SHADES of GREEN ↬ m. wheeler

XXI. MOON

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
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❝MOON❞

　
　

SHE broke through the net of goo and stumbled to the ground, landing on hands and knees. She took a moment to catch her breath, felt it bounce from the marble floor, and then she struggled to her feet.

　The entire journey was a difficult one, especially when she was moving so quickly and had gone so long without such movement. But she made it, eventually.

　Jim had been shocked into speechlessness. It was Joyce who had accepted it and listened to her as she explained what she knew. Then they gathered the others—Steve, Nancy, Jonathan—and, after a couple of phone calls, peeled off.

　One thing bounced around her mind, though she remained as silent as possible, because her throat hurt when she spoke. One word. One name.

　Mike.

　

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THE ARMY SURGED forward, and Jade felt the breath hitch in the back of her throat. Not with fear, but with concentration.

　As quickly as possible, Jade stripped off her coat and sweater, until she was left in a white tank top and jeans. She didn't know if anyone else thought anything of it, and she didn't care. Jade had always been too reluctant to test if her clothes would catch on fire if touched by the flames on her skin, and she didn't want to find out now.

　The cold did not touch her. Not even by a long shot. Her skin, from her bare shoulders to the tips of her fingers, was starting to burn, to shimmer with the gold in her veins. She pulled her hand out of Mike's, afraid to hurt him, but he was quick to touch his hand to the small of her back. He steadied her, before she even knew she needed to be steadied.

　Jade realized, in this moment, that she had hardly experimented with her power at all. She had never even tried to light a piece of paper on fire with it. Terror, like a bolt of electricity, ran through her veins, because she had absolutely no idea how to really use her power on these people, except for burning them with physical contact. But by then they would be on all of them—Jade and her friends—and she could not let that happen.

　If it was in her body, in her soul, and Jade could conjure the fire by thinking about it, by picturing it flickering along her palm, then she could picture other things too. At least, she hoped it would work out that way. There was no other way to find out, though, other than to try.

　So Jade closed her eyes.

　The fast-darkening gray of the sky filtered through the black of Jade's closed eyelids. But she could see more than that. She could still see the informal army, fifty men and women and girls and boys, a mass of variety. There was nothing that necessarily tied them together, except for the black marks on their chests, the birds with long tails and feathers, wispy like flames.

　Phoenixes. Birds that erupted in fire and rose from the ashes. Jade pictured their wings of fire, trailing patterns in the air, stretching and circling and meeting at the tips. Enormous angel's wings, enveloping her friends. She saw them wrap around Mike and Lucas and Dustin. Around the person with Max's face.