The Creative Fire: 1 (Ruby's Song) by Brenda Cooper Read Free Book Online Page A

had meant to catch, and now they were gone.
    Should she leave or go find Nona and confess that she’d been spying on her? Ruby sighed. Maybe she should wait a minute for Nona; but she was afraid that if she stayed down here she might lose all her courage. She took a deep breath, just the way Bari had taught her—the steadying breath to soothe her nerves before she sang in front of a crowd—letting it out slowly.
    She walked as calmly as she could around the corner.
    Only empty hallway, with doors on either side.
    She whispered, “Nona?”
    Silence.
    She said it louder. “Nona. Are you here?”
    Ruby took a few more steps, and her foot slid on something wet on the floor. She bent down and ran her finger through it, bringing it up to her nose.
    Blood.
    Her body went hot and shivery, her breath racing up and down the back of her throat and catching in her nose.
    One of the doors hung a little open. Just a crack.
    She stepped to it and pushed it the rest of the way open. It squeaked.
    A dark room full of lumps and shapes. “Nona?” she whispered again, and this time she heard the faint scratch of fingernails on metal.
    Her journal was still in her hand, so she told it to illuminate.
    On the floor, Nona, on her side, her arms tied behind her back, naked from the waist down. Her shirt had been pulled up over her face. The hem was soaked and dark with blood.
    The rectangle of light from Ruby’s journal was too small to illuminate the whole room, so she flashed it around, making sure there was nothing else to see. There wasn’t. A soft moan and a shudder told Ruby that Nona was still alive. She knelt beside her and touched her arm. Her skin felt cool.
    “What did they do to you?” Ruby murmured as she untied Nona’s hands and rolled her over.
    “Oh, oh, oh.” She heard herself gasping the word over and over as she spotted a dark metal shard of thin pipe or bar sticking out on Nona’s side, blood welling out around it. “Ix!” she managed to scream out before she dropped her journal onto Nona’s bare chest. She scrabbled around in the gloom, found the bottom of Nona’s uniform, and folded it around the shard, applying pressure to try to stop the bleeding.
    “Light. Ix. Light.”
    Damned machine. The cloth under her fingers was getting soggy. “Hang on, Nona.”
    Ix’s voice, finally. “What’s wrong, Ruby?”
    “Nona’s dying.”
    “Can you show me?”
    “No. Send someone.”
    “I already have.”
    “Thank you. Light!”
    Two of the four lights in the ceiling bloomed on. Ruby swallowed at her first real sight of Nona. She wanted a free hand to help cover her, but she didn’t dare stop doing her best to staunch the blood. At least it wasn’t gushing out over her fingers, but there was already so much on the floor. She’d never seen so much blood in her life, not even when Lou had cut off two fingers in the machine room. Ruby had been so close that his blood spattered her shirt.
    Nona watched Ruby, her eyes intense in the white field of her pale face. She opened her mouth. “Thank you.”
    “Who did this?”
    Nona shook her head, barely.
    “You knew them. You met them here.”
    “Don’t. Mess with It. Ruby.” A long breath, thin, Nona wincing as she added, “Not safe. Don’t be me. Stay safe.”
    “Shhh . . . stop talking. You’ll be okay.”
    “No.”
    “Why?”
    “Not. Good. Enough.”
    “What wasn’t good enough?”
    “Me.”
    “Of course you were. You’re good. You’re my friend. I need you.”
    Nona lifted a hand toward Ruby’s face. She almost made it, but her hand fell away before their skin touched.
    Ruby froze, her hands still over the wound, her voice shaking as she called Nona’s name over and over.
    Long after she’d lost all hope of helping Nona, and long before anyone came to help her, Ruby whispered, “I’ll change this. I’ll stop it. I’ll do it for you.” It became a mantra, and then almost a song, a shaky, scary little song that she sang over and over to the