Fire for the Insurance Money

3:17 a.m.

The slums were never quiet at night—gunshots in the dark, shouting matches at home, the occasional shrill wail of an ambulance.

But now a woman's bloodcurdling scream rose above it all, jolting everyone awake.

"Fire! Fire! Run!"

Russell was yanked out of his trance.

He opened his eyes. The sulfuric acid in the bathtub had gone cold, and his skin had taken on an unnatural pale pink hue, the mark of countless cycles of corrosion and repair.

He heard more than screams. Fire roared through the building, while tearing metal sounded like a hungry beast gnawing on bone.

Smoke soon slipped through the gaps around the window, acrid and sharp beneath the stench of burning plastic.

Hurried footsteps followed in the living room.

Laura was already awake. She had always been a light sleeper—or rather, the vigilance drilled into her meant she never truly slept.

Felicity stumbled out of the inner room, her voice trembling. "Lord Russell, there's a fire! Everything outside is burning!"

Russell stood up in the bathtub, water running down skin that the acid had left even firmer.

He grabbed a bath towel, wrapped it around his waist, and stepped barefoot onto the cold concrete floor. Then he opened the bathroom door.

A thin haze of smoke already filled the hallway.

He went to the window and drew back the curtain.

Outside, the world had become an orange-red inferno.

Across from their three-story old building, flames spewed from several windows on the first and second floors.

Fire licked up the outer walls, spreading along worn-out electrical wires and clotheslines. The even older wooden building next door had burned through its roof. Sparks shot skyward like fireworks, then rode the wind toward houses farther away.

The street was in chaos. Half-dressed residents poured out of every exit. Some carried children, some dragged suitcases, and some had fled wearing nothing but underwear.

Women screamed, children wailed, and men cursed, their voices mingling with the roar of the flames in a symphony of the apocalypse.

Felicity stood behind Russell, her face deathly pale.

Laura stood silently by the window, calmly surveying the blaze as if assessing a fight she was about to enter.

"Shouldn't we get out of here?" Felicity asked, fear tight in her voice.

Their room was on the first floor, and the fire had not reached it yet. But it was only a matter of time.

Russell did not answer. He closed his eyes.

His enhanced Psychic Telekinesis spread in every direction like invisible tendrils.

His senses passed through walls, smoke, and fire. He "saw" a family racing down the third-floor corridor, a man carrying a baby and a woman leading two children by the hand. He "saw" an elderly man at a first-floor corner, his leg pinned beneath a collapsed wall, calling weakly for help.

Then he saw where the fire had started.

It was not a short circuit, a gas leak, or a stove someone had forgotten to turn off.

In the storage room at the back of the neighboring building's first floor, he "saw" traces on the wall where some liquid had burned. Several old bicycles lay scattered across the floor, reduced to springs and metal frames. And there was... what remained of a gasoline can, almost entirely consumed by the flames.

This was no accident.

He opened his eyes. "Someone set it deliberately," he said, his voice calm.

"What?" Felicity froze.

"Someone started this fire on purpose," Russell repeated. There was no anger in his voice, only cold certainty.

He remembered what the elderly Chinese woman had said the night before: "That old man Happy upstairs? You'll be lucky to get away today without paying him a million or so."

Amid the noise outside, he heard that Happy was the landlord in this area.

He owned this building, along with the handful of other buildings in the slums that were still habitable.

If one burned down, the insurance payout would be enough for an old man to live out the rest of his life in comfort.

As for tenants like them—people without papers, insurance, or any standing in society—whether they lived or died had never figured into the calculation.

This was America's "fire line": when a building was worth more to insure than the lives of the people inside it, a fire would break out.

Insurance companies called it "risk assessment." The police called it "under investigation." Landlords called it "business."

And in the slums, that line was drawn especially low.

"What do we do?" Felicity's voice shook.

Russell did not answer.

He turned into the bedroom and pulled three heavy, dirty garments from the wardrobe. He tossed two to Felicity and Laura. "Put these on. Soak them and cover your mouths and noses."

Then he went into the bathroom and carried out the remaining buckets of clean water.

"What about you, Lord Russell?" Felicity asked.

"I don't need one."

He no longer did.

Level Three Superhuman Healing did more than close wounds. The cilia in his lungs filtered smoke and dust more efficiently, and the lining of his respiratory tract repaired itself far faster than smoke could damage it.

The thick smoke that could kill an ordinary person would be little more than an unpleasant irritant to him.

Laura had already pulled on the garment. She looked up at Russell, without a trace of fear in her eyes. Her expression held only a question, calm to the point of coldness.

"Are we killing someone?"

Russell looked at her.

The girl was thirteen or fourteen, yet she asked "Are we killing someone?" as casually as she might ask whether they were going out.

"First, we get out," he said.

By the time they rushed out of the room, the smoke in the hallway was so thick they could barely see through it.

The ceiling fire alarm had long since burned out. Only a smoke detector in one of the rooms kept shrieking in vain, its cries growing weaker.

Russell led the way. His Psychic Telekinesis formed an invisible shield, forcing a passage through the smoke billowing toward them.

[Psychic Telekinesis EXP +1]

[Psychic Telekinesis EXP +1]

Laura and Felicity followed close behind him, holding their soaked clothes over their mouths and noses as they hurried along.

At the corner of the first-floor corridor, the elderly man pinned under the wall was still calling weakly for help.

Russell seized a burning timber with one hand. His Telekinesis took hold at once, lifting the beam as though invisible hands supported it and easing it aside.

The old man had lost consciousness. Half a pant leg had burned away, exposing a large patch of charred skin on his calf.

"Laura," Russell called without looking back.

Laura stepped forward at once and helped Felicity drag the old man out of the wreckage.

Her slight frame held strength utterly out of proportion to her size.

"Take him outside," Russell said calmly.

"What about you?" Felicity asked.

Russell did not answer. His Telekinesis compressed the air around him into a dense barrier that kept the heat and flames at bay.

He went through the second floor, then the third, passing rooms already burned to hollow shells. His senses swept the entire building like radar, searching for people still alive, people trapped, people who had fallen.

He used Telekinesis to force open a jammed door at the far end of the third floor, freeing two young people trapped on a balcony. At the second-floor stairwell, he shifted a fallen beam so a family of four could reach the fire escape.

He "saw" the charred figure in the first-floor lobby.

[Gratitude +1]

[Gratitude +1]

Then his Psychic Telekinesis, which could reach across two kilometers, locked onto someone acting furtively.

In a dark alley across the street stood a man in a dark jacket, holding an extinguished cigarette as he watched the building burn.

There was no fear on his face, no sympathy, not even the excitement of a spectator.

Only indifference.

He was calculating how quickly the fire would spread, how long the building would burn, what proportion of the tenants would escape, and what questions the insurance investigators would ask.

Russell had seen that expression before.

In that underground facility, the people in white coats had worn it as they looked at the Mutants on the operating tables.

"Laura." Russell sent his voice through his Telekinesis straight to Laura, who was settling the old man by the first-floor exterior wall. It sounded as clear as if he were speaking beside her ear. "The man in the dark jacket in the alley across the street. Don't let him get away."

Downstairs, Laura raised her head.

Her gaze passed through the flames and smoke and settled on the man still smoking in the dark alley.

Her eyes were those of a wolf cub that had found its prey.

The man seemed to sense something.

He looked up and met a pair of cold eyes staring at him through the firelight—eyes no ordinary child could have.

Instinct told him to drop his cigarette and run.

Laura moved.

She was far faster than any thirteen-year-old should have been. She crossed the street in a few strides, vaulted an abandoned car with one hand braced against it, and swept low like a hunting falcon. In the blink of an eye, she blocked the alley entrance.

The man stopped short, his calculating expression giving way to panic. "You—you're—"

Laura said nothing. Her right hand hung at her side. Three gleaming alloy claws slid slowly from between her knuckles, glinting cold silver in the firelight.

The moment the man saw her hand, all color drained from his face. "A Mutant... You're a Mutant..."

He turned to run deeper into the alley, only to find there was nowhere left to go.

A young man stood by the wall behind him. He seemed to have known exactly where the man would run and had been waiting there all along.

Russell regarded him, his voice as level as a weather report. "You burned these buildings."

It was a statement, not a question.

The man's lips twitched. He denied it on instinct. "N-no... It wasn't me... I don't know what you're talking about..."

"In the storage room on the third floor, by the east wall." Russell's voice did not waver. "You poured out at least ten gallons of gasoline and lit it from the corner so the fire would spread in two directions at once.

"You knew most people would be asleep at this hour. By the time they noticed the fire, it would be too late to stop it."

The man's expression slowly crumbled.

He dropped to his knees with a thud, his voice shaking. "It wasn't me... Happy—Happy told me to do it! He's the landlord! He said if I burned the building, he'd give me thirty percent of the insurance money. I was just... I was just doing a job for the money... I didn't know anyone would die... I really didn't..."

"You didn't know anyone would die?" Russell repeated, as though he had heard a funny joke.

He glanced at the building still burning behind him.

"When you lit the fire," Russell said softly, almost to himself, "did you count how many people lived in that building?"

The man opened his mouth but made no sound.

"Thirty-seven," Russell answered for him. "The agent who showed me here told me the day I moved in. Thirty-seven people, crammed into these hundred-year-old wrecks. One can of gasoline and one fire, and you could turn thirty-seven lives into cash in your pocket."

He looked down at the kneeling man, his eyes empty of emotion.

"How much do you think your life is worth?"

The man's pupils contracted. His lips trembled as he tried to speak, but all that came out was a rasping breath.

He had wet himself. Urine mixed with the dust on the ground, spreading into a dark stain beneath him.

Laura stood at the mouth of the alley, her claws gleaming coldly in the firelight.

She did not move. She only watched Russell, waiting for his next instruction.

Russell was silent for a moment.

"Laura," he finally said.

Laura tensed, raising her claws slightly.

"You can't kill him," Russell said.

Laura paused and looked up at him in confusion.

Russell crouched to face the man slumped on the ground. "Do you know how many people in that building have no papers? Do you know why they'd rather live in a place like this than go to a government shelter?"

The man shook his head blankly.

"Because they're afraid," Russell said. "Afraid of being registered, afraid of being entered into the system, afraid that one day someone will knock on their door and say, 'You're here illegally. Come with us.' So you burned down their homes, and they don't even dare call the police.

"No papers means no rights. No rights means they can die and no one will care."

He stood and took two steps back, looking down at the man.

"But you're different. You have papers, a name, an address, an employer. You burned these buildings, so the police will open a case, the insurance company will investigate, and a judge will sentence you. Your face will appear on wanted posters, and your name will become a case number.

"From then on, wherever you go, that face will follow you."

He paused, his voice as soft as a sigh. "So leaving you alive seems more interesting than killing you."

The man sat limp on the ground, shaking uncontrollably.

[Fear +1]

"But I'm sorry. You saw something you weren't supposed to see, so I'll have to send you to your next life."

The man, who had thought his life had been spared, stared blankly. Then his body burst apart like an overinflated ball.

In the distance, police sirens rang across a neighborhood justice had never favored.

The sound of fire engines finally came from afar, but everyone knew that by the time they arrived, these buildings would be all but gone.

When Russell returned to the still-smoking building, Felicity was crouched beside a fire hydrant, comforting several children who had escaped the flames.

Soot covered her face, and her eyes were red, but her voice was gentle. "It's okay now. It's okay... The firefighters are here..."