Panic and fear drowned in the heat. Jean-Pierre looked around. David stood beside him, mesmerized. Yulia covered her face with her hands. The doctor was all clenched up with tension and impending pain. “We can’t escape,” Jean-Pierre thought. He shifted his gaze to Debby. She smiled sadly at him and nodded. Jean-Pierre was surprised to see her lips moving, but he couldn’t make out the words. He lowered his head closer to her and heard her sing a lullaby:
“Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are…”
She was looking somewhere through the wall of fire. Debby had already been dying for a few hours, and now she was just trying to calm her friends down. She was thinking about her kids at school, about Sango, about Nika of Samothrace’s wings, and how amazing and unfathomable it all was.
The hum abruptly fell silent and the looming wall froze at the words, “He could not see which way to go, If you did not twinkle so.”
Only Van continued to whirl around the petrified earthlings and squeak an extended “Aaaaah!” He looked like a bee that had lost its orientation and was spinning in an imaginary circle. Debby finished singing and put her hand on the head of Yulia, who was crying beside her.
“It’s okay,” Debby said gently, “it’s going to be okay.”
Audrey sat in the room with her eyes closed. There was no emotion on her face, she was breathing deeply and trying to concentrate. The world grew smaller with each breath. First, the sounds of the city disappeared. Then the sounds of the neighbors upstairs faded away, then the feeling of the room. Audrey was left alone with her breathing, but she felt each breath hit a huge, dark rock of sadness. There was no way she could overcome it.
Suddenly, she felt goosebumps run through her body. A wave of warmth and tenderness enveloped her. Audrey felt the blackness turn first into brown, then into red and orange light. She smiled and grinned at the pleasant sensation. Tears came up and Audrey opened her eyes. The room was filled with bright sunlight. It seemed to be an unfamiliar room, someone else’s, from another planet. Audrey felt that she was there and that beauty too. Then she dismissed the thought and turned to the window. The sun had found a thaw between the thick clouds, but another cloud had already obscured it, swallowing the glowing orb.