman jacket was charred past recognition.

Her stomach lurched once, violently and without permission. She had to steady herself against the ground. But it passed, and when it passed, all she felt was calm, serene. It lilted through her bones and soothed her nerves. It was a strange kind of calm, dense, thick. The sort that comes before thunder.

Her mind was endless, snowy television noise, finally at ease. It dawned on her, sitting there, that there wasn't a bus driver yelling at her to move. That was the difference this time. No one panicking in her ear. No one to tell her what to do, how to react. Lacking this, she found all she was inclined to do was … was watch. Watch the hair curl into black ash, the clothing dissolve, the flesh melt. Her own private pyre.

So she did, half-believing it might open its eyes. What if it did? What would she do?

But it didn't. It never would again, she supposed. Half an hour ago, the thing had been Tobias, juggling sparklers and worrying over her.

Now it was just a limp, heavy thing, made of meat and bone and hot, crackling fat.

She watched the fire grow on it, the gas mask blocking out most of the sour smell that was starting to thicken the air. There was a bulge under its breast pocket. Carefully, she reached inside to find the lighter she had thrown at the old Tobias, the real Tobias: the Zippo with Psalm 23 engraved on one side. It was warm to the touch, and she pocketed it, not really thinking about why. Instead she thought about how what she was doing was completely fucked up. How it didn't bother her.

She was definitely supposed to be upset.

Around her, the fire blazed. The fireworks had stopped their howling, and there was no sound other than the lightning-noise of the fire as it ate its way through everything she ever owned or cared about. Once she glanced up at her house, reduced to a light show, and wondered if she could have stopped it, but she made no move to get up. There wasn't anything she could do now, after all. The Fire that had driven back her nightmares and kept her warm and safe for so many years was taking its due from her.

Later, she would think if she had run when she meant to—before she found the thing that was not Tobias—she probably would have been long gone by the time the fire department and police arrived. As it was, she didn't even hear the trucks pull up. Her first warning that anyone else had arrived was someone's shout, garbled words she couldn't make out through her mask. She looked up, and saw dark figures running through her open gate.

In a heartbeat all the eerie serenity she had gathered to her vanished. Her head swam as she jerked herself to her feet. The figures yelled more, barking like upright animals.

She realized she was going for her flamethrower a few seconds after she had actually picked it up. She was flicking the pilot light's switch, spinning on her heel. There they were, four blurry black shapes howling things she couldn't understand at her, holding formless weapons.

Under her mask she snarled, temper flaring, gasoline on a fire. Her own cry bounced around the inside of the mask until it echoed back to her as something inhuman, something feral. She stepped over the thing that had never been Tobias, standing over it like some ancient guardian might, and planted her feet. The black things seemed to waver, and she wondered if they were real. If they weren't real, then it was fine.

If they were real, then—well. That was fine, too, really.

Without a second thought, she pulled the trigger.