Agatha is fourteen.

She is a pretty girl. Her parents find everything special about her. They even brag to their friends how she won't eat anything with coconut and they indulge her. In other respects though... they're very, very strict. No sleep-overs when she was a little girl, no overnight trips, no social media. Certainly no parties with friends, because her mom has a kidnapping phobia.

However, James and Arletta Leung go abroad often to supervise the projects. At those times, Agatha stays in her uncle and aunt's house. She's an angel next to their boys. The adults barely pay attention to her, a super-refreshing change of pace.

There is this underground rave party. Literally all Agatha's girlfriends think it's an absolute must to go. She's a total nervous wreck over it. Not because of the cautionary tales with the underage girls who fall prey to drug dealers and predatory men. That's just eye-roll material... She's heartbroken because the party comes two days too late for her. With her aunt in charge of her, Agatha knows, it would have been super-easy to sneak out. But it's two days after her parents' flight. She's still going to make it, but...

'Please,' she prays with the fervent, blind stubbornness, 'please let them be delayed.'

It's not like she doesn't love her folks. It's just... they're going to be pissed if they catch her. Disappointed. And she'd be like—

***

By this point in her story, Ablaze hiccups so much, she has to stop. Her whitened fingers clutch together. Her eyes track the dizzying streams of water outside the cave. Down and down they fall, yet she stands still.

To hell with propriety! Harris wraps an arm around her. She's warm, alive, shivering. He holds her even tighter, until she's pressed to him and her every breath goes through him too. When her shoulder blades shake it's like an earthquake.

"Please don't cry." The random onlookers can think he's to blame for her tears all they want. Her grief cuts into him, constricts his chest. "Please don't cry."

There must be something he can do to fix—

To fix what? The past? There're no time-machines on offer, even in Singapore, the city where the future seems to come early.

He clears his throat. "Do you want to go to my hotel? This place is awful... too many people. Too much noise."

"No, no... I have to tell the whole thing before I lose my nerve."

"I'm staying at the Sands," he says sheepishly. "It's ah... it's really close."

"I know where it is." She chuckles through her tears, the quiver in her voice gone. If he has to play a dumb tourist to cheer her up, he doesn't mind that.

"It's Mrs. Ang's treat. Believe it or not—" he might be pitching his voice too high to create amusement, but to hell with that too! "It's her definition of a decent hotel in Singapore. The Sands!"

Ha-hah, how funny is that? The Sands is the iconic triple-bodied silhouette over the Marina Bay. It's on every website, postcard and t-shirt. He pushes hair out of her eyes, peers into them. It's funny, right? Please, let it be funny!

Her cheeks regain some color. A wan smile flits to her lips.

He exhales the breath he was holding. "And I promise to behave like a perfect gentleman."

Her lips stretch into a wider smile. "You are."

"Then..." he offers her the crook of his elbow. Some stories can only be told in a place where you can cry in peace.

The second they step outside, before the turnstiles even, Harris' nose, throat and lungs fill with acrid smell. Without thinking, he pulls Agatha closer again, like it's his only answer to every trouble.

"Something's burning," he says.

"The forests. It's the haze."

The haze! The knotted muscles in his back and neck release. The forests are burning miles away for the wind to blow in smoke thick with ash all over Singapore.

The sky darkens into a muddy mess. People all around put on masks onto their children, then slap them over their own faces, like they teach on an airplane.

They walk the skyscrapers to one side of them. The humped glass conservatories are behind them. Columnar structures veined with neon and planted over with living plants shield asphalt underneath from the falling ash. They are the supertrees of the future. Kindergarteners in white half-masks shuffle by, toward a building of white blocks, shaped like opening fingers on a robot's hand. Singapore still looks like the future of our species, only it's dystopian.

Agatha shrinks by Harris' side, her breath wheezing. "You need a mask?" he asks.

She shakes her head, eyes fearfully browsing the sky.

He relaxes his arm on her shoulders, but not enough, not nearly enough. He's got it under his skin in his five years as a firefighter that smoke means fire. He can't breathe this and not be tense. It doesn't matter how far the woods are burning. Fire means imminent danger.

Without another word, they rush along the harbor-front promenade. When he was rushing to meet her, not even two hours ago, the harbor was the prettiest thing and the surf played a hopeful tune. With the sky pressing onto his head, squeezing his temples in a vise, he's glad to leave both the harbor and the surf behind. Everyone is trying to get inside.

At the hotel, by some miracle, they enter the elevator capsule alone. Harris jams his finger into the button, willing the doors to close faster. He can't stand another minute in public.

"I kept looking out of the windows all night," he says to break the silence. "I've never slept so high up. Fortieth floor. It's just... unnatural."

"But it's a great view." Her reply is both listless and hoarse. Hoarse is bad.

He releases her, but holds her at an arm's length. "Do you have trouble breathing?"

She cleaves right back to his side, rolling his head across his chest. A loose bun on the nape of her neck holds together still. It's tied with a scarf in a complex beige, purple and white pattern. The red in her hair is fading, but the black is all the more bright for it. "Stop triaging, Harris Sarkisian. You're on vacation."

If he kisses her hair, will it be gentlemanly? He decides that no, it won't be and he'd promised. So, he hooks her scarf between his fingers and pulls out the end that slipped behind her collar. It doesn't help to slow down his racing pulse. Pushing her hair over one shoulder to open her neck to his lips is definitely, absolutely, positively a no-no. He stifles a groan.

Fortunately, the elevator's doors open on his floor before the memory of their kiss drives him out of his skin.

His room is large by any standards. The crisp white of the linens and molding offsets the tasteful grays and beiges of the carpets, the walls, the furniture. The TV's giant. In the bathroom, a savvy guest can program the toilet to flash fifty-five different ways. But Agatha's gaze fixates on his window. Her eyes widen in fear.

Harris rushes forward to shut the blinds. She heads him off, so they end up standing in front of the floor to ceiling glass, their shoulders touching. Harris finds her hand without taking his eyes off the Singapore's Marina Bay. Because the building curves, it's like they're floating above the gray swells of the sea waves. Here and there a gull strikes across. Further down, the funky man-made structures break the view of the sea. The haze rules the sky.

"I saw how my parents died," Agatha says without a preamble. "I must have seen it on the video first, before it invaded my dreams, but I'm not sure. The project we were building was on a private island, for a cruise company. They... they had to charter a small plane to get back to Jakarta. Two minutes into the flight, while one of the workers was still filming the take off, the plane just... exploded."

He no longer gives a damn about what a gentleman would do. He only knows he must cradle her to his chest and does so.

"The investigation concluded that an engine caught fire, despite being properly maintained. It was an accident, nobody's fault. But I knew differently. I was to blame, because I wanted them to be late."

Her tears wet his t-shirt, making a hot spot right over his heart.

"It was an accident," he whispers, "a tragedy, an accident." He repeats the words a dozen times, while his memory circles to her questions at the Fire Station.

'What do you think of pyrokinesis, Harris?'

"There's no such thing as pyrokinesis, Agatha." Never before he's been so convinced she's innocent.

More tears soak his t-shirt, fueling his heart. It races inside the ribcage, seeking for a way out.

"I couldn't think of anything else. I couldn't study. Couldn't eat," Agatha says. "I burned myself where others wouldn't see it, on the legs..."

He doesn't want to think of it, but his mind snaps back like a rubber band. He sees himself walking into the burning hotel room. Her body is staged on the bed. Her legs are long, beautiful, but there are faint marks on her thighs. Old pain and guilt seeking release—futile pain, futile guilt, futile running.

"Is this why your relatives shipped you to Wisconsin?"

She nods. "They did. I'm sorry, Harris, I know it's your home, but I hated it there, in the clinic. I was all alone."

"Jesus." Maybe she hated Wisconsin. Harris is different, she seriously hates her family. "Of course you would feel alone in a foreign country."

"That's when I first heard his whispers. They told me that there was hope for me."

"There's always hope."

"I'm not mad, Harris, I was never mad! I've heard him... and I've told them, the nurses, the doctors," she mumbles. "They adjusted the medication until I was numb. And the therapy. Behavioral, sensory, the best kinds, state of the art. I became very good at pretending I no longer feel things."

"I'm sorry."

"So when I received the seraph's first tangible message, I never told anyone."

"A message from a seraph," he mouths after her. The word is familiar somehow. He isn't a spiritual type, but she spoke of angels before, so he grasps a half-formed memory of something heard somewhere before. "A seraph as in... seraphim?"

"Yes." She looks at him expectantly.

Seraphim aren't just any angels. There's something about them, something important... it sits at the back of his mind. He scrunches his face, trying to remember. It's just like playing chess with Dad, finding answers to a puzzle. Seraphim are... they are... they are...

Finally, the bell dings in his head. He's gotten the right answer and he sees how it all fits together. His heart plunges as if he's tossed it from the Sands' roof into the Marina Bay.