Pyra is in a room. It looks to be the living room. There is a red couch and two red armchairs, crowded around a television. The couch and chairs were being scorched with red flames, and the plastic trays set up with food on them gave off a putrid plastic smell. She's being crowned by flames, yet the flames licked at her skin but did nothing. Then, two faces in the blaze appeared: a woman with blonde hair and blue eyes and a man with an oily beard and brown eyes. Their faces are clouded with fear as they are burned alive by the flames. They scream at her, telling her to stop it, but Pyra just watches, helpless. She was terrified, screaming, trying to calm the flames, but it did no use. They just rose higher and higher.
Pyra woke up in a cold sweat. She looked at her small bedroom in her foster parents' house. They were scared of her, even though they hadn't heard the whole story.
It was just a dream. It isn't happening right now, and it wasn't your fault, Pyra told herself, although she knew that was a lie. She tried to dismiss the flames and the scared faces of Emily and Jacob Helen, but as she got up and dressed for the day, flames still crowded her mind.
Pyra was 13 years old, although she could pass for a 15-year-old. She had neon blue eyes and was very tall for her age. She was extremely pale, and as if that wasn't weird enough, her long white hair didn't help her either. And she didn't mean extremely blonde hair; she meant silver hair—not like sparkly silver, but not white either. Just a not-sparkly silver. Which did not help her reputation at her school, Eclipse Academy, a school for troubled kids. She rolled her eyes just thinking about it. Even the name is foreboding, she thought as she got dressed. She intentionally put on a hoodie to hide her hair. Once, when she was little, she had tried to put on a black wig to hide her freaky hair. She was about nine when this happened. She was swinging on the playground swing when the wig fell off and everybody saw her hair. Then they started laughing at her bad attempt to hide it.
Her nickname in school was "Ghost Girl," since her pale skin and white hair made her look strangely like a ghost. She tried to hide her face when she got to school, so nobody could recognize her, but that didn't work in the slightest. All the other kids whispered about how "Ghost Girl set the fire" and how scary and freaky she was with her white hair, pale skin, and luminescent blue eyes. She ignored them and went to class.
As usual, it was boring lectures, and then the worst class: gym, where the only thing they did was run around in circles for an hour with no breaks. If you were too slow, you would get detention, and the teachers acted like the only reason why they were there was because they got paid. They didn't care a thing about the actual students. Still, Pyra made it through the day without any issues.
When she was walking back to her foster parents' house after school, she avoided the bus because that added more staring and whispers, and she had enough of that in school. As she neared a turn on the sidewalk, four men dressed in black outfits appeared out of the shadows. The first thing that Pyra thought of was ninjas. Then she thought that it might be some joke until she saw the cloth that one of them was holding. When he put it over her mouth, she instinctively held her breath as long as possible and pretended to be asleep.
One of the others asked the one holding the cloth to her mouth, "Is she asleep?"
"Yeah, I think so," the other one said.
"All right, grab her and take her to the hideout we set up near here."
When her eyes started to get fuzzy, they finally removed the cloth and she could breathe again. This is my chance, Pyra thought, and she quickly jumped up. The man holding her jumped back, surprised. She started running, but the other men were faster than her and grabbed her again, holding the cloth to her mouth. This time she wasn't able to hold her breath.