Feeling Very Strange - Site de Thomas - Free

the healer | 33
The ice girl had no expression. I’ll stay, she said, tightening her
ponytail, in case you need healing. I wanted to kick her. There was a
horrible ache growing in my stomach.
The fire girl took a deep breath. Then, kneeling down, she laid her
hand, leaping with flames, on the stone jail floor and slammed the knife
down right where the flesh of her wrist began. After sawing for a minute,
she let out a shout and the hand separated and she ran over to the
ice girl who put her healing bulb directly on the wound.
Tears streaked down the fire girl’s face and she shifted her weight
from foot to foot. The cut-off hand was hidden in a cloud of smoke on
the floor. The ice girl leaned in, her soother face intent, but something
strange was happening. The ice bulb wasn’t working. There was no ice
at all. The ice girl found herself with just a regular flesh hand, clasping
the sawed-off tuber of a wrist. Equalized and normal. The fire girl
looked down in horror.
Oh, pleaded the fire girl, never let go, please, don’t, please, but it was
too late. Her wrist had already been released to the air.
The fire girl’s arm blazed up to the elbow. It was a bigger blaze now,
a looser one, a less dexterous flame with no fingers to guide it. Oh no,
she cried, trying to shake it off, oh no. The ice girl was silent, holding
her hand as it reiced in her flesh palm, turning it slowly, numbing up.
I was twisting in the corner, the ache in my stomach fading, trying to
think of the right thing to say. But her body was now twice as burning
and twice as loud and twice as powerful and twice everything. I still
thought it was beautiful, but I was just an observer. The ice girl slipped
silently down the hallway and I only stayed for a few more minutes.
It was too hard to see. The fire girl started slamming her arm against
the brick wall. When I left, she was sitting down with her chopped-off
hand, burning it to pieces, one finger at a time.
They let her out a week later, but they made her strap her arm to a
metal bucket of ice. The ice girl even dripped a few drops into it, to
make it especially potent. The bucket would heat up on occasion but
her arm apparently quieted. I didn’t go to see her on the day she got
out; I stayed at home. I felt responsible and ashamed: it was me who’d
brought the ice girl to the jail, I’d fetched the knife, and worst, I was still