Alicia looked at her hands. "I've never lit anything on purpose. It just... happens."
The truth arrived in a man named Corin Flame. He was a fire-eater by trade, a drifter by nature, and he rolled into Stillwater on the back of a motorcycle painted rust-red. He set up near the town square on a Tuesday evening, juggling torches and breathing plumes of propane fire into the dusk sky. The children squealed. The adults tipped him grudging dollars. alicia vickers flame
Corin wanted spectacle. Alicia wanted purpose. He saw her fire as a trick to refine; she saw it as a language to understand. The first crack came in Nevada, when she accidentally melted a slot machine after a drunk gambler grabbed her arm. Corin yelled at her for drawing attention. She yelled back, and the tent they were sleeping in caught—not from anger, but from the sheer pressure of suppressed heat. Alicia looked at her hands
"So are you," she replied. "The difference is, I want to help people." happens
She didn't go home. She went to the places fire had already been: forests after wildfires, apartment buildings after electrical faults, barns struck by lightning in the flat Midwest. She wore a firefighter's coat and kept her hair under a hood. She told no one her real name.
She was not born with the surname Flame. That came later, like a struck match.
"That's fear," Corin said. "Fear makes the fire wild. But intention makes it an instrument."