When Ren first woke up to the sound of screams and cries of “Fire!”, he thought it was a dream. The destruction, the chaos, the shouts: they certainly seemed like something out of his nightmares. To be sure, they would have been far more at place in his sleeping mind than his generally peaceful waking life. Even when his father had dragged him out of bed, shouting that Geosenge was being destroyed, his mind had been hazy, and it had all just seemed too unreal to be true.
But now, there was no denying it. Not with the scent of ash on the wind, or the sting of the scrapes he’d amassed from the debris flying through the air, or the pervasive, stifling heat that threatened to suffocate him as he watched his hometown’s destruction. Every detail added to the picture seemed to tell him: This is real. This is happening. Those are actual people screaming for their lives.
No one seemed to know what was going on, where the fire had started, why the destruction had spread so quickly. Some people--Ren’s father included--seemed to be trying to stage an evacuation, but they were too few, and the panic was too great. Ren could hardly blame everyone for freaking out--not when he himself had been frozen in place, watching the scene unfold before him, suddenly unable to breathe in anything other than short, rasping breaths.
A terrified wailing close by broke Ren out of his trance. He turned, and saw a woman--Wasn’t she the school librarian?--trapped under a collapsed house. Luckily, this house in particular wasn’t on fire, but the flames from her neighbor’s home were already growing dangerously close. And with her legs trapped like that, she wouldn’t have time to get away. Ren watched, entranced, as a group of people rushed to her and tried to shift the beam enough for her to get away. They struggled, but it amounted to nothing, nothing.
The flames licked at the rubble, and the woman screamed.
Before Ren could give himself time to think about it too hard, before he could talk himself out of it, he lifted his hand towards the beam, concentrated, and pushed. The people struggling with the beam gasped at the sudden release of weight, turned to stare in Ren’s direction. He squirmed under their gazes--to him, they felt cold, questioning. They said nothing, though, and Ren didn’t let himself falter until the woman had crawled out and away from the danger.
While the rest of the townsfolk helped the woman up, Ren ran.
After that, Ren couldn’t find a reason not to use his once-hidden psychic power to get people out of danger. Everywhere, people saw him, saw what he was doing, but he forced his thoughts away from that every time they strayed in that direction. He moved almost without thought, as if he was in a dream.
Ren heard another gaggle of voices, and he followed them to their source. However, it quickly became obvious that these were not another group of frightened residents. Their voices were too light, too unafraid. Ren slowed his pace until he was creeping along. And when he finally came upon the group, all of Ren’s suspicions fell into place. These people, unfamiliar to Ren, were all uniformed in an orange only made more bright by the flickering flames surrounding them. They made no move to help, but rather only added to the destruction around them.
Did they do this? Ren wondered. It seemed likely. His veins seemed to have turned to ice just watching them. He clutched at the corner of the house he hid behind as his fingers started to tremble.
