Free Fires of Midnight by Jon Land Page A

poem in the sequence. It read “Josh, Age 3 ” above the title:

    “The Fires of Midnight.” Eleven stanzas followed.
    We all know how it feels to cry
We’ve all sometimes had to lie
     
    But it’s those of us whose spirits died
Who life seems to have defied
     
    But here is a door
And I will deny it no more
     
    The one thing the world couldn’t ignore
Soon I will be the one they all adore
     
    And with the midnight hour about to begin
And the fires ready to burn within
     
    What you have but cannot see
Is all I wish I could be
     
    If you’ve ever felt this way
You know it’s no good to live for another day
     
    So now you see you’re not great
And the future holds a much worse fate
     
    So walk a mile in these shoes
And my fires will teach you to lose
     
    You can’t escape
There’s no one the fires don’t rape
     
    I cry for you
And I cry for the world
’Cause we all live together
And one day we’ll be equal forever

    Susan read the lines over, chilled by them, having to remind herself that a three-year-old had written “The Fires of Midnight.” But hardly an ordinary three-year-old. A three-year-old already aware and frustrated by the fact that he was different. A three-year-old who must have been an outcast, who desperately wanted to fit in and knew he never could.
    Heart hammering against her rib cage, Susan ejected the disk and slid a second into the slot. This one had a file menu and she began scanning
through the contents. Joshua Wolfe’s obsession with air pollution stretched far beyond its potentially catastrophic long-term effects and encompassed the development of drastic solutions. File after file was devoted to his experiments on various agents meant to attack it at the molecular level. Several of the technological references clearly indicated that the boy was playing around with some form of genetically engineered organism designed to suck pollutants right out of the—
    Susan froze the screen, eyes fixed upon it. She had almost passed over this file, would have if a spark of recognition hadn’t flickered in her mind.
    Plans, blueprints …
    She had seen them before, just hours earlier. Seen them in Firewatch’s mobile command site.
    They were the original plans for the Cambridgeside Galleria.
     
    S usan tried to steady herself but her mind was racing too fast. She recalled the air-quality registers the sweep team had found in the mall, the connection to Joshua Wolfe’s work unavoidable.
    What do I know? What can I prove?
    Start with a hypothesis. Assume Joshua Wolfe’s presence in the boiler room, and the presence of those air-quality registers inside the mall, indicated he was conducting an experiment. Assume he had released an organism or enzyme of his own creation designed to destroy air pollution. Only it hadn’t worked as planned and the result, the result had been …

    And with the midnight hour about to begin,
And the fires ready to burn within.

    The fires of midnight, Susan thought. Was that what Joshua Wolfe had inadvertently unleashed in the Cambridgeside Galleria two days before?
    She found a semblance of the answer in the next file she accessed. Mathematical formulas and equations she could make little sense of dominated screen after screen until she locked on to a file devoted to what the boy apparently intended to release in the Galleria as part of his test: CLean AIR.
    It was printed that way only as a title, replaced in later usages with the contraction “CLAIR.” She scanned back a few files and realized Joshua Wolfe had named all of his experimental formulas after women. He was apparently as adept at turning a phrase as he was at turning a test tube, a poet indeed.
    But it was his expertise with a test tube that interested Susan now. According to what she could decipher from Joshua Wolfe’s equations, two vials of CLAIR would be required to cover the area of the Galleria. This was later amended to a single vial, at the last minute, actually, perhaps