THE BOY WHO DIED TWICE

*CHAPTER 1 - THE BOY WHO DIED TWICE 

The L train was never on time in Bed-Stuy, and Usen Blaze had learned to hate the way the platform sounded when it was empty.

It was 11:47 PM on a Thursday in late August. The heat hadn't broken even though it had rained at 9 PM. The air underground was thick, smelling of piss, brake dust, and that faint electric ozone from the third rail. The fluorescent lights buzzed. One flickered.

Usen was seventeen, six foot with his afro pushed back by a durag, Ghanaian father, African-American mother, wearing a faded NASA hoodie two sizes too big and jeans ripped at the knee not because it was fashion but because he couldn't afford new ones. He had his backpack on one shoulder, headphones around his neck playing nothing. He was coming back from his night shift at the bodega on Myrtle, $9 an hour, and his feet hurt.

He wasn't supposed to be able to see it.

On the opposite track, clinging to the concrete like mold made of smoke, was a Hollow.

He had seen them since he was seven. At first he thought everyone could. In elementary school in Queens, he told his teacher there was a black man made of smoke in the corner of the classroom whispering to the sad kid. The teacher sent him to the counselor. His mother took him to church. The pastor shouted. The smoke just got bigger.

By high school, he learned the rule: Don't look at them. Don't talk about them. They feed on attention, on emotion. If you ignore them, they ignore you. Mostly.

This one was different. It had evolved. Most Hollows were just smears, formless, like bad air. This one had a mask. A white bone mask, smooth, with two black eye holes and a jagged smile carved into it, and a perfect round hole in the middle of its chest where its heart should be. It was crouched on the third rail, sniffing.

Usen tried to do what he always did. He looked down at his phone. Pretended.

Then he heard it. A small sneeze.

At the far end of the platform, near the broken MetroCard machine, a little girl was asleep on the bench. She couldn't have been more than six or seven. Pink backpack shaped like a cat, light-up sneakers, hair in two puffs. She must have missed her stop, or her mom had told her to wait and didn't come back. Her head was lolled back, mouth open. One foot dangled over the yellow line, over the edge, over the drop onto the tracks where the Hollow was.

The Hollow smelled her. Its mask twitched. It left the third rail and started crawling, spider-like, up the side of the platform, toward her foot. Its mouth opened. Not to eat her body. Hollows didn't eat bodies. They ate the soul's light. They ate hope, will, joy, until a person was an empty shell that would walk into traffic or jump.

Usen's thumb froze over his phone. The platform was empty. No MTA worker. No cops. The next train was in four minutes according to the board. If it came while the Hollow was attached to her...

Every adult instinct in him that had been trained by Brooklyn to mind his own business screamed: Not your problem. You crazy if you get involved. You'll get killed.

The Hollow touched her ankle. The girl shivered in her sleep. Her light-up sneaker flickered and went dim.

Usen's headphones fell.

"HEY! GET THE FUCK OFF HER!"

His voice cracked. It echoed too loud in the empty station.

He ran. He didn't think. He covered twenty feet in two seconds and shoved the girl as hard as he could. She woke up screaming, fell off the bench onto the concrete behind him, pink backpack tumbling.

The Hollow missed her. It grabbed him instead.

Cold. God, the cold. It wasn't like ice. It was like grief. Like every time his dad left, every time kids laughed at his accent, every time his mother cried because rent was late, all at once injected into his veins. The Hollow's claws - invisible, but real enough to cut - ripped across his chest. Three lines. His NASA hoodie tore. Blood, hot and immediate, sprayed onto the tiles. He smelled his own blood.

He fell back against the vending machine. His legs gave out. He slid down, leaving a red smear.

The Hollow stood over him, fully visible now to him, seven feet tall, mask cracked where Usen had hit it.

_Finally,_ it whispered inside his head, not with a voice but with a feeling. _A seer. I've been waiting for a seer in this station for ten years. Your soul will let me become a Perfect Hollow._

Usen couldn't breathe. His chest was open. He pressed his hand to it and felt his heart stuttering. The girl was gone - he could hear her small feet slapping up the stairs screaming for help, but no help would come in time for him.

He thought of his mother in Queens, working double shift at the hospital, who would get a call. He thought of how no one at school would even notice he was gone for a week. He thought of how he had lived seventeen years trying to be invisible.

His last thought wasn't heroic. It was angry.

_I don't want to die like I'm nothing. If I have to die, let me be something. Let me matter for one fucking second._

And somewhere beyond the sky, beyond the Palaces, beyond the afterlife, something that had been sleeping since 53 BC opened its eyes.

Usen died at 11:49 PM. Cause of death, if anyone bothered to write it: blood loss.

Then he opened his eyes and he was still on the platform. The blood was still on the tiles. But he wasn't bleeding anymore. He looked down at his chest. The hoodie was still torn, but the skin underneath was whole. And over his skin, overlapping his body like armor made of light, was a second body. Made of fire. White-gold fire that didn't flicker like normal fire. It burned steady, like a small sun inside him. It had wings.

A second soul. A Dead Soul.

The Hollow took a step back. For the first time in ten years haunting that station, it was afraid.

"What... what are you?" it hissed.

Usen looked at his hands. They were on fire. Not burning. Wreathed. The fire licked up his forearms, pure, clean. He could feel it. It was warm. It was furious. It was his, but also not his. It felt older than the city. Older than the world.

He didn't know what to do. He just felt.

He remembered the girl's light-up sneaker going dim. He remembered how that thing fed on little kids.

"BURN," he whispered, not knowing where the word came from.

The fire answered.

It didn't shoot like a fireball. It erupted. A pillar of white-gold flame exploded out from his chest, from his hands, from his mouth, filling the entire end of the platform. The fluorescent lights shattered. The tiles cracked from heat. But the bench, the garbage can, the MTA posters - none of them burned. The fire only burned one thing.

The Hollow screamed. A real scream this time, not a whisper. Its mask melted like wax. Its black body turned to ash that was instantly incinerated again, until there was nothing. Not even dust. The hole in its chest where its heart should have been filled with Phoenix fire and then closed.

Silence. The fire vanished as fast as it came. Usen's hands were still faintly glowing, little embers floating off them like fireflies.

He was breathing hard. Alive. He was alive again, but his heart was beating twice - his own, and a second, stronger beat underneath.

Then, behind him, the brick wall of the station where the MTA map was began to glow. The bricks melted, not into rubble, but into light. A doorway opened. Not a door. A Torii gate made of ever-burning flame, and beyond it he didn't see Brooklyn. He saw a sky that was a permanent sunset, floating islands, and a palace made of black stone and fire that went up forever.

A woman stepped out. She looked about twenty-five, but her eyes were too old. She wore a black uniform like a military coat but Japanese, with gold trim, and on her shoulders were pauldrons made of actual skulls with gold chains. Her hair was red, long. She held no umbrella now, just a sheathed sword. She looked at the circle of ash where the Hollow had been, at the melted tiles that only melted in one perfect circle, at Usen's hands still burning white-gold.

She stopped. Her mouth actually fell open.

"No," she whispered. "No fucking way."

"What?" Usen said, voice raw.

"You killed a masked Hollow. Bare-handed. With no weapon. No training. Just... raw First Flame."

"What are you talking about? What flame?"

She stepped closer, and the heat coming off her was insane, but Usen's own flame pushed back.

"Kid, I'm Captain Kira Blaze, South Palace. And you just awakened the Phoenix. The First Flame. The flame that belongs to no clan. That hasn't chosen anyone in a hundred years. And you did it on the L train in Brooklyn. Do you know how insane that is?"

Sirens wailed from above. The little girl had gotten to the street.

Kira grabbed his torn hoodie.

"You have ten seconds to decide. Come with me now, or explain to NYPD and your mom why the MTA platform looks like a meteor hit it and you're holding fire that shouldn't exist."

Usen looked back at the stairs, at his world. Then at the gate of fire.

He chose.

Stepping through the fire gate was like stepping through a memory of summer.

One second he was on cold, piss-smelling concrete in Bed-Stuy. The next, the air itself hugged him. It was hot, but not sweaty hot. It was dry, clean, like standing too close to a bonfire on a beach at night, but the fire loved you. The ground was black obsidian, warm under his sneakers, and it hummed.

Usen fell to his knees. Not from pain. From pressure. The air in this place was heavier. It had soul in it.

He looked up and forgot how to breathe.

Blaze Palace was not a palace. It was a continent.

Floating in an endless sky of orange and purple that never got dark and never got light, just eternal dusk, was a mountain of black stone, and carved into it was a city. Pagodas made of flame that didn't consume. Training yards where hundreds of people in black and red uniforms were sparring, their weapons leaving trails of fire. Rivers of lava that flowed upward. And above everything, circling so large its shadow covered the entire city, was a bird.

No. Not a bird. Usen's brain tried to make it a bird because it had wings and feathers, but it was too big. Its wingspan was wider than Brooklyn. Each feather was longer than a city bus and made of living red flame that shed embers that became new little fire spirits. When it breathed, the entire sky pulsed.

Suzaku. The Vermillion Bird. The Queen of the South. One of the five Shijin who held the world together.

She saw him. Of course she saw him. She saw everything in her domain.

She folded her wings and dropped. The wind from her descent knocked over twenty Reapers in the training yard. She landed fifty feet from Usen and the ground cracked. As she landed, she shrank, and shrank, and shrank, until she was a woman. Tall, taller than any woman Usen had ever seen, maybe six five, barefoot, wearing a kimono that was made of living flame that moved on its own, red hair so long it dragged on the obsidian and burned it. Her face was perfect and terrifying, eyes like magma, lips like a cut, a small black mole under her left eye. Gold jewelry that floated.

She walked. Every step left a burning footprint that faded.

Usen tried to stand. Kira put a hand on his shoulder. "Don't. Kneel. It's respect."

"I'm not kneeling to -"

Kira shoved him down.

Suzaku stopped in front of him. She didn't look at Kira. She only looked at Usen's chest, where, without him noticing, a mark had formed. A feather, made of white-gold light, floating just above his torn hoodie, slowly rotating.

"So it's true," she said. Her voice was not loud, but it vibrated in Usen's ribs like a volcano speaking. "The Phoenix has left its nest."

"I didn't steal anything," Usen said quickly. His hands were still faintly burning. He hid them.

Suzaku smiled. It was not a kind smile. It was the smile of a wildfire that finds a dry forest.

"You think the Phoenix can be stolen, little dead soul? It chooses. It has always chosen."

She reached out a finger with a nail that was a claw made of ruby. She touched the feather of light over his chest.

The world exploded.

Usen was no longer in Blaze Palace. He was in a desert of bones, 53 BC, watching an angel with white wings kneel and set his own soul on fire. He felt that angel's pain as if it were his own - the selfless agony of burning yourself to keep others warm. He saw that fire become a bird made of the first light ever created. He saw that bird bow to no one. He saw five giant beasts - a red bird, a white tiger, a black turtle with a snake, a blue dragon, a golden deer - all bow to that bird.

He came back gasping, tears made of steam running down his face. His nose was bleeding gold.

"What... what was that?"

"Azrael's sin," Suzaku whispered, and for the first time, there was reverence in her voice. "The first selfless sacrifice. The birth of the Phoenix. You have his heart."

She stood up straight and turned to the entire Palace. Her voice, when she projected it, shook the sky.

"REAPERS OF THE SOUTH! TODAY A NEW BLAZE IS BORN! BUT NOT AS YOU WERE BORN!"

Hundreds of Reapers stopped training and knelt. They all looked at Usen kneeling there in a torn NASA hoodie, hands burning with no weapon.

"THIS ONE," Suzaku shouted, "HAS AWAKENED THE FIRST FLAME BARE-HANDED! NO SCARCIUM! NO BLADE! HE KILLED A MASKED HOLLOW WITH ONLY HIS WILL! FOR A HUNDRED YEARS THE PHOENIX HAS REFUSED EVERY CAPTAIN, EVERY PRODIGY, AND IT CHOSE A BOY FROM THE HUMAN WORLD WHO DIED SAVING A CHILD HE DID NOT KNOW!"

A murmur ran through the crowd. Some were in awe. Some, Usen could see, were jealous, angry.

Suzaku looked back down at him, and her magma eyes softened just a fraction.

"That is why you will not be given a weapon," she said quietly, just to him.

"What? But -"

"Shut up and listen, little flame. A weapon is a crutch. A sword, a bow, a scythe - they channel power so you do not have to hold it in your body. You held First Flame in your bare hands and did not turn to ash. That means your soul is strong enough to hold it without a crutch. If I give you a scythe now, you will rely on it. You will become weak."

She put her hand on his head. Her hand was so hot it should have burned his scalp off, but his own Phoenix fire pushed back and they sizzled together.

"For six months, you will train with no weapon. Only your fists and your flame. You will learn to shape it, to be it. When you can burn without wanting to destroy, when you can go Berserk and still choose to protect... then, and only then, will you be worthy of summoning your Scarcium. Then you will be worthy of your true form."

Kira, still kneeling next to him, whispered, "She's talking about your Bankai, kid. In Bleach terms. Your big scythe moment. But only if you don't need it. It's some old master zen shit."

Usen looked at his hands. The white-gold flames were smaller now, dancing between his fingers like they were alive, nuzzling him.

"When do I get the scythe?" he asked again, but this time not demanding. Asking.

Suzaku's smile returned, wildfire again.

"When Brooklyn needs a Grim Reaper."

Far above Blaze Palace, beyond the sky of eternal dusk, beyond even the other Palaces, in a place where there was no air and only light, Azrael opened his eyes. The Supreme Ascendant, who had been watching for two thousand years.

He felt it. Bare-handed Phoenix, again, just like his.

"It's started," he said to no one. And the universe .