Clara Dee Fuego Official

"You have the Spark," he said, kneeling to her level. "Not the petty fire of matches or gasoline. The first fire. The one Prometheus stole. The one that makes stars jealous."

She finds children who set things on fire when they are angry—or sad, or scared. Children with too much light inside and no one to teach them the difference between a hearth and a hell. She stays with them for a month, a season, a year. She teaches them to bake bread with their palms, to forge plowshares from scrap metal, to light a candle for a dead loved one and let the smoke carry their goodbye.

Her grandmother.

The explosion that followed cracked the salt flat open. A pillar of white-gold fire rose into the sky, visible from three villages away. The Ember Council screamed as their gifts were unmade—Soot-Marie's smoke turned to harmless fog, Mr. Cinder's violet flame guttered into a match-strike. Clara walked through the inferno untouched, cut her grandmother's bonds with a finger of heat so precise it left no mark on the skin, and carried the old woman out into the cold, clean air of dawn.

Her grandmother, a woman of river-stone silence, put a hand on Clara's shoulder. "Do not go with the ash-hearted," she whispered. "Your fire is for bread and birth. His fire is for thrones." clara dee fuego

She looked at the black candle. Then at Mr. Cinder's patient, hungry smile. Then at the seven Ember Council members standing in the shadows, waiting to see if their little weapon would finally ignite into something monstrous.

Not her grandmother. Not the room. Not the Conflagration. "You have the Spark," he said, kneeling to her level

Clara Dee Fuego closed her eyes.