19.
Jamie
Jamie made it to the burning building as the fire trucks were pulling up, their sirens wailing in the night, their lights casting red flashes on the buildings opposite, down the alleys that weren’t already illuminated by the fire light. She came in on a hard channel from the top of Freedom Tower, racing at well past terminal velocity. She dropped it in the last hundred feet or so before she reached 55th, sending a channel to the ground to reverse gravity and hold her there, over the street, as she tried to figure out what needed to be done first.
The front fires were already extinguished, smoke pouring out the windows. The roof, however, was in flames, fire licking out into the night, the brick at the top floor already cracking and crumbling, threatening to fall onto the street below. From this distance, the building reminded her of a doll house in a way, and—
She blinked.
It did look like a doll house.
And that gave her an idea.
“Never done this before,” Jamie muttered as she pushed herself up above the burning building, into the cloud of smoke. She ignored the urge to cough at first, then adjusted herself so that she was on the edge of it, just outside its billowing reach. She set up twelve channels, small ones, on the buildings around the flaming one, reversing the gravity so that she sat atop a pyramid of wells, balancing her above the buildings with considerably more strength than just one channel alone would.
“This will be dicey. And fun,” she told herself. “But mostly dicey.” She took a deep breath and then pushed a hand toward the nearest corner of the building.
It took her a few minutes to set up the channels the way she thought it would require. She’d only had the powers for a few months, but she’d practiced in that time, trying to learn everything she could about how they worked. Her gravity channels were only as strong as whatever they were anchored to; in this case they were anchored to her, and she was anchored to the nearby buildings.
“Here’s to the sturdiness of the modern building code,” she murmured. A second after she set her plan in motion, she realized that a lot of these buildings probably hadn’t been built to modern codes, but it was a little too late.
Jamie reversed the flow of gravity on all the channels she’d just tethered to the burning building, reeling them toward her. She could hear brick and wood straining and breaking, and watched carefully as pieces started to fall off toward the street below. She threw wide, weak gravity channels down over the street like nets, and watched as brick and wood was caught in them, suspended in place over the streets.
Jamie turned up the power of the channels below, closing her eyes as she balanced many more channels than she’d ever dealt with simultaneously and with more power than she’d ever put out at one time. The top floor of the burning building broke apart in eight pieces, and she slipped a hard edge of gravity like a blade below them to its connection to the rest of the building. That was new, too, though she’d experimented with a gravity blade a few times at the place she’d used as her training ground on Staten Island.
She pulled the top floor of the building off as neatly as if she’d taken apart a doll house. The flames were visible within, burning in the walls and halls and apartments. There were four or five bright, blazing spots, and she could see them through the smoke.
“And now for something completely different,” she muttered to herself.
She set up channels directly to the spots where the fire was burning brightly, circling about a ten foot square; it was plain to her from this distance that the top floor wasn’t fully engulfed yet, that the fire on the fourth was just starting to burn through in these spots, and maybe, just maybe, she could contain it here if—
“Oh, damn,” she said, as she caught the first signs of motion in the labyrinth of exposed rooms beneath.
She could see a family, three or four people, one with a cat in their arms, waving from one of the apartments that was yet untouched by the blaze. She reached out and caught them all in a gravity channel, lifting them up, then tethering them to a building down the street. Gently, she slid them down, their screams of terror at being picked up in the air like children crackling through the city night over the sirens wail. She let them drop the last few feet to a gentle, wafting landing.
Jamie was sweating furiously, and it was getting harder to concentrate. She felt like she had a hundred different irons in the fire, like she was multitasked to the maximum and had almost no concentration left to give. She caught sight of a body in a hall and lifted it, dragged it up, then brought it down on 55th behind a parked ambulance. She saw the paramedics rush toward the fallen form, casting their gaze skyward to her as they did.
“Fire, fire, fire,” she muttered, sweat cascading down her forehead from beneath her mask. It was in her eyes, it was burning, and the wind seemed to be shifting direction, because now she was getting more of the smoke. Holding up the pieces of this building was a burden, threatening to pull her down at any moment. She threw down three more heavy gravity channels using the fire trucks as her anchors to fight against the increased weight as she ripped the flaming segments out of the top floor of the building. She lifted them high, to her, and then looked west, to the river.
“I have … to get rid … of some of this … weight,” she said, unable to even muster the strength to close her mouth when she finished speaking. She anchored the pieces to her and set the channels toward the river, letting them roll west with all the power she could give them, which wasn’t much. The fragments of the building looked like they were ziplining toward the river, still aflame, smoking like falling meteors as they sizzled across the sky.
An anchor slipped as a fire truck moved beneath her, and Jamie’s little pyramid suddenly felt unstable. She felt a surge of panic, like she’d fallen out of bed in a deep sleep, and thrusting out an emergency channel to stabilize her. It hit the building down and behind her, and she felt the facade crumble. She threw out another broad-based net, but it was weak and flimsy, and she could feel the pieces threatening to tumble out of it like it was bare threads straining under the weight of tons.
The billowing cloud of black smoke shifted, and she caught it full-on, the darkness enveloping her. It burned her eyes, blurring her vision with darkness and pain. A great racking cough welled up within her, rolling up from deep within her lungs and hacking out, fresh air gone and replaced by something painful, like knives in her chest.
“Oh … hell …” Jamie said, sweating, her arms and legs in agony from all the weight, her mind sluggish, a hundred gravity channels thrown up around her. She could feel them now, like they were rats gnawing at her paralyzed body. She couldn’t move, couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t breathe—and she couldn’t let a single one of them go, or else people below her would die.