There used to be a building here. Modern, only a few years old, the acme of the architectural sciences. Optimised for heat and light, easy to access and a pleasure to work in. At the top were the luxury apartments with commanding views of the city, as the brochure put it. Shops and restaurants lined the ground floor. Sandwiched between, offices occupied by the kind of thrusting, creative business types that made this city great. Six stories high it stood, wrapped in shining glass and immaculate white cladding.

There used to be a building here until ten years ago today, when Pyrophoresis, Pyro for short, turned up and in his murderous rage burned it and slaughtered seventy-four men, women, and children.

I’m not sure what part of that day will stay with me the longest. The way the scorched ruin more resembled a rotted tooth than the building it had been. The acrid stench of incinerated flesh mingling with the burnt hair smell of the flame-resistant cladding - Pyro could even set that alight. The horror of the scene worn on the faces of the first responders as they discovered body after body after body, each indistinguishable from the rest. The indifference of Pyro when I got to him deep in the structure’s innards.

After they pulled out the corpses and pulled down the charred skeleton of the building, they paved it over and dedicated this square and memorial. A family group, man and wife, son and daughter, frozen together in white marble, smiling gently at the heavens. They stand on a plinth of black stone engraved with the names of the dead. Every now and again they add a new name when one of the wounded passes.

Every year for the last nine years, on this day, they erect a stage in the square and the great and the good dress up in funeral black and stand sweltering in the sun to remember the dead. The irony of it always strikes me in its perversity, that in the hottest part of August we commemorate those who burned alive by suffering in the summer sun, as if our discomfort could approach even a hundredth part of theirs.

The speeches are the same as the speeches of the past. What will the Prime Minister say this time? Tragic events? Terrible acts? Unfathomable loss? A debt which might never be repaid? A duty forever ongoing? His is the last speech before the silence and the laying of wreaths. He steps forward to the podium, solemn eyed and mouth set firm. He gazes out at the crowd, checks his speech is in place, grips the podium.

“We gather here again in shared sorrow,” he begins. “Across the world, messages of goodwill reach us from people touched by your loss…”

Here we are again, then. Ten thousand people pack out the square and the streets surrounding it. Ten thousand pairs of eyes staring up at me, at the Prime Minister and the other dignitaries. Who are these people here for? Ten thousand mourners after ten years?

No, they’re not here for him, for Pyro. Mass murderers might have a twisted appeal to a broken few, but too many of the faces in this crowd aren’t showing sadness. To be sure, there are the families and friends of the dead. I recognise them standing near the front and on the stage. I remember them from the endless round of inquiries and fact-finding meetings in the years after the event. Some families showed patience and restraint in the face of the tragedy, and some were possessed by the most incandescent rage, as if hurling abuse in the faces of the Talented could achieve anything of value other than a fleeting moment of catharsis.

There are others here today. Off to my right is the head of the THF ringed with a vanguard of her truest believers. Every year, the number of family mourners seems to decrease and the number of angry protesters increases. Many people are here to pay their respects to martyrs.

There’s a third group of people here today, and these are the ones I have only contempt for. I sympathise with the pain of those who lost and the anger of those who hate. I have no time for the third group, those who are here to be seen. Remembrance as political theatre. They spew their idiocy over the media and it hurts how hollow their words are. Vultures might pick over our bones but they don’t portray themselves as our leaders and moral betters.

Yet another situation when I’m glad my helmet hides my face.

“Yes, we remember those who died. We must not forget the man responsible. We may never know what drove Richard Martindale, Pyro…” the Prime Minister is almost drowned out by an angry chorus of jeers. “We may never know his motives that day, yet we will never slacken in our efforts to keep our nation safe from the dangers posed by rogue Talented”

The jeers convert into cheers. Pyro has become his own antithesis, the villain he worked hard not to be.

Pyro never understood that joining the Authority and doing what we did together was not work and not play. It was never - it is never and never will be - play. It was never a job. It is a vocation, a calling that demands sacrifice and dedication. Things Pyro couldn’t understand. When he joined I always wondered why. Although the Police called on us to help, Pyro wasn’t the type they often asked for nor did he take on covert work or spend days ploughing through investigations with uncertain outcomes. Most of our days were spent grinding through school visits and photo opportunities. Once I saw him in front of a crowd, I understood.

He was a showman and a natural comedian. Pyro was a hero in the comic book sense, ready with a bon mot and grandstanding for the cameras, more beloved than I ever have been. Crowds turned up wherever he went, no matter why he was there. He was bigger than the Beatles. Hundreds of thousands of people ensnared in his cult of personality. Who could blame them? The vast majority of the Talented are Physicals or Sensitives. Very few are Intrinsics like me or Extrinsics like him. Pyro was not just an Extrinsic, he was a show-stopper. He could manipulate heat. He specialised in making things hot, anything and everything. His control was exquisite and nothing pleased him more than the chance to show off. He’d take a bundle of matches and ignite only the centre-most match, letting it burn through the bundle. He could channel heat so precisely that none of the other matches were so much as scorched. He adored touring schools, meeting children. Anything for the crowd.

Pyro would be loving every last second of this attention if he could see it. There is an inevitable element of fame to being one of the Talented in public service. It was what Pyro lived for - he reveled in the negative attention most of all, in answering the challenges of his detractors - the adulation making up the most substantial part of his salary. He would’ve worked for free if his payment were a crowd chanting his name.

We worked so hard to keep his name out of the scandal rags. I knew the real Pyro. The one who had to be dragged out of bars when he lost the ability to stand. The one who liked to demonstrate how well vermin would erupt if you superheated their viscera and drank in the braying of his friends as he painted them in pigeon gore. “That’s so Pyro!” they used to laugh.

That’s so Pyro. When he messed up, and he did enjoy a screw-up, the messes were almost Augean in scale and intensity. For every blaze extinguished, there was a pregnancy to terminate. For every criminal caught, there was a body to bury and the bereaved to hush up. I kept his secrets and he kept the love of the masses, screeching around on his preposterous flame-motif motorbike, wearing his ridiculous suit of lights, eternally jolly and laughing. And he thought I was jealous of him! He even encouraged that belief among our colleagues, that I demanded he do better and be smarter solely because he and not I was the popular one. He didn’t know - how could he know, given his empty-headed lack of curiosity - that every step he took on his journey was one that I had trod years before. As if I didn’t have my own memorial, or that my name wasn’t engraved on plaques across Europe. As if he were the only one to enjoy the company of camp followers. Pyro never understood the nature of these things. To him, they were rewards due instead of what they truly were, a parasite gnawing away at the soul, destabilising, restless, never sated.

The Prime Minister wraps up his speech and the clock ticks around to two thirteen in the afternoon, the minute Pyro entered the building. The crowd settles into the two minutes’ silence. Fists raise in salute from the THF mob. Tears fall from the eyes of the mourners.

We don’t know why Pyro came here that day. He didn’t keep a journal. He’d been on leave at the time, probably partaking in his usual chemical and fleshly pursuits. His movements were unclear, yet he made his way here and unleashed his fury. There was CCTV, long suppressed by the government. When I watched it during the investigation, what struck me most was the lack of control. Pyro’s attacks were indiscriminate, setting aflame walls and furniture as much as people. It was like he was the at the centre of a vortex of hellish heat, his every step dragging it forward. He entered the building and people started dying. He knew where he was going, too. Down into the sub-levels. There had been a medical centre down there, and that was his destination. His anger peaked in that facility. He burned everything, rendering to atoms people and equipment alike, the concrete warping and cracking under his assault. And that’s all we know, the records of the centre having been as thoroughly reduced to ashes as everything else in there.

A round of applause breaks out as the two minutes’ silence ends. Seventy four wreaths stand waiting behind the dignitaries. Each family sent a member to bear a wreath to the memorial and those who remain unidentified get a celebrity to honour them. This year, it’s my turn to carry out the duty. We collect the wreaths and make our way across the plaza towards the memorial, the crowd massed around our path, held back by a rope barrier. The Prime Minister leads the way, Prince Charles at his side. Wet eyes shine up at us and vengeful eyes glower down.

There was a price to be paid. The public outpouring of grief at the butcher’s bill was matched by fury that such an act could happen. The fact that a show trial was impossible after I carried Pyro’s body out of the ruin did nothing to deflate the swelling, rancorous mob that appeared every day outside the Campus and later outside Parliament. It wasn’t the first time a Talented had killed or committed an atrocity. The scale of the disaster and Pyro’s status demanded action and accountability. Politicians love it when people demand them to take action and be accountable, it’s what they get out of bed for.

The debates in Parliament were debates in name only. That some Normies were envious of privileges and rewards the Talented received was beyond question and now the fusion of envy and righteous anger caused a rising tide of anti-Talent sentiment across the country reflected inevitably in Parliament. The THF had long been calling for compulsory registration and scrutiny of the Talented, making the entire community into the enemy. Parliament usually tutted and prevaricated and made excuses or noted with concern or took the matter under advisement. This time, politicians felt the wind of change and proposed policies that went beyond the wildest dreams of the THF. Not only were we to be registered and monitored, but failure to register was made a crime. Failure to notify a change of address was a crime. Anyone could look up your address if they had your name, or see if a Talented lived in their town. Such laws dragged us down to the level of sex offenders, as if a Talented were as much of a threat to your children as an unrepentant paedophile. They made Zeus and myself the enforcers of the law. They made us build a prison on our home base, the Campus, and required us to staff and maintain it. They said we had failed in our duty of care. They said that because we were powerful, we were also responsible. They turned us against ourselves and we agreed to it all, meek as mice. We were architects of our own betrayal.

Wreaths line the base of the statue. The RAF band play Elgar’s Nimrod as we dignitaries ringing the memorial take our turn. A grim-faced man watches me. He was one of the calm ones at the reconciliation meetings. His son was a security guard at the building that afternoon, the first person to confront Pyro when he entered and the first to die. He comes over to where I’m waiting. His mouth twitches impatiently, the words inside are fighting to get out, but he holds them back and settles for placing a hand on my shoulder. I never have the words to comfort these people. There are so many of them, the Normies, their lives so fleeting even when disaster does not take them, and they are so careless with their time. My condolences ring hollow in my ears when I say them so I have no hope this man would take any comfort from them. I turn my mask towards him and hang my head. He grimaces and pats my shoulder before walking away.

Two questions battle for answer within me. Why don’t I feel guilty? Why should I feel guilty? Over the long years of my life, I’ve made many mistakes and done as many immoral things as heroic acts. Regret corrodes and while I have much I think I should regret, I do not. All my life, I strove to do what was best for the many. I accepted the duty for what it was, an obligation. Surely for every service performed there must be a consideration given? That was the old code, even when all you received was gratitude. Pyro broke the chain. Like the grieving father, I didn’t make the world be this way. Here we are, Normies and Talented, clinched together in a mutually repugnant never-ending dance of death. It used to be different. It was better before Pyro came here.

When I arrived here ten years ago, the fire was already out. I landed in the road, the tarmac in places swirled into still-molten curlicues. Jagged holes in the walls marked where panels and concrete had spalled away and pools of molten glass were clinking and plinking as they cooled. The fire chief ran up to me, his eyes wide and face immobile.

“I don’t know how many got out,” he said, “I sent a team in and I heard them screaming over the radio.”

“Has anyone else been inside?” I grabbed the fire chief by the shoulder to get his attention.

“I sent SAR teams moving through the upper floors after the fire went out. It just went out, like someone flicked a switch on it.”

“It just went out?”

Pyro. Nobody else had the power to do this. I took off and hovered over the building, my Sense piercing through the cracked concrete panels. Several teams of firemen were inching their way through the rubble. There was something, someone motionless in the basement. I returned to the fire chief’s side.

“Chief, tell me about the sub-levels,” I said. The fire chief had hid head in his hands. I shook him gently and repeated my question. His mouth opened once or twice before any sound came out.

“There was a clinic in the basement,” he said. “Take the stairwell to the right of the lift.”

I’d come prepared for smoke and activated the rebreather module attached to my suit before I made my way inside. I had seen my share of serious fires yet this was at another level. Usually you got some idea of what the place looked like before the fire, portions of charred furniture, or decorations clinging to the walls. In here, little remained except piles of ash, the walls barren and blackened. Two firemen were kneeling in the corner next to a pile of cinders. They were weeping. A stretcher lay beside them. I got closer and saw that pile of cinders was shot through with bones. It had been a person once. My gorge rose and I stumbled back. I paused in the stairwell, my mind spinning. The question ‘why?’ dominated my thoughts. Pyro, for all of his flaws, was not homicidal. Careless, clumsy, yes, not psychopathic.

The walls of the stairwell were a frenzy of cracks, as if constructed out of a giant concrete jigsaw puzzle. In a few places, the steel rebar had melted and run out of the cracks, dribbling down the walls like the steel was little more than candle wax. I headed down. As I reached the bottom, I could hear a faint sound of coughing. I followed the hacking through the rooms of the basement, where the doors had vanished in the intense heat. Ash, nothing but ash in the rooms. Ash and incinerated people. I counted four or five bodies, whether they belonged to clinic staff or patients or firemen was hard to tell. I couldn’t stand to look for more than a moment before my brain dragged my eyes away from the horror. My Sense reached out and there was someone else down here, two rooms away, sat on the floor, arms wrapped around their knees.

It was Pyro.

He looked up as I entered the room, expression sleepy and eyes half-lidded. He was naked and coated in ash, except where his tears had washed tracks on his face. His hands were black and wizened, as though baked for too long in an oven. Somehow he’d managed to burn himself.

“Huh,” his voice never rose from a hoarse, exhausted whisper, “they sent you. Got any water?”

“What did you do?”

“Pull up a chair, I’ll tell you all about it.”

“Pyro.”

“Oh, no chairs left, I burned them all? Sorry about that.” He drops his eyes to the floor

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

“I’ve fucked it, haven’t I?” he said. “To be precise, first they fucked me. I went to them for help and they fucked me good.”

“Richard. Pyro. Who are they and how did they fuck you?”

His eyes snap up to my helmet.

“You were right. I should’ve listened, but you were right,” he said, followed by a cough. “I think I burned my throat. Did you know how much a burned throat hurts? Wish I didn’t.”

“You need to come upstairs with me.”

“I’m not going anywhere. You know that feeling when you’ve over-used your Talent and there’s nothing left?”

I shook my head. Extrinsics could push themselves that far, but it was rare.

“Just me, then. Don’t worry, I’m played out. Don’t think I could even light a fart right now.”

I sat on the floor opposite him, kicking up a puff of ash.

“Pyro…”

“Richard. I’m not Pyro. I’m Richard.”

“Richard. Please come with me. You’re going to have to answer for this. It’s better if you come willingly.”

“I can’t leave.”

“Why not?”

“It’ll just start burning everything again,” he said as fresh tears welled in his eyes. “Just knock the building down on top of me. Or kill me. You’re a killer. Step over here and kill me, break my neck, crush my head.”

“What?”

“I’ve fucked us all, Red. I tried to get out of it and I ended up fucking it all up.”

“I don’t understand, Richard.”

He sighed.

“I can’t control it,” he said, tone flat and expression blank.

I looked at his scorched, shrivelled hands and naked body. He’d burned the clothes off his body and destroyed his own hands. The pattern of indiscriminate burning. The sheer intensity of the heat he’d unleashed. He was telling the truth, he’d lost control.

And he was right. He had to die or the pattern would repeat when he recovered. I stood up and brushed the ash from my body.

“Any last words?” I said.

“Tell them I’m sorry.”

“That’s it?”

“Nothing I say will ever be enough.”

“Stand up, please.”

I crossed the room and moved behind him as he rose.

“Goodbye, my friend,” he said.

I wrapped my right arm around his head and jerked it upwards, sharp and hard. His body slumped into my arms, one last breath sighing out.

“I was never your friend,” I said, hefting his body onto my shoulder, carrying him out into the uncertain light.