Chapter 10: The First Ember
The scream wasn’t loud. It was a sharp, inward gasp, like someone drowning in air. Frank, who hadn’t left the chair beside the bed, was on his feet before his eyes fully adjusted to the gloom.Sage was awake. Not the drugged stupor of before, but violently, terribly present. Her back was arched off the mattress, every tendon in her neck standing in stark relief. Her eyes were wide, pupils swallowing the dim light, fixed on nothing in the room. A fine tremor started in her hands, lying pale on the blanket, then escalated into a violent shudder that racked her entire frame.
“Hey,” Frank said, his voice low.“You’re safe.”
She didn’t hear him. Her breath came in short, ragged pants.The room’s temperature began to climb.Not subtly. It was like someone had thrown open a furnace door. A wave of dry, blistering heat radiated from her body.“Sage.”
The wool blanket over her legs began to smolder. A tiny curl of grey smoke whispered up, followed by a bright, hungry orange ember. The ember spread, fast, eating through the fabric with a soft, crackling sigh. Flames licked up toward her knees.Frank didn’t hesitate. He snatched the ceramic water pitcher from the nightstand and hurled the contents over her legs. Water hit fire with a furious hiss, steam erupting in a cloud.The flames died instantly, leaving a blackened, sodden ruin of blanket.
The door burst open.Matt stood in the frame, his face a mask of stark alarm. He didn’t need to see it.“The air,” he said, stepping inside and closing the door quickly. “It’s cooking. Her heart… it’s like a drum.”
Sage’s seizure stopped. She collapsed back onto the pillow, staring at the charred, steaming mess on her legs. The heat in the room dissipated as suddenly as it had come, leaving behind the acrid stink of burnt wool and wet ash. She looked from the blackened fabric to her own trembling hands, holding them up as if they belonged to a stranger.Her breath hitched. A silent, open-mouthed horror filled her eyes.
“I… I did that?” Her voice was a threadbare scratch.
Frank picked up the scorched blanket and dropped it in a heap on the floor.The mattress beneath was scorched, the feathers inside singed.“Yeah. You did.”
She curled her fingers into fists, hiding them against her chest. Her body began to shake again, but this was shock, not power.“It was inside.The dark.It felt cold. So cold.Then it… it itched. Like something trying to get out.” She looked at Frank, her eyes swimming with a terror deeper than anything she’d shown in Voss’s mansion. “What’s wrong with me?”
Before Frank could form an answer—what answer was there?—the bedroom door opened again. Tommy stood there, impeccably dressed in a dark sweater and trousers, his gaze missing nothing: the burnt blanket, the scared woman, the two tense men. He held a small, silver medical case.
“The doctor mentioned an adrenaline spike that didn’t match your vitals,” he said to Sage, his tone clinically smooth. “I see she understated it.” He stepped fully into the room, setting the case on a dresser.“Gentlemen. Give us the room.”
Frank didn’t move. “Like hell.”
“Frank,” Matt said, his head tilted.“Her pulse is settling. The immediate danger has passed.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about.”
Tommy turned, his cool eyes meeting Frank’s. “You brought her here for sanctuary and for answers.I can provide both.But not with an audience. She’s not a prisoner. And you two…” He glanced between the vigilante and the lawyer.“You’re stimuli. Of the most volatile kind.”
Sage was still staring at her hands.“I want to know,” she whispered, then stronger, “I need to know. What I am.”
Frank’s jaw worked. He looked at her, at the raw plea in her eyes, then gave a single, stiff nod.He pointed a finger at Tommy. “You hurt her, and we finish what we started at the cliff house.”
“Noted,” Tommy said, unimpressed.
Matt touched Frank’s arm, a light press that spoke of shared unease.“We’ll be right outside.”
They left, pulling the heavy door shut behind them. The click of the latch was unnaturally loud in the sudden quiet.
Tommy didn’t approach the bed immediately. He opened the medical case, withdrawing a digital thermometer, a blood pressure cuff, a small flashlight.He moved with an efficient, detached grace, pulling a chair to the bedside.
“How do you feel?” he asked, wrapping the cuff around her bicep.
“Terrified,” she said, her voice flat.“Physically.”
“Empty.And too full. At the same time.” She watched him inflate the cuff. “You’re not really a doctor.”
“No. But I am a very good evaluator of assets and liabilities.” The cuff hissed as it deflated.He noted the reading, his expression unreadable. “Your blood pressure is elevated, but not dangerously so, given the circumstances.” He picked up the thermometer. “Open.”
She did.He placed it under her tongue, his eyes holding hers.The silence stretched. When it beeped, he checked it.“Normal. Remarkably so, considering you nearly spontaneously combusted.” He set the tools aside and sat back.“Tell me about the cold. The itch.”
She swallowed.“When I woke up… it was like remembering a dream.A bad one. There was a room.All white.Not like this.Clean.Sterile.And cold. A different cold.From machines.” She blinked, her focus turning inward.“They put me in a tank. Like a bathtub, but filled with something thick.Gel.It was… quiet. So quiet I could hear my own blood.Then the itch started.In my bones. They were putting the fire in. Trying to… bake it into me.”
Tommy listened, his head slightly cocked.“They were trying to trigger your metahuman potential. A common, if barbaric, approach among certain black-ops circles. The chemical cocktail in your system was designed to break down psychic and physiological barriers.To make you… suggestable. To make the power obedient.” He leaned forward slightly.“Did it work?”
A bitter, broken sound escaped her. She held up her hands again.They were steady now, unnervingly so.“You tell me. It feels like a light switch in a flooded basement.I can’t find it. But sometimes… the water touches the wires.”
“Can you control it? Summon it?”
“I don’t want to!” The words burst out, raw. She drew her knees up to her chest, away from the burnt patch on the mattress.“I want it gone. I want to not be this… this thing that men use for parties and that sets things on fire when it has a nightmare.”
“That,” Tommy said calmly, “is not an option.The genie is out of the bottle. Your only choices are to understand it, or to be destroyed by it. And given the attention you’ve attracted, destruction is the more likely outcome.” He paused.“You mentioned a room. A facility.Can you remember where?Landmarks?Sounds? Smells?”
She pressed her forehead to her knees, concentrating.The room grew still.Too still. Frank and Matt, listening from the corridor, could feel the weight of her focus through the door.“Humming,” she whispered. “A constant, low hum.Like a power generator.And… a smell.Like ozone.And salt. Like the sea, but… not clean. Stagnant.”
Tommy’s eyes narrowed a fraction.“Industrial coastline. Possibly a decommissioned plant or a private marine research facility.” He pressed further.“Names.Did you hear any names? Even fragments.”
She winced, as if the memory physically hurt.“A voice.Over an intercom.Female.‘Subject is resilient. Proceed to Phase Three. Dreykov will be pleased.’” She looked up, her eyes clouded.“Dreykov. That means something to you.”
Tommy’s expression didn’t change, but the quality of his stillness did.It became sharper, more lethal. “It does.An old ghost. Not one I ever hoped to hear from again.” He stood up, smoothing his sweater.“Your recovery will continue here.You are safe within these walls. But you must learn to control what is inside you.Uncontrolled power is a beacon. And it makes you useless to yourself.”
“I don’t want to be useful,” she spat, a spark of defiance igniting in her bruised eyes. “I want to be me.”
“You don’t know who that is,” Tommy countered, his voice cool. “Until you do, usefulness is all you have. It’s what will keep you alive.” He walked to the door, then stopped, his hand on the knob.“Rest. I’ll have the doctor bring something to help you sleep.Without dreams.”
He left, opening the door to find Frank and Matt standing guard. He closed it behind him and started down the hall, expecting them to follow.
“Well?” Frank growled.“Dreykov,” Tommy said, the name tasting foul. “A name from the darkest corners of the old Soviet ‘science’ programs. He was supposed to have died in the early 2000s.A blown-up bunker in Siberia. Apparently, reports of his death were exaggerated.”
Matt’s brow furrowed.“What does he want with her?”
“What men like him always want. A weapon.One they can point. What’s fascinating is that she wasn’t just a passive subject.They were intensifying something that was already there. Baking the fire in, as she said.” He stopped, turning to face them.“She’s not just a victim. She’s a product.A very expensive, very dangerous one that someone lost. And Voss was just the broker, trying to demonstrate the merchandise to a buyer’s market.”
Frank’s face was stone. “So we find Dreykov.”
“We don’t do anything,” Tommy said, a tired edge returning to his voice.“I have leads.Resources. You two are a wrecking ball.Useful for demolition, terrible for delicate excavation.” He looked at Matt. “Your church.Your law practice.Go back to them. This is a deeper, older game now.”
Matt shook his head.“She’s in this because of a choice I made. I don’t get to walk away.”
“And you,” Tommy said to Frank. “Your particular brand of justice is a loud, messy affair.We need silence now. We need to know what she is before the wrong people come knocking to collect.”
From behind the bedroom door, a soft thump sounded.Then another. Frank was moving before Tommy finished speaking, shoving the door back open.Sage was out of bed. She stood by the window, her forehead pressed against the cool, dark glass, her fists beating a slow, quiet, hopeless rhythm against the polished oak frame. Her shoulders were slumped, the defiant spark gone, replaced by a bottomless despair.
Her shoulders were slumped, the defiant spark gone, replaced by a bottomless despair.
That despair hardened into a wall over the next day.She stopped answering questions. She turned her head away from offered food. The doctor managed to get some fluids into her via IV, but Sage just stared at the ceiling, her hand limp around Frank’s when he held it, neither accepting nor rejecting the contact. It was as if she had simply vacated her own body, leaving behind a shell that was too tired to even burn.
“This is a trauma response,” the doctor said on the second day, her voice low in the hallway.“Catatonic features. The mind retreats when reality is unendurable.”
“We need her mind present,” Tommy replied, his impatience a thin veil over something colder. “Dreykov isn’t going to wait for her to finish grieving.”
Frank said nothing. He just watched from the doorway as Matt tried, his voice gentle, to talk to her about anything—the sound of the rain, the feel of the blanket, a memory of a smell from his childhood.Sage’s breathing didn’t change. Her heart rate, which Matt could hear with painful clarity, remained a slow, metronomic dirge.
By the third day, the room smelled of stale air and untouched soup. Frank had taken to cleaning the single handgun Tommy had allowed him, the repetitive click-clack of the slide a grounding ritual. Matt paced, his own frustration a live wire.“We’re losing her,” he finally said, his voice tight. “She’s just… fading.”
“She’s not fading,” Frank corrected, his eyes never leaving her still form on the bed.“She’s digging in. She’s making herself a fortress where nothing can get in.Or out.”
Tommy appeared with a slim tablet. “I’ve traced the ozone-and-salt scent profile. Combined with the industrial hum description, it matches a derelict biochemical processing plant on the North Shore. Decommissioned after a spill. Quietly purchased by a shell corporation six years ago.” He showed them satellite images of a complex of rusting tanks and low, windowless buildings clinging to a jagged coastline. “Security is subtle but present.Thermal signatures indicate a small, constant garrison.”
Matt’s head tilted. “You’re planning an assault.”
“I’m planning reconnaissance,” Tommy said. “But it’s pointless if we don’t know what they did to her.What she is. She’s the blueprint.” He glanced into the silent room. “We need her to talk.”
Frank stood up, the chair legs scraping harshly against the floor. He walked into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the mattress, his weight causing her body to tilt slightly toward him. He didn’t take her hand this time.
“I know you’re in there,” he said, his voice low and rough, devoid of its usual gravelly command.It was just a statement. “I know about fortresses.You build them right, nobody gets in. Problem is, nothing gets out either.No food.No light. You just sit in the dark, listening to yourself breathe until that’s all you are.” He leaned in closer. “Your fire isn’t the problem.The silence is.”
For the first time in days, her eyelashes flickered. A single tear escaped, tracing the same path down her bruised cheek. But her eyes didn’t open.Her lips didn’t part.Frank stood up.He looked at Tommy, then at Matt. “We’re doing this wrong.”
“Oh, do enlighten us,” Tommy said, folding his arms.“You want answers from a lab.” Frank’s gaze was flat and final. “I know another way to get them. From the guys who ran it.”
Matt stepped forward, picking up the shift in Frank’s tone.“Frank, no. We don’t even know where the primary facility is. Tommy’s lead is a guess.”
“I don’t need the facility.” Frank moved past them into the hall, his mind already working through the logistics of pain, the arithmetic of extraction.“Voss had buyers.Clients. Those pricks at the party didn’t just show up for champagne.They knew what they were there to see. Someone in that room knows where she came from.They’ll have a name. A number.”
Tommy’s expression shifted, the clinical interest sparking into something sharper. “The guest list was encrypted, scrubbed. My people haven’t been able to crack it.”
“I don’t need the list.” Frank was already strapping on a worn shoulder holster from his gear bag. “I just need one of them.The one who looked like he’d done it before. The one who wasn’t surprised.”
Matt blocked the doorway.“You’re talking about kidnapping and torture. We cross that line, there’s no pretending we’re the good guys.”
“Good guys.” Frank let the words hang, rotten and empty. “Were you being a good guy when you brought her out of that cave, Murdock? Did that feel clean?” He shouldered past, his bulk making Matt step aside.“She’s dying in there.Not from her throat. Not from some infection.She’s drowning in whatever they put inside her head. I’m going to find the guy who ordered the recipe. And I’m going to make him read it to me.”
He walked down the hall toward the manor’s back entrance, the set of his shoulders leaving no room for debate.Tommy watched him go, then looked at Matt.
“He’ll do it with or without you,” Tommy said. “With you, there’s a slim chance he might leave a witness alive. A source we can use.”
Matt stood in the dim hallway, the silence from Sage’s room pressing against his back, the echo of Frank’s retreating footsteps a drumbeat pulling him toward a cliff. He took a last, listening breath, hearing only the shallow, terrible calm of her lungs.
Then he turned and followed Frank into the dark.
Then he turned and followed Frank into the dark.
They took one of Tommy’s cars, a nondescript sedan that smelled of synthetic lemon and gun oil.Frank drove, his focus absolute, navigating the rain-slicked streets with a predatory silence. Matt sat in the passenger seat, his head bowed, listening to the city’s night symphony—the hiss of tires, the distant wail of an ambulance, the rhythmic thump of Frank’s pulse, a steady, grim drumbeat.
“The gaunt one,” Frank said, his voice cutting through the quiet.“Silas.He’s dead. But the other one.The one who went first.”
“Charles,” Matt supplied, the name leaving a sour taste. “His heartbeat was all greed.No fear until the end.”
“He knew the product. Knew what he was paying for.Men like that keep records. They brag.” Frank’s knuckles were white on the wheel.“He’ll have a contact. A way up the chain.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“Then we find someone who does.”
They pulled into the service alley behind a towering condominium on Central Park West. The building’s bulk loomed over them, a slab of privileged shadow.Frank killed the engine. The only light came from a single security bulb above a reinforced delivery door.“Top floor,” Matt said, tilting his head. “He’s home.Heart rate is elevated.Probably still jittery from the party drugs. Listening to jazz.A single malt, neat. He’s alone.”
Frank was already out of the car, pulling a black ski mask over his face.Matt didn’t bother with one. His was a different kind of disguise. They bypassed the main lobby, a glass-and-brass monument to opulence, and went straight for the service entrance. Frank picked the lock on the metal door with a practiced, silent efficiency that spoke of a hundred such breaches.
The service stairwell was concrete, cold, and echoing with the distant hum of the building’s machinery. They climbed fast and light, their footsteps absorbed by the grit on the steps. On the penthouse landing, Frank paused, listening at the door.Matt simply nodded.Frank kicked the door just beside the lock. The frame splintered with a sound like a gunshot in the confined space. They flooded into a stainless-steel kitchen, all sharp angles and cold surfaces. The jazz was louder here, a smooth saxophone weeping from hidden speakers.
Charles Fisk was in the living room, standing frozen beside a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the dark park, a crystal tumbler halfway to his lips. He wore a silk robe over pajamas. His face, flushed hours before with cruel excitement, was now pale and slack with shock.“You,” he breathed, the word trembling.
Frank closed the distance in three long strides.He didn’t speak. He slammed the butt of his pistol into the man’s solar plexus. Air exploded from Charles’s lungs in a pained whoosh, and he folded, dropping the glass.It shattered on the polished teak floor, ice and whiskey spreading around his knees.
Matt moved through the sprawling apartment, his senses mapping the space. Three bedrooms, four bathrooms, all empty.No panic buttons pressed.No safes in the walls. Just the stark, expensive taste of someone with money and no soul.
Frank hauled Charles up by his robe collar and shoved him into a low, modernist sofa.He leaned over him, the mask turning his face into a featureless void. “You bought a woman tonight.”
“I didn’t—Voss, he said it was a demonstration—” Charles stammered, his hands up in a warding gesture.
“You put your dick in her,” Frank continued, his voice a low, dead monotone. “You paid to do that.Who’d you pay?Not Voss.He was just the auctioneer. Who gave him the product?”
“I don’t know names!It’s all through intermediaries! Blind drops!”
Frank’s hand shot out, grabbing Charles’s pinky finger. He bent it back until the joint gave a wet, sickening pop. Charles shrieked, a high-pitched sound that was swallowed by the saxophone’s mournful tune.
“The name,” Frank repeated.Tears streamed down Charles’s face.“Volkov! The whisper was always Volkov!But he’s a ghost, a story!I never met him! I just transferred funds to a numbered account in Cyprus!”
Matt stood by the window, his back to the scene. “He’s telling a partial truth.The fear is real, but there’s more. Deeper.” He turned his head slightly.“The Cypriot account.Who administered it? The funds didn’t move themselves.”
Charles was sobbing now, cradling his broken hand. “A firm.Grendel Holdings. My lawyer said it was clean!”
“Grendel,” Matt echoed, filing the name away.It was a thread.Frank wasn’t satisfied. A thread wasn’t enough.He needed a rope.“Who picks up the product? After Volkov’s people are done baking their weapons, who tests them? Who delivers?” He leaned in closer, his voice dropping to a whisper Charles felt in his marrow.“You saw her scars.Old ones. This wasn’t her first sale. Who brokered the last one?”
“I don’t know! Please!”
“Think.”
Charles’s eyes darted wildly, scrambling for a purchase, for anything to make the pain stop.“There… there was a man. At a different event, years ago.In Monaco.A demo, but different. A man who could… influence electrical fields.Volkov’s work, they said.The handler was Russian.Cold. Had a tattoo here.” He tapped his own neck, just below the ear.“A spider. A black widow.”
Frank and Matt exchanged a glance, a shared moment of grim recognition.A specific. It was something.“Name,” Frank demanded.“He was just called ‘The Manager’! I swear!”
Frank straightened up.He looked at Matt, then back at the broken man on the sofa. “He’s coming with us.”
“Frank,” Matt warned. “This is different.”
“It’s necessary.” Frank hauled Charles to his feet. “Tommy’s people can peel him apart properly.Get the bank details. Track the spider.”
They took the service elevator down, Frank’s grip a steel vise on Charles’s arm. The man was limp now, beyond resistance, lost in a haze of pain and terror. They shoved him into the backseat, where he curled into a silent ball.The drive back to Stone Manor was a silent, tense interval. The only sound was Charles’s ragged breathing and the rhythmic swish of the wipers. The earlier momentum had solidified into a leaden certainty.They had crossed a line, and there was no path back.
When they pulled into the manor’s garage, Tommy was waiting, his expression unreadable. He took in their captive with a single, evaluating glance.“A party guest. How gauche.”
“He knows about Volkov.About bank accounts and handlers with spider tattoos,” Frank said, pushing Charles forward. “Your turn.”
Tommy nodded to two stern-looking men who emerged from the shadows. They took Charles by the arms and led him away into the depths of the house, his slippers whispering against the concrete floor.
“And Sage?” Matt asked, the question hanging in the cool, damp air of the garage.“Unchanged,” Tommy said, turning to lead them inside. “The doctor is with her.”
They moved through the manor’s hushed corridors, the weight of the night’s work settling on their shoulders. As they approached the bedroom door, the doctor stepped out, her usual composure fractured by a faint line of worry between her brows.
“She’s deteriorated,” the doctor said without preamble, blocking their path.“She has taken no substantial nutrition for days. The IV fluids are not enough.Her body is consuming itself.”
Frank pushed past her into the room.
Sage was on the floor. She had apparently tried to stand, to reach the window again perhaps, but her legs had failed her. She lay in a frail heap beside the bed, one arm outstretched, her fingers just brushing the scorched patch on the mattress. The rise and fall of her chest was barely perceptible. Her skin, always pale, now had a wan, translucent quality, like paper held too close to a flame.The collapse was total. It wasn’t the violent, fiery implosion of her power.It was a quiet, biological surrender. Dehydration and malnutrition had finally pulled the last thread holding her to consciousness. The formidable stillness she carried was gone, replaced by the terrible limpness of utter depletion.
Frank knelt beside her, his large hand hesitating for a second before gently brushing the hair from her damp forehead.Her skin was cool, too cool.
“Sage,” he said, but there was no response, not even a flicker.
Matt stood in the doorway, his senses drowning in the weak, faltering rhythm of her heart. It was a faint, slowing tap against a silent wall. He heard the shallow, insufficient draw of breath into lungs that lacked the energy to fully inflate.
“She’s running on empty,” Matt said, his voice tight.Tommy watched from the threshold, his calculations visibly shifting.A captive was one thing. A dying asset was another.“Get her back on the bed.Now. We need a full medical suite set up here. Hydration, electrolytes, total parenteral nutrition if necessary.” He looked at the doctor, his tone leaving no room for debate.“You will keep her alive. However you have to.”
Frank gathered Sage into his arms. She was frighteningly light, a bundle of bones and fragile heat.He placed her back on the clean sheets, arranging her with a clumsy care. Her head lolled to the side, her lips slightly parted.The fire was out. The dark inside her had won. And all they had to show for their night’s work was a sobbing financier in a basement room and the fading echo of a name: Volkov.
The real fight, it seemed, was just to keep her from slipping away before they could even begin.