The medicine cabinet mirror spiderwebbed and cracked, and Lucas picked the glass slag out of the bottom of his foot with a razor blade. At a cheap motel at five a.m., there's a sudden scrape of paper behind the yellowed shower curtain-the training list Raine slipped him last night flutters down, revealing a pencil-scrawled sketch on the back: a woman in a wedding dress engulfed in flames, signed R.H.
His pupils plummeted. Tucked into the eulogy read by the pastor at his mother's funeral was an odd aphorism: "The beloved of Ms. Rose Holt will be forever trapped in the March 2001 fire."
The roar of Raine's pickup truck cuts through the morning fog.
Today's training ground is an abandoned chemical plant, with seventeen baskets hanging between rusty reactors, each with blades welded to the rim. "If you can't catch the ball, you'll have to catch this." Rayne flings out a sack full of pins, and a foul-smelling liquid is oozing out of the corner of the bag.
When the first basketball came through the wire mesh, Lucas finally realized what hell was - the blades along the rim of the basket sliced through the skin of the ball, and the blown rubber chunks rained down in a shower of nails. He rolled to avoid the fatal blow, but the back of his neck was pressed into the palm of a branding iron.
"See that blue valve?" Raine's voice mingled with a mechanical rumble, "This is where your mom was back then, choosing Blaze over me."
Lucas was suddenly flung toward the temperature-control dashboard, the red numbers of 198 degrees searing his retinas. The three-hundred-pound iron door slammed shut, and Raine's sneer came from the ventilation ducts, "Now you've got ten minutes to prove that the Holt's aren't afraid of fire."
Hallucinations began to encroach as the heat licked at his ankles. The seventeen year old mother, dressed in a lab white robe, was burning training plans at the operating table, tongues of fire curling around her temples in the same manner as the sketch.
There was a sudden pounding sound from the ventilation ducts.
"Fire drill! Everyone evacuate!" --It was Elena! She was at the other end of the duct, frantically pounding on the iron wall, the hem of her school uniform caught in the specimen of daisies that he had snuck into her locker last week.
Raine's growl blew up at the same time as the fire alarm.
The moment Lucas crashed through the escape door, Marcus stood at the top of the fire escape holding his cell phone up. "How touching, trashy guy with a nerd." He hit the send button, and the video of Lucas crawling in a pool of blood last night instantly shot to the top of the Hot 100: #CinderBitch's (Cinderella Bitch) Basketball Dreams.
Elena's daisy specimen floated into the furnace and turned into a wisp of smoke.