I don’t know if this is rebirth or death. But we need to save our own lives.

I assist Maribelle as Brighton and Prudencia carry Iris. We step around the tomb of fire that’s continuing to eat at whatever remains of Orton’s corpse. Maribelle is in no condition to drive, and not having a license doesn’t stop Prudencia from putting her weekend driving lessons to use. Hopefully we didn’t survive this battle just so we can die in a car crash.

We pull out of the factory’s alleyway as black smoke spills out of the shattered windows. I watch the glowing fire within until it’s out of sight, and even then, I can’t push the memory of the flames eating Orton out of my head.

“Is that going to happen to me?” I ask.

“What?” Brighton asks.

“Burnout,” I say. “The powers turned on him. I’m not supposed to have mine either.”

“Bro, you were reborn with these powers! It’s different. You owned everyone in there like a hero.”

I can’t feel as hyped as Brighton. We didn’t get the information we needed. Maribelle is biting down on her shirt to fight past the pain of her burnt hands. Iris has been hurt so badly that she’s in need of healing—again. There were six acolytes, and I only saw one escape the factory. Orton is dead. I didn’t kill Orton or the acolytes directly, but six people are goners now because of me.

I shouldn’t get to be crowned as the hero when everyone’s suffering is my fault. And maybe we’re not the saviors this city needs.

Nineteen

Spell Walkers of New York

BRIGHTON

Being Emil on social media is wild. He isn’t doing great in real life since last night’s fight, but he’s tracking really well online—really, really, really well. His Instagram profile is now sporting the blue verified badge, and he’s got over six hundred thousand followers showing him love and support. Some hate too, but he doesn’t need to know about that. His Twitter mentions are so out of control that I can’t keep up. Most notably, his Celestials of New York training montage has over three million views. BuzzFeed even cribbed my clips for their post! Between that and the twenty thousand new subscribers I’ve made overnight, I’m living the dream.

Last night, I handed over the full video of the battle against Orton to the Spell Walkers so they could figure out why Orton burned out. When people’s bodies react poorly to the amount of creature blood needed to turn someone into a specter, it usually happens at the beginning. Orton had his powers for at least two weeks. This was extreme. Lucky for them, I got most of it on camera. I stayed up editing the battle to fire it up on YouTube as soon as possible, but it sucks that I lost some moments, like when Orton’s blast was flying straight at me and Prudencia so we had to take cover away from the doorway, or when Orton was walking in place as if he were shackled like some rabid dog.

The video is blowing up within the hour. I rush out of the library and back to our room to show Emil. I find him shaking, with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, even though warm sunbeams are bathing him and Eva is sitting across from him with a mug of tea.

“Hey,” Emil says weakly.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“Your brother and I are having a long-overdue talk,” Eva says. “Would you mind giving us some more time?”

“We tell each other everything,” I say.

The way Eva stares at me makes me question what I’ve said. “I’m happy to set up a time for us to do some group counseling, maybe even involve your mother, but this is a private session.”

Someone thinks she’s a real therapist.

“It’s okay. He can stay,” Emil says.

I’m tempted to throw an I-told-you-so smirk Eva’s way, but I keep it together and sit beside Emil. Emil gets me up to speed, though it’s nothing new—questioning his relationship with Ma, how he’s terrified all the time, how he couldn’t sleep last night because he feels so guilty over everything that happened with the factory. Talking it out with Eva is a solid idea because I refuse to grieve Orton and the acolytes, and Maribelle and Iris both received healing, so all’s well that ends well. Figuring out how he feels about the big family secret and feeling bolder in battles is going to take time, but Emil will get there. He has to.

“What if using my powers overloads me too?” Emil asks.

“Bro, you’re trying to talk yourself out of fighting. You see that, right?”

“Emil’s fear is valid,” Eva cuts in. “There’s still so much we don’t know about Orton’s situation. Did he die because he was a celestial with phoenix essence? Maybe the creature’s blood took longer to corrode his celestial blood.”

“I want to do the right thing,” Emil says. “But what if I screw up everything even worse than Keon did?”

Eva is about to tug a strand of hair and resists. “Back before there was so much disharmony between celestials and humans, our ancestors had a saying: ‘The strongest power above all is a living heart.’ Emil, your heart is powerful—you care, you ache, you feel. I don’t know what Keon’s intentions were, but his execution was disastrous. Your humanity is what makes you heroic, not your powers.”

As Eva tells Emil more about how she swears by this mantra as a pacifist, my mind keeps turning the words over and over: The strongest power above all is a living heart. Humanity is what makes heroes, not powers. The strongest power above all is a living heart. Humanity is what makes heroes, not powers.

The strongest power is humanity.

“I got it!”

“Got what?” Emil asks.

“The key to winning.”

I tell them to get everyone in the boardroom, and I run back to the library to get ready. I collect all the links and data I need to make my case. This is going to be a level up for the movement. My heart is pounding when I enter the boardroom to find the Spell Walkers and Prudencia gathered around. I haven’t been this nervous about a presentation since my Advanced Placement Computer Science final—which I aced.

I go to the front of the room and thank everyone for coming.

“What’s the big plan?” Maribelle asks.

“A six-part video series featuring all the Spell Walkers,” I say. Maribelle glares at me like Dad used to when I would urgently wake him up to tell him about some new fun fact I learned, a fun fact that always could’ve waited until he was out of bed. “Eva told us about that old celestial adage, the one about the strongest power being a living heart. Why don’t we post about why you all became heroes? Your origin stories. We can dispel all the rumors about how you’re building an army to take down the government or getting stronger to attack the city again.”

Maribelle stands up. “Dude, no one cares about us.”

“I disagree.” I share my report on the positive engagement I’ve seen across Emil’s accounts and my own. People are rooting for all of us. They didn’t know Emil two weeks ago, and now they’re starving for more details. I remember what it was like waiting for the next time any Spell Walker would pop up on my feed, whether it was a clip of the latest brawl or even a casual sighting of them out in the world.

“We’ve tried the media route before and after the Blackout,” Atlas says. “My own account included.”