Ember Phoenix🐦‍🔥

She finds a bench, sits cross-legged, and gets out her biology flashcards to keep her mind occupied — never mind that her GCSEs are over now. The thought she needs to get an actual social life crosses her mind as she methodically, mechanically works through them. Not even five minutes later she shoves them back in her bag with a huff of frustration. She’s too worried about being late to focus properly. Oh, why wasn’t she more careful? What if this was an A-level exam? Or something more consequential than work experience with her biology teacher? Her mum drilled it into her since she was buttoning up her own shoes by the front door: to be late is to disrespect the event and everyone involved.

And here she is: fanning herself with a book, tidying her mussed-up hair in the station window, and wondering why she didn’t just take the summer off.

It feels like forever until her next train comes. The thirty minute journey to Kings Cross passes even slower than usual. Roxie watches the city crawl past her, the faint ghost of her eyes glistening back at her in the window.

When she reaches Kings Cross, her usual tube along the Northern Line is delayed ten minutes. She waits the full ten minutes — and then another two for good measure — (this is normal for London) before the tube trundles into the platform. Half the crowd steps forth like a fog, advancing towards the already heaving tube.

Roxie has been on tubes like this before: jammed between several strangers’ bodies, praying no one gropes her or something. People aren’t very sympathetic to a school uniform. And she could do it again. She knows she could do it again.

But something about today, and her already souring mood, makes her skin crawl, covering it with landmines that will discharge the moment someone touches her.

There will be plenty of other tubes.

She steps back, and watches the doors seal them in, packed like sardines.

Satisfied, she checks the board: the next tube is in... twenty minutes?!

A tannoy announces, “The Northern Line is severely delayed. We apologise for any inconvenience.”

Of course it is. Nothing seems to be going right for her today, and the temptation to turn back and just... miss today is more alluring by the second. It would be so easy to spend all day at the library, tell her parents she felt sick, and took the day off.

But Roxie doesn’t quit that easily. It will take a lot more to sway her than slow tubes.

Looking at a tube map, she plans out another route. She doesn’t have to take the Northern Line like she usually does. If she goes on the Picadilly Line to Holburn, she can change to Central, which should get her close enough to City Thameslink where she usually gets off. Piccadilly to Holburn, Central Line to City. She mouths it to herself, feeling the rhythm on her tongue. Yes— it’s a plan. A good one. So she’ll be a little late — but better late than never! Her biology teacher might even be proud of her for making such an effort!

By the time she’s done that and navigated the maze that is the London Underground to the right stop, the next Picadilly tube is crawling into the station, and Roxie hops on board.

Relief. She lets out a sigh. She’s in the right place. Her changeover is at Holbourn. She just needs to hang in there. It’s five minutes, no point even sitting down. Just her luck when the tube jolts, and sends her tripping onto the floor.

Pain bursts through her knees, and she lets out a sob of pure shock. A few people turn to stare, and her face goes hot.

“You alright, gorgeous?” One person — a man — asks, offering his hand, his body towering above her—

The doors slide open and in a heartbeat of pure fear, Roxie bolts off without even checking it’s the right station. By some stroke of luck, it is Holbourn, and she bolts, no longer looking where she’s going, sprinting for the nearest tube with its doors open.

The doors slide shut, swallowing her up and out of reach from him. It’s only when it rolls in the other direction, does panic jolt through Roxie’s body, and she realises she got on the wrong tube. Back to Kings Cross. Terrific. Everything that could be going wrong today has, and she’s ninety percent on board with skipping today and going home. But... better late than never (even though by now, she is definitely going to be late). She has to try. Roxie Malhotra was raised to keep going, even when things seem completely and utterly dire. Even when she 

A chill crawls up her spine, and to soothe her, she traces the Picadilly line with her eyes, following the route. She never normally takes the Picadilly; it’s always the central line. The unfamiliarity only adds to her unease, and it makes the hairs on her arm stand up. She was always a bit insecure about having visible arm hair, but she cares a lot less now. That kind of thing hardly matters anymore. She just has to focus on her studies, get good grades, and get—

Flash!

BANG!

Roxie is thrown, shaken to the core, like a toddler playing with their toys, up into the air like a ragdoll. She doesn’t have time to shield her eyes, doesn’t even have the breath to scream, there’s no time. It happens so fast.

It’s hot. Prickling across her face. Suffocating her mouth. Settling over her body like a blanket. For a moment, it feels as warm and inviting as the bed she was so reluctant to leave this morning.

Then, she falls, hell returns, and something slices across her forehead. Her head smashes into the floor, sending an agonising swell of pain reverberating through her whole body. A sickening crack hits her ears, followed by stabbing pain in her chest. Her nose hits the floor, and blood pools under it. Someone falls on top of her, pinning her to the floor, and panic floods through her. She's trapped. The world is breaking around her, and she is trapped.

She squeezes her eyes shut, shaking and crying. Oh, God, this is worse than anything even her anxious mind could’ve dreamt up. Maybe this is a nightmare, and if she falls asleep now, she'll wake up back in bed, with plenty of time to get to school.

.o0o.

“Hello? Can you hear me, love? Try to say something, alright?”

Roxie coughs weakly. Someone is talking to her, but she can't even force out one word. Her throat is full of nothing but smoke. Every breath is a struggle dragged from her windpipe.

“It's alright, love, I've got you. I need you to sit up. Can you do that for me?”

Roxie creaks one eye open, and sees an older lady, maybe in her sixties, with streaks of grey running through her hair. Her face is covered with ash, dirt and smoke, and she speaks with an accent Roxie vaguely identifies as Northern... somewhere. She can't make her head think at all, and she vaguely wonders, how will I get through work experience today?

“Take my hand, alright?” The lady offers her hand, similarly coated in ash. “I’ll help you.”

Roxie numbly does as she's told, trying to cough away from her. She's always been good at that. Good little teacher’s pet.

The lady helps drag her from underneath whoever fell on her, and it's not until she sits, crumpled on the floor, that she realises with a gut punch of horror, that is not a person. That is a corpse.

“He's... dead.”

The lady turns her face towards her. “Don't look at ‘im, alright, duck? Just focus on me. Sit yourself up against the seats and pop your head between your knees, alright?”

“I have to... to go to school,” Roxie says numbly. “I have... work experience today.”

The older woman tuts, her face wrought into a pitying frown. “Don’t worry about that, duck. You're bleeding from your head, you need to go to a hospital.”

Roxie blinks, trying to signify a nod, but she can’t even make her head move. She must be injured. But most of it’s just shock from... Whatever that was. She tries not to think about it as the nice woman helps her into a sitting position with her head between her legs. It slightly hurts her neck, but she figures the nice woman who’s currently saving her must know what she’s doing, so she lets it happen.

Someone screams down the carriage, “Is anyone a doctor?”

Someone coughs on the smoke clogging the air, but otherwise, silence echoes around the shell of the tube carriage.

“Hello? My husband is bleeding! Somebody, help! Please!”

Roxie grabs the side of the seat, trying to stand. “I did a first aid course once— and I know a lot about biology! Maybe I could—”

“Sit back down, love, you’re injured.”

“But—”

“There is nothing you can do, alright?” The lady looks at Roxie with blue eyes that would be pretty if it weren’t for the sickening yellow emergency lighting. Those eyes belong in the summer sky. Not down here, in the pits of hell.

“Just wait here, okay?” And Roxie does. She listens to people screaming, praying in a multitude of languages, and her ears ringing like a fire alarm. She watches smoke settle on the already dirty seats, and wonders for a second how they’re going to get cleaned, before realising this tube will never be a tube again, and wonders if she should commit the poor thing to memory. She wonders if any of the tubes are going to be the same again — and that’s when the awful thought strikes her.

“The other tube! What if the next tube coming this way hits us?”

The kind lady looks sympathetic, but her head flits to the coughing, confused crowd — and Roxie then realises that is not something you say aloud. Not to a crowd just dazed and despairing enough not to start panicking. She’s studied crowd crushes, she knows about the Hillsborough disaster — she knows that, when instincts take over, so does fear. And that is a frantic, terrified, deadly thing.

It’s too late to take it back. A few people are staring at her, some muttering, some frowning, all sounding very, very worried. Someone yells, “Is that a kid?”

“I’m— sixteen.” Roxie suddenly hesitates. “But I—”

“Keep it down, will you?”

“Hey!” The lady barks. “You should be ashamed of yourselves. That’s a teenager who’s at least as frightened as the rest of you lot, and the least you could do is show some compassion.”

The carriage quiets down, and Roxie finds herself subconsciously leaning into her side.

“I’m not frightened,” she says, biting down on her lips. Despite the tightness in her throat, and the fluttering in her chest, and the dread twisting through her intestines, and the thickness in the air, she knows she has to be brave.

The lady pats her knee. “It’ll be alright, love. I promise you.”

A window smashes. Roxie screams and ducks before her body knows what she’s doing. Her body knows the panicked move before her mind does, and feels like forever until she remembers how to breathe.

When she unfurls herself, she sees the back half of someone’s body wriggling out of the smashed window. Another person meets her confused gaze in the light, and goes, “We’ve gotta get out of here somehow.”

“But— won’t they send someone?” They have to send someone. Surely. The tube driver must have sent an alert, or— something. Something.

The guy shrugs. “That’ll take too long. We bounce now, or...”

He doesn’t finish his sentence, and instead climbs out of the window.

“There’s plenty of people staying,” the lady reminds her. “Don’t you worry.”

Roxie leans forward, glancing down the train. Just a few seats down, someone helps plug someone else’s bleeding leg. Halfway down, there’s two people bent over another’s body on the floor. Several heads crane up and down the carriageway, eyes perked, hands twitching, bodies ready to help. Someone cries out for help, and another crawls out of the window to their aid. None of them look ready to leave.

But that explosion... What if there’s another? What if the tube isn’t safe anymore? It feels like being locked in a falling plane, and no amount of comfort would slow it down.

The only thing stopping her is that, however bad it may be on here, the outside is unknown. And that is a million times worse. What if there’s someone with a knife? What if there’s another explosion? And she’d be going there all alone?

Teenagers take risks. Roxie knows this. They’re chemically programmed to do so. But that stage of development seems to have skipped her, because she’s never taken a risk in her life and she is not going to start now. Being late was a risk, and look how that paid off.

Everyone else leaves, and Roxie puts her hands on her lap, sits neatly on the smoke-coated seats, and waits. Someone will come. Someone has to come.

.o0o.

Roxie learns a lot when she’s sitting on the tube wondering if she’s going to die.

She learns that the kind lady who helped her is called Margaret (not like Margaret Thatcher, she said very firmly), but everyone calls her Maggie. She was travelling from Yorkshire to see her kids and grandkids. Her favourite colour is green, and she loves embroidery. She asks Roxie about her hobbies, and her interests, but Roxie can barely open her mouth, let alone string enough words together to form a response — and then her brain threatens to let her see the dead body on the floor she’d been working so hard not to look at — so Margaret carries on holding her hand and talking about embroidery techniques.

More people leave the carriage. Some to help. Others to leave. Some smash windows with their bare hands just to breathe easier. They seem to ignore the fresh cuts it leaves streaking across their smoke-stained skin like shooting stars of red. Roxie doesn’t ignore them. Nor can she ignore the cries for help that echo up and down the tube. Cries she can’t answer. People she can’t save.

Roxie asks Maggie if she wants to leave and she says, “Someone will come for us too. Those people are gonna make sure the ambulances know there’s people down here.”

“Are you sure?”

Maggie doesn’t sound certain, but she nods her head, and says, “Yes.”

“You don’t have to lie to me to make me feel better,” Roxie says quietly.

“I’m not lying to you, love.” Maggie smiles, squeezing her hand. “Someone will always do the right thing. And all it takes is one person. Someone will come. I promise you.”

She tries to take faith in her words. You never tell children the world is ending; it’s rule number one of the apocalypse — and if it isn’t, it should be. But Roxie watches people cough out their last breaths in a spatter of blood on blue tube flooring, and with every second no one arrives, believing in hope becomes harder and harder.

Then, what feels like hours later, someone staggers into their carriage, and shouts through the still-lingering smoke, “Hello? EMS, is anyone there?”

“Yes! I’m here, I’m here!” She waves her arm, hoping someone else can see her amidst the smoke still hanging in the air. Her heart soars. Finally! Someone!

“Are you injured?” The approaching voice asks, their heavy footsteps coming closer.

“Uh... I hit my head, I think.”

“Hold still for me, alright? I need to look at your eyes.” 

She does as she’s told — and a blinding bright light flashes into her eyes, assaulting her senses, making her thoroughly incapacitated. Her heart judders, and she reflexively blinks a few times. Her vision blares dark— white— dark— white— and it’s then she realises what the horrible sight reminds her of. The flash. The flash. The reason she is curled up on a seat in a still-smoking carriage. The seconds of her life that changed everything, derailing it like the tube, slamming her so harshly into the aftermath, she can tell it will stay with her for a long, long time.

“...Pupil response looks good,” the EMS’s voice fades back into her ears. “Can you see how many fingers I’m holding up?”

“Uh... three?” She says, glancing behind him as more people in uniforms and high-vis jackets pour into the carriage.

“Does your head hurt at all?”

“It aches a little I guess.”

“Your nose and forehead are bleeding too.”

“Oh— don’t worry about that,” she says, somewhat out of politeness, but also knowing full well that emergency services will be stretched to the brim with a disaster like this.

“Can you walk?” He asks. Gripping the pole and his outstretched arm, she wobbles to her feet, testing her shaky legs. They’re weak as anything, rattled by adrenaline pounding nonstop at her veins. One step almost sends her falling into the EMS’s arms.

“Are your legs injured?”

“No, she’s just shaken as anything, poor duck,” Maggie says for her.

“I’ll get one of my coworkers to walk you up and out of here,” he explains. “You’ll get more treatment as soon as you’re out of here safely.” He straightens up before announcing, “Everyone, please stay where you are until we tell you to evacuate, alright?”

“It hurts,” Roxie says quietly. But he doesn’t seem to have heard her, as another scream for help catches his attention, and he rushes off. Roxie gets it. There’s a lot more urgent cases than her. She was lucky. She was so, so lucky.

“Come here, love.” Maggie nudges Roxie’s head towards her, and she procures a handkerchief — embroidered, by the looks of it — and starts dabbing at the cut on Roxie’s head. It stings like salt in a wound, but she bites back the hiss that boils in her throat and lets it happen. Maggie continues scrubbing at her forehead, her lovely handkerchief coming away with a red smudge, peppered with blood that must’ve stuck and dried to her skin. What a lot of effort, delicately stitching flowers into satin... what a waste.

“Hey.” Maggie taps Roxie’s cheek. “You’re going to be just fine.” She smiles warmly, every crease of it lit up by the emergency lights, and it seems like that soft moment could last forever.

But more boots thud into the carriage, and soon, Roxie is marched out, accompanied by a man in a high-vis jacket whose name she doesn’t ask. He offers her a hand as she walks down a ladder off the tube, and then onto the tracks.

It’s dark. Very dark. Sunlight does not reach down here. The tube glows behind her like a beacon of light. Ahead looks like something straight out of a nightmare she’d wake up from in a cold sweat longing for her parents to hold her and promise everything will be okay.

Roxie turns around, trying to catch one last look, but Jacket steers her away by the shoulders. “Don’t look back.” His voice is void of emotion. “I know you want to. But don’t.”

She doesn’t make a fuss, and hangs onto his arm, walking down the tracks as she lets the darkness swallow her.

She’s never been on the tube tracks before. It’s trespassing. And even though she’s right next to a police officer, she feels a weird sense of thrill being here. Knowing she’ll only get to experience this once.

“Has my colleague checked you for injuries?” Jacket asks. Roxie confirms.

“What... happened?” She asks after a while of silence. People are faintly chattering ahead and behind. Some of their sobs float around the brick tunnel like ghosts. But still, her voice is low enough that only Jacket would hear her.

It’s a while before he responds. The difficulty of that question twists itself into every crease in his forehead.

“We don’t know yet,” he says eventually. “All we know is that people need our help.”

“Thank you... for what you’re doing,” Roxie says, realising she never thanked the EMS that helped her — or Maggie! She’ll probably never see her again. The thought is enough to sober her into silence.

“Don’t thank me, darlin’, I’m just doing my job.”

With that, they reach a set of stairs, plunging Roxie further into darkness. His high-vis jacket has no light to even reflect, and in a moment of panic, she grabs his arm. He doesn’t pull away. “Just a little bit of the stairs, then we’re up on ground level, alright? How old are you, darlin’?”

“Sixteen.”

“Fuck.”

Roxie’s heart jolts. “Am I in trouble?”

“No— it’s just... You’re a kid. You don’t deserve this.”

“No one else does.”

When she reaches the surface, the light hits her eyes like a laser, almost blinding, and she jams her hands over her eyes. Jacket grabs her arm, guiding her to a darker place, and, letting her eyes adjust, Roxie slowly opens her eyes.

She immediately wishes she didn’t.

Once upon a lifetime ago, Roxie was in her year eight geography lesson, learning about natural disasters. Her teacher showed them pictures: earthquakes where rubble is scattered everywhere; volcanoes where lava swallows entire houses like they’re nothing; hurricanes that scatter the physical remains of people’s lives across the land like a board game thrown on the floor.

This feels like she’s been tossed into a grainy photo in her textbook. It activates every sense she has: the sight of EMS workers carrying stretchers with patients showing more blood than skin, the sound of yelling punctuated by police sirens, the smell of blood, the feel of urgency, the taste of smoke on her tongue. There’s nowhere she can go to escape it. No shoulder she can bury her head in, no bedroom to retreat into when everything got too loud.

The only choice left is for her to be brave.

She follows Jacket through the crowd, trying not to look at the dying bodies around her. “Where should I go now?”

“Not a hospital,” Jacket says stiffly. “Those are already overflowing. We’re trying to shut down public transport. It’s safest to stay put here.”

Safe? Here? Full of the smell of death and blood and suffering. Her hair stands on end, and she realises in a second that she cannot stay here a minute longer.

She excuses herself from Jacket, promising to stay put. Maybe she should go to school? But that’s already at least an hour on the tube — and she is not going back down there. No. No. No no no. She just has to go back home. Home, that is at least an hour on the train. At least the train won’t swallow her underground, promising to save people the trouble of burying her.

She knows she’s somewhere in Kings Cross, but with all the Emergency Services vehicles, it’s barely recognisable. Barnet is at least half an hour — and again, that’s with public transport. She asks a ticket officer when the next train to Barnet is, and he simply shakes his head. It’s not until she looks at all the trains quietly sitting in their stops at the station, showing no signs of leaving, that she realises public transport has shut down.

Busy, bustling London... held captive in their own city. The thought is genuinely quite heartbreaking — on top of all the horrors she’s witnessed just this morning — and she wonders if this will be the kind of thing that scars. That never really leaves, and just lingers in the air like the smoke seeping out of the underground where thousands are still trapped, lurking below.

Someone came for her before. Someone surely will come again. Someone will come to save her. Come to save them all.

.o0o.

“Mum? Mum— I can’t get through to you,” Roxie says into the phone, even though she knows it’s futile. This call hasn’t worked, nor did the five before it. “I think... I think the phones are down.” The loneliness of the word makes her shrink even further into the alley corner she’s squished into. It’s dirty and disgusting, littered with rubbish and gum stains like blotched stars on the grime-darkened pavement. Faintly, she thinks how germy this is. The Roxie from a week — hell, even a day ago — wouldn’t go near a place as dirty as this. But she’s so covered in ash and soot and smoke, she doesn’t know how it could matter anymore. What more could happen to her? What could possibly be worse than...

People walk past her. Some are confused. Some are bleeding, who don’t seem to have even noticed. Some are simply dazed, their eyes blown wide like their pupils exploded with the tube. Some just trying to get to work, brushing past the horrors unfolding. Roxie doesn’t have it in her to detest them. They’re as scared as she is.

Still, no buses pass. The roads are utterly clogged with cars, people bursting at the seams trying to escape this city. It’s all starting to feel a lot bigger than Kings Cross. She hears snatches of conversations as she passes by. “Did you see that body?” — “I heard at least five people died” — “Electrical fault — “Explosion. It was definitely an explosion.” — “Bomb” —

“Terrorism.”

(The silence surrounding that word is louder than any explosion.)

To distract herself, she wonders about Maggie. Tries to spot her in the crowd. She must’ve got off, right? Sure, Roxie didn’t see her leave, but she wasn’t injured. Or was she? Come to think of it, she never asked. But she must’ve got off. There’s no reason she wouldn’t have escaped... right?

She can only hope. Just as she heard people praying. Hope, religion, faith... it’s all the same thing. The smell of incense laid before her family’s shrine is as familiar as the smell of hope lingering desperately in the air around her. She wants to light a diya, cradle its tiny warmth in her hands, and believe she is as strong as the flames that refuse to blow out. She wonders if her parents are crowded around their little shrine now, tears pricking their eyes as they offer anything they have to the Gods, asking anyone listening to bring their little girl home.

“I’m okay, mum,” she says into her phone. It comforts Roxie more than anything else, imagining the soft crease of her eyes as she hears that blessed confirmation her daughter is alive. “I’m okay. I promise. I’m just waiting for the authorities to tell me what to do. It’s what you and dad would want me to do. And who knows? Maybe the public transport will be up and running soon...”

But even as she speaks, that seems even more unlikely. She has no faith to hold, nothing she can give, no evidence to the contrary that the saviour she is patiently, diligently waiting for might never exist.

“Mum... I don’t think anyone’s coming.”

.o0o.

She’s ruining her trainers. They rubbed against her ankle socks until the skin was red and raw, and she finally gave in, peeled off the backs, and put her trainers half-on, her poor, scrubbed ankles finally able to breathe. The skin was remarkably clean, bearing no trace of the dirt that covers the rest of her body. It’ll take a long shower to wash all of this off. When she gets home. (Not if.) Eventually.

She has no idea where she’s going. Barnet is North from Kings Cross, so her strategy so far has been to use the movement of the sun to make sure she’s going in that general direction — but she was never good at map skills in geography GCSE, and the sun keeps moving, and the further she goes, the more lost she feels.

She tries asking passers-by, “Excuse me, am I anywhere close to Barnet?” “Could you tell me the way to Barnet?”

She wants to yell at them. Hello? Does a schoolgirl wandering around covered in soot warrant any concern, or are you that heartless?

Oh God— it’s then she realises. Her uniform. Her hundred-pound selective-school uniform that cost her parents a fortune... she looks in utter dismay at the stained, singed fabric. The spoiled shirt. The ruined blazer. She can’t wear this now! And if that’s how her uniform looks, she can only imagine how her face must look: smudges of crusted blood tracking a path through the smokey, grey dust that’s settled on the sweat that sticks to her skin.

So much for the cool day; it’s hot as anything now, and her precious water is running low. She’s aware she missed lunch — and come to think of it, she might’ve forgotten breakfast too. But there’s knots in her chest that have yet to be undone, and her gut feels hollowed out, as if someone scraped everything out with a spoon and scattered it across the tube tracks.

The heavy books in her bag drag her shoulders until they hurt, and she doesn’t even dare to sit on a bench, lest she never get off it again. She’s tired. She’s so, so tired. A new word should be invented, just to encapsulate the sheer, tear-jerking exhaustion she feels. Her feet might be bleeding. She stopped feeling half her toes ages ago. She doesn’t bother to check if they’re okay. As long as she gets home.

Whatever it takes.

The sun begins to dip, like it’s already given up on the day. Roxie doesn’t know what time it is — late, probably. She hasn’t seen a clock in... all day. She just watches her shadow stretch out in front of her (she’s definitely going the wrong way now), watches every street with the same generic houses blur into nothingness, and walks, and walks and walks and walks, until she finds she isn’t walking anymore, and she barely feels the slam of her knees crashing into the pavement.

She gasps. Cries. Sobs. Whatever sound she’s making, there isn’t a word. No one would invent a word for something so horrific. But her shoulders shake, her stomach clenches, her ribs — which she faintly remembers cracking, all those hours ago — creak and scrape against each other, and her mouth keeps making that awful, awful noise.

Beep!

Roxie practically jumps out of her own skin. The flinch is so painful, so utterly horrible, she finds herself collapsing onto her side, curled in like a frightened prey animal.

Someone calls, “You alright, love?”

Roxie’s head whips up, her heart still pounding from the scare. Her lips open, but no sound pushes out. She tries again; only a croak. Her voice is all spent on that awful sound.

“What’s happened to you?” They try again, leaning out of the open car window. Roxie can only shake her head.

“Shall I call someone? Your mum? Dad?”

A second voice interjects, “Oh shit, is she in school uniform?”

The chugging of the engine cuts off— and a door opens, footsteps coming towards her. If Roxie’s body had even a scrap of energy left, she’d run. Stranger danger. She should run. She needs to run. She doesn’t. (She can’t.)

The person — a man, in maybe his twenties — crouches down near her. “Come on, I can’t leave you like this. Is there anywhere I can drive you?”

“Barnet.” Her voice rushes back at once. “Can you drive me to Barnet?”

“Sure thing.” He stands up, extending a hand. After a moment’s consideration, she takes it.

He — Lucas — doesn’t try to talk. Nor does his friend (Matt). They explain they’re heading out of central London back to Bedfordshire after their boss told them to go home early. That they’re so glad Matt’s disability meant they usually hazard the M25 into London, rather than take public transport.

“What’re you doing in the middle of Finchley?” Asks Lucas.

“I came from London,” Roxie says quietly. 

“Oh what, the centre? Kings Cross and all that?”

Roxie nods.

“I heard there was some massive explosion down in the tubes — yeah, some guy apparently blew up the whole thing. People are saying it’s either an electrics problem, but I think it’s a suicide bomber. People just don’t want the hard truth, innit?”

Roxie doesn’t reply. Her body is frozen. Her head pulls her deep underground, smashes itself against a pole, and drags her along the tube tracks, scattering her remaining pieces among the bleeding bodies lining Kings Cross station.

“Shut it, mate— seriously, shut up. I think...” Matt suddenly drops his voice. Roxie can still hear them from the front seat. “I think she was on that tube. Look— she’s covered in smoke. And she’s well shellshocked.”

“Oh... oh fuck.” Lucas sounds horrified. “I’m sorry, kid.” Roxie wishes people would stop calling her a kid. “I’m so sorry.”

They stop asking her questions after that.

It isn’t long before they hit traffic. Their car crawls to a halt, and they keep the engine on for a valiant five minutes before they shut it off. Matt pulls out a sandwich, offers one to Roxie, and she finds she still isn’t hungry. Even if her stomach wasn’t in a million knots, she knows never to take sweets from strangers.

She recognises this road as the M25. She’d be quicker walking from here, probably. She could find her way. But even if she can’t lower her guard (she is in a stranger’s car), it’s just so absolutely nice to sit down for a moment. To give her poor, exhausted feet a break. To let her brain tune almost everything out, where she no longer needs to think about explosions and headaches.

Somewhere along the line, the light fades out of the sky, leaving a lazy approximation of a sunset tucked beneath the black trees along the side of the motorway. She doesn’t know how such beauty could exist in a world where she almost died.

Almost died. It feels so surreal. To have tasted death on her tongue and somehow didn’t swallow. (Smoke. It tasted like smoke. Smoke and blood and burnt hair. The unmistakable, almost meaty smell of burning human flesh.) She wants to be sick in this stranger’s car. Her lungs jerk, and she coughs up bile into her mouth, but there’s nothing inside her to get rid of.

By the time they finally reach Barnet, it’s dark, even for a July night, and Roxie can’t feel relieved. Her voice has come back to her in patches, and she can stomach directing Lucas to the town centre.

“Which way’s your house then?”

“Oh— just drop me by the ASDA in town, I can walk,” she says, knowing better than to give her home address.

“Are you sure? I can drop you right to your door — ‘s the least I could do.”

“Really— it’s fine,” she says, smiling to mask her bubbling anxiety. This was already a wildly risky move, and she’s so, so lucky it didn’t go wrong. Getting into a car with strangers... and men, no less? What was she thinking?

As they pull into the ASDA car park, she tries to open the door — and it doesn’t. Fear jolts through her. They’re going to kidnap me. They’re going t—

“Sorry. Child locks.”

Lucas clicks a button, and she practically falls out of the door.

“Take care, yeah?” Matt calls.

She mumbles a quick thank you, and they drive off. Roxie stares at the blaring, green lights of the ASDA shopfront — just like the green of the emergency exit lighting— God, can she stop thinking about it for five minutes? — and suddenly wants nothing more than to collapse right there on the concrete. She’d have more energy in the morning. Enough energy to walk back to her house and fall asleep for the next three days.

No. She can’t stop now. She’s so close. She’s just seven minutes away from her house. It would be cruel to stop now.

She holds her chin up extra high. Squeezes tight the straps of her school bag. I can do this.

Twelve minutes and three wrong turns later, she knocks on her door.

Her mum wrenches it open almost immediately, hours of anxiety creased all across her face. She and her dad must be worried sick. God, she wishes she could’ve called them. Told them she was okay.

She stands still, her face the picture of shock. Like that renaissance painting she badly redrew in her year nine art class. Her eyes are red, a crisscross of veins bulging as her eyes strain with the ocean of tears locked behind them in a brave, brave smile.

“Mum?”

Her hands fly to cover her mouth, trembling like leaves against her face, staring at Roxie like she’s a ghost. “...Rohana?”

“I’m sorry about my uniform,” Roxie blurts with an almost hysterical bubble of laughter, before her legs give way, her bag drops to the ground, and she falls into her mum’s arms.

.o0o.

July 8th 2005

Barnet, England

8:21am

Roxie is running late. This time, she lets herself. She can’t stomach going in today. Not when she has to take the... and even if she somehow made it into school, someone’s probably spread the news of her being in the explosion by now. She didn’t show up for school (and she always shows up, even when she’s sick) — someone must’ve put two and two together. She doesn’t want to become the girl who almost died in an explosion. Even though that swallows her whole life right now.

She tells herself it will fade. She tells herself she will bounce back, like the times she was bullied, the times she went home crying, the times she snuck a pair of scissors up her sleeve and hid in the bathroom. But even that isn’t like... it isn’t this. She didn’t almost die. She didn’t wander around London until blisters burst on her heels. She wasn’t flung headfirst into a metal pole. She wasn’t pinned to the floor of the tube underneath a dead body.

It keeps coming back to her in flashes. Memories her brain stuffed to the back of her subconscious so she could stand a chance at getting a good night’s sleep. Her dreams were empty, thank goodness. But she has a feeling those are yet to come.

She buries herself under her duvet. She’ll always be safe there. Nothing can get to her under here.

Not even her parents, knocking on her door.

“Rohana?” It’s her dad. “Is everything okay?”

She doesn’t answer. It’s then she realises she can’t.

The door creaks open. “Sonu... you have to get up,” her dad says, his voice hushed. “You cannot let the terrorists win. You have to be brave.”

Again, Roxie doesn’t answer. She doesn’t think she could even if she wanted to.

Roxie’s mum tuts at him, her shadow suddenly in the doorframe. “Ranbir, don’t put pressure on her like that.”

“If she doesn’t face it now, when will she?”

“At least give her a few days!” Her mum snaps back. “Look at her, she's exhausted.”

Her dad’s voice is clipped when he says, “Let’s take this outside.”

It doesn’t make much difference. Even through the crack in the door, Roxie can hear every word. About how she needs to be brave but she needs time to recover — but all she can think is how they talk about her like she's invisible. As if she, despite being sixteen, is a child incapable of making her own choices.

What makes her heart stop is when her dad says, “We’ll all have to take the tube again someday. I have to go to take the tube into work today, and even though I have to—”

“You can’t go!” Roxie shrieks, flinging the door open, and clings onto her dad’s body with all the strength she has. “Please. Don’t go in. What if— what if there’s another explosion? What if it isn’t safe?” Millions of possibilities spill out of her in a jagged river of panic.

“Oh, manu...” her mum tuts, patting her head and joining in the awkward hug. “Let's all three of us take the day off. Just relax, eh? Your father and I can work from home.”

Roxie mumbles an mm-hm into her shoulder. Their embrace smells like love and lavender laundry detergent, and she doesn’t want to be anywhere else in the world.

But yesterday still hangs over her head like a guillotine that isn’t done chopping at her neck. She dreads what this means for her — what it could mean for the world — and the thought of facing another day where anything could happen to her now is nothing short of terrifying.

“Are you okay, beta?” Her dad asks softly.