Flame by Amy Kathleen Ryan Read Free Book Online Page B

corridor, and she went on screaming, “I can’t live here! I can’t! I can’t!” Kieran could no longer see her, but he could hear the sobs breaking her down. He’d never liked Sarah Wheeler, but he was filled with hurt for her.
    “Kieran,” someone said. He turned to see Harvard Stapleton standing by him, the brave man who had run through the Empyrean with Kieran on the day of the initial attack, when all this started. Harvard looked ten years older now, his hair grayed, his skin mottled and sagging, his back bent. “Have you seen Samantha?” he asked, voice wavering. “They said all the kids would be here, but…” He looked around the room, his gray-green eyes wide with bewilderment.
    “Harvard…” Kieran said.
    Felicity extended a hand. “Mr. Stapleton. You were always good to me.”
    “Have you seen Samantha?” he asked her, sounding like a man lost in fog. “I can’t find her.”
    Kieran opened his mouth to speak, but Felicity shook her head. “Mr. Stapleton, she was such a hero. You would have been so proud.”
    “Where is she?” he begged.
    “She gave her life so the little girls could get away.” Felicity paused, then straightened her spine and looked him right in the eye. “The guards caught us when we were trying to escape, and one of them shot her.”
    “Please don’t tell me that,” the man begged.
    “I’m so sorry,” Felicity whispered.
    “She can’t be gone!” he wailed, shoving his fists against his eyes and collapsing onto the floor. Kieran looked on, feeling useless as Felicity knelt by Harvard, her arms on his shoulders, whispering in his ear that it was going to be okay.
    But it wasn’t.
    Kieran remembered his former self, the young man who was so sure he was on a divine mission, that God had everything settled and determined, that he was on the side of Good and Right, and he couldn’t fail. He’d thought that horrific catalog of unimaginable loss had to be for some kind of purpose, but now he knew: It meant nothing. All those sermons he’d given were lies, lies he’d told himself because he couldn’t heal the destroyed families, the orphaned children, all their futures altered forever. There was no meaning. It was senseless, needless misery and waste.
    A cold blackness filled him. He couldn’t breathe. His knees buckled, and he knelt down, holding himself up with one hand, staring at his white knuckles as his palm pressed against the frigid metal floor. The awfulness of the last months seeped into his body. He couldn’t hold it.
    He’d been such a liar.
    His throat swelled, and he gulped for air, his fist pressed into his abdomen.
    A warm hand on the back of his neck.
    A warm hand pulling him from the floor.
    Mother.

 
    MAYA
     
    Seth woke up on a bed—not a hard cot in the brig, not a damp bed of ferns, but a real bed. The last time he’d slept in a bed had been that night in Waverly’s apartment when he’d been on the run from Kieran Alden, who had framed him for crimes he didn’t commit. That night, Seth had been in physical pain all through his body. Now the agony was located mostly in his mangled hand, which lay over his chest encased in a thickly wrapped bandage.
    “You’re awake,” someone to his left said. He turned to see the shadowy silhouette of a petite woman standing in the lighted doorway. “Mind if I turn on the lights?”
    The lights winked on, and as he sat up, he became acquainted with a dull ache in his head he hadn’t known was there. He hardly remembered coming here. The guard who had come back for him in the tropics bay had stuffed him into a produce cart, then covered him with mangoes and melons. He remembered being wheeled around for what felt like a long time until Maya whispered, “Hey. Come out of there.”
    Trying to protect his hand, Seth had pushed his way out of the pile of fruit, then Maya covered him with a hooded jacket and took him to this apartment, where he collapsed onto the bed with hardly a thought for who