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  “In what world is that a breaststroke, Donald?”

  The submerged form of a girl who had been trailing behind everyone else touched base against the wall of the pool, pulling her head out of the beryl water and shaking it back and forth. A trickle of clear liquid dribbled out of her ebony goggles as she pulled them up to her head. She glanced left and right again, blinking a little more water out of her eyes, before settling her gaze on a woman in a cardinal red jersey by the side of the pool.

  “Was that okay?” she beamed, a hint of tentative anxiety deflating her smile just slightly.

  “I said,” the woman frowned, “that’s not a breaststroke.”

  The girl gave a pensive frown, an audible ellipsis passing before she spoke. “Wasn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “I thought it was.”

  “No. What were you doing with your legs?”

  The girl, suddenly conscious that the rest of the class was staring at her, looked down at herself, the cogs slowly whirring in her head. “I was… kicking them…?”

  The woman folded her arms, patience visibly draining away. “And what’s wrong with that?”

  “…I don’t know.”

  At first, her fellow students had found it funny. At the very least, there was grounds to mock and titter quietly amongst themselves as students did – behold this one, for she cannot do as we do, so youth was often prone – but as she showed no signs of improving as the club neared the end of its two hours, the joke had quickly grown dull, then outright irritating. If anything, it was a miracle that the patience of her teacher had held out this long, but it too was clearly thinning at best.

  “You were flutter kicking,” the jerseyed woman pointed out.

  The girl blinked. “Y-yeah…?”

  “Why?”

  “Because… it… worked better?”

  “Oh, did it?”

  The sarcasm was tangible, but the girl nodded, a little defensiveness creeping into her tone. “It did, a bit. I didn’t drag behind as much this time.”

  “You still finished last.”

  “But it wasn’t as last.”

  “Doesn’t matter anyway. Flutter kicking in a breaststroke is illegal.”

  The girl’s face blanched a shade. “Wait, what? Why?”

  “You frog kick. You are allowed one dolphin kick at the very start before you frog kick. That’s it. You would be disqualified with that mess you were doing. You touched with one hand, didn’t you?”

  The girl looked down at her other hand, eyes widening in shock, quickly pressing it against the wall.

  The woman gave a short sigh. “Alright, everyone. Butterfly kick. Not you, Melanie,” she said, gaze catching the girl as she poised herself. “I want you up over here.”

  The girl reluctantly pulled herself out of the pool, sitting herself on the edge. Shame gathered stickily in her throat as she stared at her knees, waiting to be scolded.

  “Over here,” the woman repeated.

  The girl pulled herself to her wet feet, slapping them against the hard floor. It stung a little to walk.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” said the woman, “but why are you here?”

  The girl was confused. “You told me to come over.”

  “This club, I mean. Swimming,” she sighed. “You obviously aren’t having fun, and you haven’t made a whole lot of progress these past two months.”

  The girl looked down at her feet and shuffled in place. Her face had fallen, and her shoulders hunched with the shrivelled tensions of guilt.

  “I thought maybe I’d have a chance at getting a scholarship,” she mumbled. “You know… If I learned to keep up with everyone.”

  The woman’s expression shifted, scrutinizing her. “That’s not a bad goal to have. I can’t fault you for it, but…” she said carefully. “Well, why swimming?”

  “I’m good at it.” The words rang hollow. As much as the girl believed them to be true, she knew that her teacher was unconvinced. More than that, her teacher had every authority with which to damn her. The girl knew that this woman knew infinitely more about swimming than she did. The girl’s metric of her skill was not an objective measurement. “Not compared to other people,” she elaborated. “Compared to other things.”

  “What’s your GPA?” the woman asked.

  The girl fell silent.

  “You can tell me,” she pressed. “I’m not gonna be mad or anything.”

  “It’s 0.21.”

  The woman was visibly taken aback by the number. “Well, that’s…”

  “Even worse than you were expecting, right?” sighed the girl.

  “Well… Yes, but that doesn’t doom you exactly,” she said. “Look, sometimes our skills aren’t what common sense would tell us. Sometimes you can do things that people wouldn’t expect from you. You might not be good in school, but there are plenty of other things out there that school doesn’t reflect on. My dad always said that some people are like glass. Everyone treats it like a solid, but it’s actually a really thick liquid that can do a solid’s job better than any real solid like metal ever could.”

  “That’s not actually true,” the girl said quietly.

  “What isn’t?”

  “Glass is a solid. People say it’s a liquid but it’s not.”

  “It is. It just flows very slowly.”

  “It doesn’t flow.”

  The woman sighed. “I’m not focusing on glass right now. But that just proves my point. Most people don’t know that, and you do. I think your skills are probably like that.”

  “Unhelpful?”

  “Unusual,” she corrected. “Listen, you’re not feeling it at the moment, so I’m gonna let you go early today. Have a think, okay? I’m not gonna stop you from swimming, but make sure it’s what you really want to do.”

  The girl could only swallow enough of her shame to give a shallow nod.

  “Oh hey, it’s you. You’re out early.”

  The chipper voice of another girl pronounced clearly her undignified entrance into the corridor from the changing room, bag hoisted over her shoulder.

  “Hi, Sarah,” Melanie acknowledged halfheartedly.

  Sarah was still in her netball uniform, nursing her wrist with an ice pack. “You seem fine. Let me guess. Millington got mad?”

  “Not mad,” Melanie muttered. “Just disappointed.”

  “Oh-ho-hoooh, shit,” Sarah chuckled as she followed her footsteps. “That bad? What did you do, drown?”

  “I wish,” she sighed.

  “It’s like one in the afternoon. You’ve got a whole day left to do whatever you want. Cheer up.”

  Melanie gave an incredibly mediocre nod. “Maybe I’ll get something to eat.”

  “You didn’t have lunch?”

  “I feel sick if I swim after I eat.” She couldn’t deny that she was still hungrier for it. She wondered if it could have been a contributing factor to her ineptitude.

  “That’s pretty wimpy,” Sarah said. “Sure, see if you can’t drop by a 7-Eleven or something on the way home, I guess.”

  “That’s expensive.”

  “What’s expensive?” she practically spluttered.

  Melanie did not respond. Her attention had been caught by something else across the hall: a familiar boy being tugged at by a tiny little girl.

  It would have been impossible for her not to recognise Matt at this point. He was a year ahead of her. He was tall, handsome, a top achiever both academically and athletically. Calling him a modern prince wouldn’t have been much in the way of exaggeration, especially with his obviously wealthy family. To top it off, he had moved to New York from somewhere in England just two months ago. She wished she could have said that she was even playing against the crowd here, but he was just as ridiculously popular as anyone would have expected just by looking at him. She honestly wanted to kick herself for falling squarely into the biggest cliché imaginable.

  “Are you serious right now?” Sarah’s voice came like a slap across the face, only driving home the absurdity of Melanie’s thoughts with a sharp stinging in her brain.

  On some level, she was aware of it – the fairytale in her head was just another dream, a product of her age. She wouldn’t be yearning after the most popular guy in school forever, just like she couldn’t continue to get bad grades forever. And she certainly wouldn’t be able to dream forever of a miracle that would never come either.

  “I-imagine that!” she forced a sheepish laugh.

  No, there was a far more objective voice in her head politely and regularly informing her that she wasn’t special. Talentless, unfit, a doormat, a wallflower, mediocre with no redeeming qualities. She would have been the type to quietly read books in her own corner of the library if reading didn’t give her a headache. There was nothing to set her apart, no alternate route to take. She had looked for years for some special skill she could make use of, and nothing came. She wasn’t ‘different’, somehow unlike her peers. She was the same as everyone else, just worse. But she had one small stroke of good fortune in the midst of this. Her locker was just two doors down from his.

She opened it up, pretending to rifle through it just below the unintelligible noises of the small child, and only just realized that Sarah wasn’t slowing down.

  “See you Monday, Sarah,” she said hastily.

  “Yeah,” came the reply, “see you around, uh… you.”

  She wasn’t precisely sure what the right expression was for that, so she shuffled through a couple before settling on a light smile, but Sarah didn’t look back to see it, instead just rattling another door open to take a bag out of. She sighed slightly and looked back into her locker.

  “Melanie, right?”

  She paused. That wasn’t Sarah at all. It was too deep, and the accent was wrong. The answer was obvious, but it had scrambled her thoughts enough that she immediately doubted her own ears, came to the conclusion that it was a ghost, realized she didn’t believe in ghosts, and peeked slightly out from behind the door only to find dark brown eyes looking back at her.

  “I’m not going to bite,” Matt cocked an eyebrow.

  She blinked away the butterflies in her stomach. “I’m just surprised you know.”

  “It’s on the door,” he replied, tapping the words ‘Blake, Mathias’ on the front of his own locker.

  Her face tingled with needles of humiliation. “I always thought Matt was short for Matthew,” she fumbled, as though that were a defense.

  “Most people do,” he said. “Sorry, I hate to bother you, but can you keep an eye on my little sister for a minute?”

Melanie looked down to find another pair of eyes, these ones green and glowering.

  “Uh. Sure.”

  “Thanks. I’m just going to the bathroom, so I’ll be right back,” he promised, already putting one foot in front of the other. “Don’t be a nuisance.”

  Melanie almost opened her mouth to respond, but was cut short by the little girl shooting a raspberry at her brother as he made his way out of sight.

  “Don’t be slow then!” the child squeaked loudly in response.

  “I’m sure he’ll be alright,” Melanie promised lightly.

  The little girl’s gaze shot back to her. “Mmph.”

  Her demeanor immediately morphed into that of concrete. Melanie couldn’t help but feel that if a glass bottle fell from the ceiling onto this kid’s head right this instant it would shatter instantly into pieces and leave her none the wiser.

  “W-what’s your name?” she asked, trying to shake off the child’s needlessly intimidating aura.

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  “Blaze,” she replied.

  “Blaze Blake?” Melanie tilted her head slightly. “That’s a pretty wild name for a kid.”

  “No,” the kid shot back. “Blaze Thompson.”

  That didn’t seem right. “Aren’t you siblings?”

  “He’s my half-brother,” she said. “My mum and dad aren’t married yet. He’s Blake. I’m Thompson.”

  Melanie nodded slightly. “It sounds like your family situation is complicated.”

  “Everyone at school thinks so too,” replied Blaze, and gave the kind of slightly-too-hasty shrug that told Melanie in too few words that she didn’t want to talk about it.

  “It seems like you get along with Matt though,” she said.

  A shrug again, gentler this time. “He’s okay when he doesn’t suck.”

  “All siblings fight,” Melanie said. “I think.”

  In truth, she herself was an only child. She thought a lot when she was younger about having a brother or sister, but everyone she had asked told her it was hit-and-miss for the most part.

  “We’re probably bad about it. Dad says we both need anger management,” Blaze grumbled.

  Melanie felt like she had just been flipped on her head. Matt needed anger management? She had never heard him say an unkind word to anyone, nor had she ever so much sensed a lick of frustration from him. But then again, she had never seen him fail either. She wondered for a brief instant what he would have been like in her own position, but nothing came to mind. It seemed an alien concept. She and he were in entirely different dimensions to one another – he simply lived at the peak she was trying to reach, so the idea that his own footing could be somehow shaky gave her a complicated cocktail of feelings. She intellectually understood that nobody was perfect, but having that idea so readily enforced before her clashed with her intuition so heavily that her instinct was not to believe it at all, regardless of who was telling her.

  “That’s great! You two have something in common then!” was the only thing Melanie could think to say.

  The part of her that hadn’t selected those words immediately swarmed her like a pack of rabid hounds well before Blaze had the chance to pull a baffled expression.

  “Are you kidding me?” cried an exasperated voice.

  Melanie flinched. She thought Sarah had left, but she was still staring back at the pair with her locker door open for whatever reason.

  “I can’t believe you’re this weird even with little kids,” she rolled her eyes.

  She moved to open her mouth, but Melanie didn’t even get a word out before Blaze spun on her heel and declared, voice full of venom, “I didn’t ask you anything.”

  Sarah winced, looking back into her locker, mumbling to herself. “Alright, squirt, chill.”

  “Blaze, you need to stop snapping at people.” Matt had re-emerged, placing a hand briefly on the girl’s head as he looked back to Melanie. “Thanks.”

  “No problem,” she said, just slightly quieter than she had intended, leaving the sound she hadn’t made still lingering in her head. She briefly considered saying it again at the proper volume, but the two were already turning to go.

  “See you around, Mel,” he waved.

  Mel. The nickname rang her like a bell.

  “Y-yeah,” she nodded.

  Something flashed.

  The next instant ripped her out of the world.

  Nothing registered at first. Her mind reeled, not completely comprehending what she was experiencing. But piece by piece, it came together. The first thing to recover was her sense of sight. Her sight had not been impeded, but her sense had. Everything fluttered as though she had been staring into a sun the size of the universe. Her ears were ringing. Her balance was gone. She was laying against the lockers, a hard dent splitting them down the middle. It took a moment to realize that it was marking where she had hit them. Next came the pain. It was as though the air itself was scalding her flesh. She couldn’t scream.

  The gray sky had split. No, more than that, the building had been split to see the severed heavens. There was no ceiling. The walls were shattered, tipped with embers. The entire corridor had been cleaved by that light. It was as though a gigantic flaming sword had slashed the whole world wide open.

  Smoke and haze covered her vision. Flames had scattered, glowing in unnatural yellows and blues and greens and whites. The shattered architecture was glowing where it had started to melt. She could see the skyline, fractured and fiery. Flashing lights ripped through the air near and far. Her leg was numb. Burning glass splinters were adorning her skin. She couldn’t scream. Her brain was paralysed in a loop of confusion. There was nothing to think about, because there was nowhere to start from. Cause and effect had become meaningless in that moment that the world had exploded.

  Melanie’s eyes flicked back and forth. Three more figures strewn wildly about like dolls in a child’s bedroom. Matt, Blaze, Sarah. Movement from all three.

  Nobody was dead. She breathed a short sigh of relief. Her hearing was starting to recover, and through the roaring of the colors dancing across the sky, she vaguely picked up on Blaze howling – an animal sound that was so painfully out of place that it felt as though her own heart was being wrung.

  “I’m here!” she heard Matt cry. “You’re going to be fine!”

Melanie tried to push herself up. A crunch bit into her palm, but her arm was shaking too much to balance on it at first. Once, twice, deep breath. Dust rushed into her lungs. She choked it out again. Her head was pulsing. Something was sticky. She hauled herself up. Something spun. Blood rushed through her brain as though she had flipped upside down.

  Her sense of time was beginning to recover. She looked around, left and right, up and down. The air was buzzing with invisible activity. A vaguely sweet scent was blowing by – ozone, she recognised from her physics class. Smoke, fire, as far as the eye could see, in countless colours in which fire should not have burned. The ground was a smouldering dark grey. It was impossible to tell where the roads and sidewalks had been this morning. Slag was all that remained.

  In an instant, the buildings that she passed every day, the school she attended, the streets she walked on, the backdrop of her life – everything had been reduced to cinder in an instant. Melanie had never really considered what the apocalypse would look like, but this was undoubtedly it. It was as though she had been transported somewhere else, but she knew that her instincts betrayed her. She had not moved.

  “Is everyone alright?” she spluttered weakly.

  No response.

  Blaze’s voice had died down into sobs now. That was at least an improvement. Melanie tried to stand, but her right leg refused to budge. No pain, no feeling whatsoever, and no movement. It was as though it was no longer connected to her, like some invisible link had been cut.

  She didn’t have time to consider it. If her leg wasn’t going to help, then fine. She had worked around worse. With the balls of her palms, she reached up and pushed down on the dents of the lockers she had hit on the way down, righting herself as she slowly got to her feet.

  Deep breath. She choked again.

  Stop doing that.

  The haze was beginning to sting her eyes, but she just kept blinking. Her mind raced, trying to grasp at some invisible ‘next step’, but as she stumbled over what exactly was happening—

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  The unmistakable rhythm of slow, measured footfalls cut through the rubble. They were practically silent compared to the screaming lights.

  No.

  They should have been silent.

  There was no way that she could have possibly heard them. In a quiet corridor, absolutely. But even in a busy street, that sound should have been drowned out completely. But the earth was quivering, and the sound of destruction was still reaching her loud and clear. To hear those footsteps so clearly violated all rationality. For a single moment, Melanie wondered if she had broken.

  Strolling leisurely through the wreckage of her reality was a young man, barely more than a boy. There was not a single dark hair out of place on his head, not a single speck of dust on his black dress shirt. His calm gaze passed over her very briefly, and in that instant, her stomach felt like it had opened up. It was as though she was being judged by the void. His eyes were of cold nothingness. They did not linger on her in the least.

  It was just that one brief instant that she needed to reach her conclusion. Billions of years of evolution had culminated in one simple instinct, a feeling to describe something that she could not have possibly known.

  Standing here was a danger unknown to her.

  This was not a predatory animal. This was not a natural disaster. This was gravity.

  It was not an event that threatened her, merely a fact. If she took one step forward off this edge, she would fall. That was nothing less than absolute.

  Melanie didn’t understand what she felt in that moment. All she understood was what it was telling her.

  She was simply going to die.

  “Blaze,” she heard Matt again. “Run.”

  “I wouldn’t,” warned the stranger. “While I could stop you from killing yourselves… Well, I’m running late.”

  In the corner of her eye, Melanie spotted the shape of Sarah stiffen and turn. The girl ran, stumbling a little on the debris, panting heavily.

  The stranger said nothing, simply watching with obvious bemusement on his face.

  Melanie realized it the moment before it happened. Sarah crossed an imaginary border. One heartbeat leapt up into her throat. Another flash. There was no scream, no body. The ground buckled and trembled under the white light, and an instant later, there was nothing.

  Matt roared. He kicked off the ground. His fist swung at the unfamiliar figure like a wild animal—

  “No.”

  —and that was the answer.

  The stranger lazily flicked his wrist to one side, and Matt bounced uselessly off the remnants of the wall with a crack.

  His gaze shifted to Melanie. Everything froze.

  She had heard of the body becoming paralysed with fear, but even her thoughts had scattered.

  She was going to die. She knew it. She was going to be killed meaninglessly, effortlessly. There was nothing she could do to change that. Anything that crossed her mind was crushed instantly under that knowledge.

  “Worthless,” he assessed, and broke his stare.

  A tinge of relief filled her body, thinner but more potent than she had ever felt. It was true. She was worthless. She already knew that. Whoever this was, this living gravity, he had discerned that she was worthless beyond the point of even harming. She completely understood it, and was grateful for it for the very first time in her life. Her birth was so meaningless that her death would serve no function.

  “That leaves you.”

  That remark was not addressed to her. All her relief, all her gratitude, vanished in an instant. She followed his gaze, the direction of those terrible words, down to their only possible victim. The shape of a little girl was crouched over Matt, glaring defiantly up at the stranger.

  “Stop… hurting him…” she hissed. “Stop hurting my brother!”

  “I already have,” he said. “Don’t worry. He failed as well. You, though…”

  Blaze gritted her teeth. “I’m not scared of you!”

  The stranger’s thin lips shifted, just slightly, into a smile. “You pass.”

  He raised a hand, and in his grasp was a knife like a golden mirror.

  Melanie could think again. She had no choice but to think.

  I have to reach them.

  She didn’t understand what was happening. She didn’t know the first thing about this, but she knew one thing with absolute certainty. She could not let him hurt her.

  Blaze’s stare didn’t waver. “Are you going to kill me now?”

  “Wouldn’t that be a waste,” he replied, and took a step toward her.

  Melanie hobbled forward. He raised the blade up. She was never going to make it in time to stop him. In a race between his arm and her body, his arm was going to come first no matter what.

  But…!

  The knife fell, and met flesh.

  Silence.

  “…Huh.”

  The stranger was the first to react. A sound of mild but genuine surprise escaped his lips.

  He had stabbed the wrong person.

  Melanie was there, stretching her arms out around Blaze, a human shield. The blade was embedded in her back, directly between two segments of her spine.

  She felt it, of course. Its icy fang had no mercy for her. But she had managed to throw herself in front of it. Kicking off the ground with her good leg, she had cleared the distance just in time. In the race against him, she was last – but she wasn’t that last.

  That weak pride was extinguished instantly.

  Gold.

  Everything was gold. Her nerves, her eyes, the world, herself. Everything was searing gold.

  She couldn’t scream.

  “————————!”

  Her mouth released a silent, strangled noise that no human should have made. Her lungs trembled. It wasn't that she wasn't releasing enough air. She was trying to release too much. It felt like she was shoving a balloon into a keyhole. But as her breath failed her, the balloon deflated just enough to burst.

  Only then did she finally cry out.

  Gold. Gold. Gold. Gold. Gold. Gold. Gold. An explosion of agony blinded her. Her eyes were so wide it felt as though they were to burst from her skull. She clawed at her skin, tearing at herself like a raging demon. Her heart was racing faster than a machine gun. Her thoughts were shattered from their very foundation. Every single molecule in her body felt as though it was trying to rip itself from her to escape this living hell. She couldn’t see or hear anything. Everything around her was drowning in gold.

  Her balance was thrown off. Her feet fell from under her. The agony crackled and sputtered ever so slightly. The stranger had pushed her over. She tried to raise her arm.

  Gold.

  It spasmed wildly, like a bolt of lightning had possessed it. Her muscles felt as though they were going to explode.

  “It’s fine,” said the stranger, looking back to Blaze. Another knife was in his hand, sky blue. “This is why you always bring spares.”

  “Don’t touch her!” cried Matt.

  The stranger didn’t even acknowledge him. He grabbed Blaze’s wrist, and drove the knife into her shoulder. In that same instant, it vanished.

  Blaze trembled. She didn’t make a sound. No, she was trying to. Her mouth was open, but nothing came out. Her limbs shook, her body jittered erratically, and then she was on the ground beside Melanie. She heard Matt’s scream, but her eyes were on his sister. Her stare was alive, a spark of fear gripping it as she shook and trembled on the ground.

  Help me, it begged.

  The pain was dying down. Everything was dying down. All of it, from her sense of sight to her hearing. The world was going dark and silent, and as she stared back at Blaze, the only thing she could do was whisper. “You’re going to be okay.”

  She didn’t have the slightest idea as to whether that was true.

  “Well then,” she heard the stranger’s voice. “Mathias Blake, was it? Since you wanted to be a hero so badly…”

  That was the last thing she heard before she fell into blackness.

  Ah.

  She really was going to die.

  Well, she knew that from the beginning.

  In the end, she couldn’t protect the person in front of her like she had intended.

  That was really the hallmark of a worthless life though.

  It wasn’t a surprise.

  Do you want to die?

  Of course not.

  She was more than used to her own worthlessness.

  When it came to ‘living’, she was already behind everyone else.

  That was why, even now, she was going to struggle in the same way that she always had.

  She didn’t expect to succeed, but that had never stopped her from floundering uselessly like this before.

  She had at least that much pride as a worthless human being.

  Of course she was going to have trouble trying to survive.

  What else was new?

  Because even though she was going to fail anyway…

  If she failed because she had given up trying at all, then she wouldn’t really have been ‘alive’ to begin with, would she?

  I see.

  Melanie couldn’t feel her body. She couldn’t see anything. She couldn’t hear anything.

  But still, in spite of all of that, she struggled to keep feeling the golden agony enveloping her. One thing was obvious: if the pain left her, then she would fade away too.

  We’re going to get along, I think.