Page 47 of Pyre

“Uh, and a side salad,” she said quickly, then hesitated. “Dressing on the side. No egg or cheese?”

The bartender looked up, one eyebrow raised in amusement. “Is that a question?”

Ruby winced. “Yes? No. Yes. Can you please put the dressing, egg, and cheese on the side?”

He snorted but nodded. “Mmk. Need a drink or anything?”

She shook her head, handed him a hundred-dollar bill, told him to keep the change, and headed back to the booth. Jonah was still sound asleep, his head resting on his arm, glasses slightly askew.

When the food finally arrived in a Styrofoam container a few minutes later, Ruby gently nudged Jonah awake. He blinked groggily, sitting up and rubbing his eyes as the bartender placed the box on the table.

“Is this for me?” he asked, a sleepy smile spreading across his face.

She nodded and stood. “Bar’s closing. I’ll meet you upstairs.”

She spun on her heel and made her way to the stairwell, expecting him to take the elevator. A few moments after her first step, the door opened and a second set of footsteps followed behind her.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“CAN A ZOMBIEbreathe underwater?” Jonah asked from the passenger seat of the truck, breaking the comfortable hum of the highway beneath them.

The drive to Denver was long—almost twelve hours from Mrs. Ulerik’s house. Kavya had chatted happily for the last half hour, thrilled to finally see her wife, while Jonah had complained almost as long about his house-sitter’s abysmal care of his prized bluebells and lavender and his parent’s request for him to join them for dinner. Ruby didn’t have anything to look forward to. No one waited for her back at the hotel. Maybe she would binge a new show. Or read a book.

Ruby, sprawled out in the backseat, didn’t bother to look up from her phone. “No, I cannot breathe underwater,” she replied, her tone dry, eyes flicking up just enough to catch Jonah’s reflection in the rearview mirror.

“No, not you,” Jonah huffed, turning halfway in his seat to shoot her a look. “You’re not—” he caught himself, seeing the way her eyebrows rose. “Okay, so maybe you are, but I’m talking about fictional ones. You know, from the movies.”

“Like the ones who die with a headshot?” Kavya asked, one hand drumming against the wheel as if she were working out the logic.

“Exactly. Theoretically, they need their brain to live. Which means they need oxygen for the brain. No oxygen, no brain. No brain, dead.”

“Unless the brain’s fueled by something else,” Kavya mused.

Jonah shot her a curious glance. “Like what?”

“Phlogiston.” Kavya’s lips curled at the corners.

“That’s not how that works,” Jonah said, rolling his eyes. “Again, we’re talking blockbuster zombies here, not real life.”

Ruby tuned out their banter, flicking through TikTok. She stopped on a particularly satisfying cleaning video, watching a grime-coated driveway transform under the stream of a power washer. Her finger hovered over the screen. “Do I need a power washer?” she muttered absently.

“You live in a hotel,” Jonah reminded her without missing a beat, still locked in his debate with Kavya.

“Back to my question,” he insisted, unwilling to let it drop. Ruby barely listened, sliding into another video where someone used a power washer to restore an old, mossy stone patio. She could almost feel the sharp spray of water herself, the way it cut through the grime.

Kavya, however, wasn’t done with Ruby yet. “Hey, Rube, what was the training like for a thermophile at the TCA? Was it different from everyone else’s?”

Ruby hesitated, eyes still on her phone, but her focus had shifted. The videos suddenly weren’t enough to drown out the memory of those early days. Slowly, she glanced up. Both Kavya and Jonah were waiting for her to answer.

“Well,” she slipped her phone into her lap, “at first, they did some physical experimentation. Then it was mainly observation. They wanted to see how I’d react to being around people, watching recruits, that sort of thing.” Ruby’s voice dropped a little, her tone turning distant. “They were trying to…humanize me. Make me remember what I was supposed to be protecting.”

Jonah turned in his seat with a scowl. “What does physical experimentation mean?”

“They wanted to see the limitations of the healing. What all I could grow back, if I needed to be conscious, that kind of thing.”

Ruby’s hand gestured vaguely, trying to grasp the right words. “I was… I was in a bad place when they found me. It took them almost a year to track me down, and during that time, I couldn’t come to terms with what had happened. There was so much grief, and this overwhelming…otherness.”

The quiet in the truck deepened, the weight of her words hanging between them. Ruby looked down at her hands. “The agency... they put me through every therapy you could think of. Physical, mental, emotional. And then there was combat, of course, but it was mostly about making me feel like a person again.”

---