The fire inside Ace McShane had been kindling for a long time. Her classmates added fuel to the flame, as did her teachers, neighbors, and her mother. Her mother more than all of them combined, really, but even she could only stoke the flame to a low, steady smolder.
Of all the people, why did it have to be Manisha who was the catalyst? Why did it have to be her body, charred and melted, that Ace screamed herself hoarse over, that she wept her eyes bone-dry over, that finally stoked the fire too large and too hot to be contained in mere metaphor any longer?
(Because, the Doctor explained to her gently, many years later, no one else could have done it. No lesser emotion could have called the Torturing Flame into her life. Only Manisha could have been that person for Ace.)
She built bombs, explosives, played with chemicals and matches and things that should've killed her a thousand times over, and she never got hurt, not seriously. If the nitro and phosphorus and fluoride ever splashed on her, she never noticed. And whatever weapons of mass destruction she built, she used to wreak havoc on her tormentors, on Manisha's killers, and on that awful old house Gabriel Chase.
(Wretched place. Ace felt something profoundly wrong when she walked in there, something watching, something that was opposed to everything that lived on Earth. She lit her fuses and left in a hurry.)
Some gang snooped around, tried to talk her into joining, the Lightless Flame or something like. She was interested at first, but then they started talking about targeting people who didn't have anything, people who were already struggling. Recent immigrants. She punched the leader in the face and only flinched a little when the woman's whole head caved in and dripped molten wax onto the floor. She told them never to set foot on her turf again. They laughed her off and walked away, but they never did come back.
Then came the first explosion that backfired on her -- not burning, though, it just blew her back across the room and out the window and she felt the bottom her stomach drop out as the world fell away to inky black and distant streaks of light and vertigo...
and then she was on Iceworld.
(It was strange, really; Kane was as Desolation as she was, just from the opposite temperature extreme. The Professor, as a Weaver, was apparently her natural enemy. Really, she should've sided with Kane against the Doctor, according to whatever laws govern fear monsters. But Ace had never been one for following rules, and her rage at fascists overwhelmed whatever connection she might've had with that toerag.)
So that left her with the Professor, traveling in his blue box that might've been bigger on the inside, not that you could tell for all the cobwebs clogging the corridors. He fed on his plots and schemes for toppling dictators and defeating monsters, she fed on the delicious loss and pain that those dictators and monsters felt when their empires collapsed, their dreams of conquest burning around them. And oh, how they ran, burning patterns across space and time...
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