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feet, and someone was even kind enough to give me a cap to protect my head from the bright sun—I lost mine a while ago, in the forest.
    I just wish I had a weapon. What good will I be if the fiends attack again?
    Elle bounces up to me. “Sorry about that,” she says. “I had to tell my dad about something and then… what’s up? You look sad.”
    I shrug. I wasn’t aware of my facial expression. “Nothing,” I say. “I’m fine.”
    “You lost someone, didn’t you?” She lowers her voice, eyes darting about like it’s a taboo subject.
    I swallow. I’m too tired, too overwhelmed, to think about the others now. They’d want you to get answers from these people. They’d want you to live.
    I nod. “Everyone. I was the only survivor.”
    “I’m so sorry.” Are those tears in her eyes? Who cries on behalf of strangers?
    “I’m okay,” I say, lamely. “So, um, Nolan told me that your group fights the fiends. Could you tell me more about that?”
    “Sure! Well, we don’t all fight—only you Pyros can do that, because the fiends don’t get knocked down easily.”
    “Yeah… about that,” I say. “It makes no sense. I mean, I think I’d have noticed that I can survive getting kicked into a wall before now. When I was seven I fell off a bench and broke my ankle, but that fiend hit me into a brick wall and it barely did any damage. Even when I fell out the tree. I broke a couple of ribs, but it should have been worse.”
    “Um, that’s probably because you were awakening,” she says. “That’s the one thing outsiders—naturals—have in common. My dad’s studying it, and he says that the energy blasts are what’s triggering it. Before there were only a few of us, but there are a new bunch of people waking up alive from energy blasts. Only you Pyros can survive them. But you know that already, right?”
    “Yeah,” I say, though my mind’s swirling. One question at a time. “But the part I don’t understand is how I fought the fiends. I was injured, but it was like my hand—my whole body, really—caught fire.”
    “That’s because you’re different,” she says, with a laugh. The sound is foreign to my ears.
    “I know that,” I say, and inexplicably, my own mouth curls up at the side. “I’d just like to know what—what I am.”
    “Pyro,” she says. “Well, that’s just a nickname we’ve adopted. I’ve thought of a nickname for you, anyway.”
    I blink. “You have?”
    “Yeah. Leah the Phoenix. You rose out of the ashes, right?”
    “Um. I guess.”
    A mythical bird that burns in fire at the end of its life and is reborn out of the flames? My chest tightens. I’ll never forget the others. Randy… Opal… they kept me alive for the past two years. I don’t know that I’d have lived through Lissa’s death without them. But for the sake of surviving, I have to look forward, not back. Randy told me that himself, like he told everyone in the group. Not all of us listened. Some sank into grief so deep, they stopped eating or sleeping and either died from sickness or were killed during night raids from scavengers desperate enough to attack a group of other humans. Those of us who stopped looking back and started looking out for our own survival were the ones who lived.
    “Are you okay? I won’t call you that if it upsets you.”
    “It’s fine. I like it.” I don’t manage a smile, but that doesn’t matter. “Have you found other people… like me, then?”
    “Not really.” She bites her lip. “It’s not common. Like a genetic mutation. It’s dormant until the energy blast triggers it.”
    Dormant. But could it have happened before?
    I think of Cas’s blood, mixing with mine, healing.
    Could I have saved my sister?
    It doesn’t matter, a voice in my head tells me. That’s over now. It’s done.
    I turn back to Elle. “How does it work?” I ask. “Using my… abilities, I mean? It happened by itself, but can I control it?”
    “Of course.” She smiles. Her