Free From the Fire II by Kent David Kelly Page A

held her breath. The reclaimers churned and thrummed beneath the shower drains, humming and re-cleaning the draining water.
    She still could not remember how she had gotten there. After she had descended the ladder and pressurized the vault door, many of the details were still alien to her memory. How had she managed to lift the aluminum shelving off of herself when she had been in danger of being crushed and asphyxiated? How had she survived the blasts at all?
    She had no idea.
    Hon, you’re wasting warm water, her father’s voice called out to her.
    Strange. Was he at the door? She could not see his misted shadow there. Leave some for Patrice. Despite herself, Sophie felt a tiny smile touch her lips.
    “Sorry, daddy,” she whispered.
    Despite everything, she welcomed the loving sternness in his words. She had only the phantom voices for company now, a chorus of the burning and the dead, the long-lost and the recently departed all singing within her in their own isolate cathedrals of pain and silence. Echoing. She wondered if she would go mad with the sunlit and rising arcs of all those pleading intonations, so many souls all caught and tangled up in her skein of memory, with no one else to ever remember who the voices’ souls had been. Soon, perhaps, she would need to silence them all, to reinstate herself as a lone woman in sole domain over her own prisoned mind.
    You, you are all dead. And I? I live on. I am.
    And if she could not bear to silence the purest of those voices? Tom, Daddy, Lacie. If she let them reign and sweep her own voice into the darkness and away, which of those souls would she become before the end?
    Oh, no. I am myself. She shivered, bracing her feet against the tiles beneath the shower door. Her toes splayed over her view of the display crystal. You need to get up now, or you’re just going to curl up here and die.
    “Too scared. I don’t want to,” she whispered.
    So sorry, little star. Father again. Up and all heart, and there’s my girl. You need to. Come on, now.
    She got up on one knee. Her muscles burned, her arms ached as she tried to lift herself. Her legs refused to give her anything more than the merest hope of rising.
    Come on. Authoritarian, then. The patriarch. Soon he would be angry, and then ... You’re wasting all the water.
    She stared at the floor, as if the firmament and actuality of its porcelain grid could lend her the strength to try what she had failed to do only a moment before.
    Get up. She moaned in pain. A whimper. Weak. Whether that was her own thought or her father’s, she never knew.
    She tried again. A cry. She was on both knees, then, and her hands were against the door and spreading the mist away. Faint tracers of grit and blood smeared out of her palms against the glass. The display at her knees blinked brighter, droplets trickling down the misted reflections of its face.
    However long she had been there, Cowering, weak , she had been filthy when she had crawled inside. Behind her, a single bloody fingerprint showed on the wall between two furtive jets of water. To her left, trails of urine and dirt and feces showed where her feet had been shoved against the farther wall. One of the shower jets was broken and a cone of filth betrayed the geometric shadow where its water should have been running down. Turning, gasping, Sophie found a green bar of soap behind her back, and began to cleanse herself, grimacing every time her shoulders were forced into motion.
    I may be weak, daddy. I may have always disappointed you after you lost Patrice. But I am Sophie. I’m alive.
    She tried to rise up off her knees, and failed again.
    Alive.
    She grieved for Tom, but the horrible guilt welling in her heart felt like its own hollow of all-consuming nothingness, a dead star of gravity where her sorrow and love should be. The enormity of what she should be feeling, the honor she should be giving that great and undying love, engulfed what little she could give and made a