Page 64 of Light the Fire

I wouldn’t have been able to do it without them.

I wasn’t sure how long I stood there, driving the boat and getting lost in my thoughts and the delicious salty air, but a stirring down below and soft but sure footsteps had my body stiffening, waiting to see who joined me.

Normally, I could tell who it was by the sound and vibrations of their gait, but whoever it was was tired, and that made their steps slower.

“Want some company, Angel?” Jorik murmured, popping his head up as he held onto the ladder.

I grinned down at him. “If it’s you, Big Man, absolutely.”

He had a blanket around his shoulders, and he came to stand behind me, looping his arms around my waist and drawing the blanket around both of us. It was a level of intimacy from him I hadn’t experienced yet, but I liked it.

I really liked it.

He knew Rix and I had … been together, so did that bolster his confidence with me as well? It seemed to. This time yesterday, he wouldn’t have wrapped his arms around me this way, despite the desire I didn’t know I harbored for him to do so.

The more they touched me, the more care and intimacy they showed me, the more I realized how badly I’d been deprived of such things my entire life. I craved the human contact that seemed to be borne of nothing but attraction and care. They didn’t want anything from me. They weren’ttakinganything from me. Instead, they were giving me something, and with each brush of their hand, that hollow, throbbing ache in my chest that I had just come to accept as normal began to fill up.

We were quiet for a moment, and slowly as we sailed in the night, my thoughts wandered.

“Your heart rate is going really wonky, Angel. Everything okay?” He turned me to face him, bracketing me in between his broad body and the helm. He kept one hand on the wheel and steered.

“Tell me about the … world,” I said. “I want to know everything.”

Jorik grinned down at me, busting out those deep twin dimples before he then leaned forward and pressed a kiss to my nose, causing flames to flicker in my belly. “What do you want to know?”

What didn’t I want to know? “Everything,” I said again.

He smiled again, his green eyes twinkling, but I could tell he was tired. “Well, the world is … a beautiful fucking disaster.”

I scrunched my brows, which only made him smile more, though his face and eyes still held a sadness that I could feel in my own heart. “We still haven’t recovered from the Stratera plague—obviously. There are pockets of civilization, but in a lot of ways, we’ve gone backward in time. There just aren’t enough peoplein the worldto serve the needs that the population became accustomed to. There is still a divide between the haves and the have-nots. Possibly bigger than there ever was before. Abandoned cars line every street, slowly rusting over and decomposing, because we just don’t have the manpower to remove them. The seas”—he glanced down at the inky water below—“have been raped near clean of life and sustenance. I hunted with a speargun for hours trying to find a fish or something but found nothing. I know there are fish down there—and in the rivers—but not many. Global warming has killed most marine life—if people’s greed and overconsumption didn’t already take care of that.”

My eyes were wide as I listened to him. “Surely, it’s notallbad?”

His lips flattened into a grim line. “It’s not. You can always find a silver lining if you squint and look hard enough. Rix is better at it than I am, for sure. But there is beauty. Nature is reclaiming its land. Cities are shrinking and trees and plants are pushing up through the concrete and taking back their rightful place. There are mountains and forests, deserts and jungles. All beautiful, all surviving, just like they did before people walked the earth, and just like they will after we’re gone.” There was a resigned sadness to his tone that had me leaning into his embrace more. I wanted to absorb his pain, take some of it into my own body and ease his hurt.

“And there are still animals—squirrels, wolves, rabbits, deer and birds,” I asked.

He nodded. “Yes, as we’ve seen in the woods. And they’ll outlive us all because they’ve established a hierarchy that works. They know their place in the food chain. There is peace in their ecosystem.”

“Andhow do we restore the balance in our own ecosystem? The ecosystem of humanity? Is that what Revolution Inferno is? An attempt at a rebalance?”

Jorik nodded and lifted a hand to cup my face, stroking his thumb over my cheek. His pinky finger rested against the pulse in my neck. “I think so. Those with money and power want to keep it for themselves, while enslaving and relying on the rest of us to do their bidding. We can’t survive another hundred years like this. Humans will die off completely. If we continue to rely entirely on Lambdas to keep our population alive, it will eventually either kill off the Lambda strain, or a mutation of self-preservation will occur and Lambdas will only be able to carry a certain strain or number of babies to term in their lifetime. But I believe thatyou, Ms. Triple-Threat Hellcat, the first of your kind, hold the power to bring the change, and the hope that the world so desperately needs.”

I blinked at him and relaxed again. “That’s a lot of pressure.”

His warm, smoky chuckle swept over me like a welcome summer breeze, and he pulled me tight against his chest. “You don’t have to do it alone, though.”

I rested my cheek against his chest and wrapped my arms tighter around him. “Tell me more about this beautifulfuckingdisaster of a world.”

He chuckled again. “Well … look around you.”

I tilted my head skyward, and my mouth opened. Green wisps and slashes painted the sky, shifting like mist on the wind. “What is that?”

“The Northern Lights … Aurora Borealis.”

“It’s …beautiful.”

“Mhmm. Mother Nature is a tough and beautiful bitch. She’s been treated like shit, beaten, bloodied, raped and scraped of nearly all she is, and yet through it all, her beauty never ceases. She’s prevailed before—just ask the dinosaurs—and she’ll do it again. She’s strong, a force to be reckoned with, and determined to survive no matter what. If anybody should be worried, it should be humans. Mother Nature will survive. But we won’t.”

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