Simon’s fingers were chafing where they pinched the match. He was holding his breath in his concentration, trembling a little, as he stared at the phosphorus-dusted head of the matchstick and tried with all his might to set it on fire.

  After a minute he released the breath he was holding and, sputtering, stuffed the match back into his breast pocket. He huffed and rubbed his forehead, nursing another migraine, before turning back to scrutinize the video playing on his computer.

  Grainy, low-res security footage played and replayed the most traumatic ten seconds of his life in a loop. It showed him, short and prim and flustered, stumbling before the chess table like he was about to faint, before erupting into a full-body fireball that sent a plume of evil-looking smoke guttering against the ceiling. On the periphery, other contestants and spectators scrambled, as surprised by this explosion as he was.

  Simon picked at the bandages on his neck. A gas leak, is what he’d been told by the stammering, incompetent nurses at the trauma center. Some sort of small, contained gas explosion probably sparked by unlucky friction.

  That absurd excuse hadn’t felt sufficient when he first heard it, and he’d been completely blasted on morphine at the time. With a day’s afterthought, Simon had come to the conclusion that no conventional explanations were satisfactory, and had made the logical leap that his spontaneous combustion had some sort of correlation with the feverish, almost hallucinogenic state of panic he’d experienced in the moments preceding. Whether this relationship was correlative or causative was what he intended to find out.

  And so, here he was, curled in on himself in his computer chair, careful not to let the livid surface of his burned skin come into contact with more than it had to, trying to light matches on fire with his mind. He’d felt briefly foolish, but he reminded himself that he was just eliminating possibilities. This was an objective, scientific endeavor, and not something to be ashamed of.

  Besides, there was nobody here to judge him. His cavernous Eagan home was empty, the cleaning staff done for the day. To fear the recrimination of someone who wasn’t even there was counterintuitive. Simon reminded himself, as he often did, not to let his growing fear of Father rule him internally, not to let it conquer-

  His phone rang, and the contact on the screen flashed: Father. Simon started as if he’d been kicked, reached for the phone, hesitated, cursed, and then picked it up.

  “Hello,” he said, voice cracking a little with disuse. Simon felt a pang of embarrassment.

  “You’re up.” Father’s voice was an opaque, cool monotone.

  “The sedatives have mostly worn off.”

  “The doctor prescribed you rest.”

  “I’m not exerting myself unduly, Father.”

  A silence on the line. A whimpering, childish part of Simon hoped that Father would ask how he was feeling. Then the executive part of his brain stamped on that impulse with as much prejudice as it could manage.

  Father was waiting for Simon to speak again. A favorite tactic of his.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  “What, er- Did you mean to call me about something?”

  “Don’t be inane.”

  Simon felt too exhausted to be aggravated. He relented immediately. “Father, what is it? Are you displeased about something?”

  “You know quite well what I’m displeased about.”

  Simon’s mind raced as fast as his heart. What had he done so wrong? Father can’t possibly be blaming him for the explosion? The hospital bill, that can’t have been outside of Father’s means. Maybe the interruption had derailed some of Father’s work? Maybe-

  Oh.

  “I didn’t technically lose the chess match.”

  “Only due to freak luck.”

  Luck! Simon repressed the urge to laugh bitterly. The skin on his shoulders stretched and cracked and burned. “Father, I had to go to the hospital.”

  “And you should count yourself fortunate. Had that woman,” Father said the last word with uncharacteristic venom, “been allowed to play her next three moves, you’d have lost.”

  “I had escape routes. Her rook-”

  “You were floundering. Any half-blind moron could’ve seen that. She had you, Simon. You were about to lose.”

  Simon leaned back into his chair, ignoring the white-hot protestations of his skin, and stared holes in the ceiling. A fury brewed in his gut, tempered by his fear. He couldn’t believe that this was the conversation he was having.

  “Nobody knows this. My record- Our record is still spotless. My ELO’s intact.”

  “Damn the ELO, it’s not about that. This isn’t about the chess. This is about the mountain of resources that has been invested in you, Simon, and your recalcitrance, your juvenile disregard for the privileges that have been given and given and given again, a colossal effort being burned for a child who refuses to meet his potential.”

  Refuses? Refuses? Simon felt like slumping out of his chair and muttering the word over and over like a madman. Simon spent every waking minute of every day trying with all his might. Refuses?

  “I’m sorry that you’re disappointed,” Simon said, voice tight. “I’ll do my best not to let it-”

  “Your best is flagging. You’ve plateaued. Your growth rates in every metric but plasticity and retention are failing to meet predicted targets. You’re failing, and I, by extension, am being made into a failure.”

  Simon felt a tear leak from his eye. He slammed the heel of his hand into his head to dislodge it, bit his finger to keep from crying. He took a mental five count before responding, voice mercifully even. “I’m only fifteen. I still have three years to meet-”

  “Don’t expect me home until this weekend. I’ve made an executive decision to invest more time with Sabine.”

  The name fueled a flare of hatred in him. He hated his half-sister, resented her mewling childishness, her pretensions of musical genius, the unthinking way the media fawned over her, and how eagerly she lapped that adoration up. The fact that she was only four years old was no excuse. He had known better at that age.

  “I plan to do my best to justify all your hard work, Father,” Simon said. He left a silence of his own there, for Father to finally relent, to ask how his son, who was nursing several square feet of burns, how the fuck he was doing.

  As the silence drew on, Simon felt something in his stomach give way. A pit was opening, swallowing him, and at the bottom of that pit a flame was being fanned. He felt a fever of anger grip and overtake and consume him. He clenched the phone with whitening fingers, grit his teeth, squeezed more loathful tears from his eyes as his Father breathed easily on the other line.

  Say it, he mentally demanded. Say it. Ask me how I am. Ask me if I’m hurting.

  Silence. Breathing.

  Say it, you fucker. You ghoul. You charlatan quack asshole douche fucker dad say it, say it, SAY IT.

  His father hung up.

  The fury in Simon’s chest hit a fever pitch, and the match stowed in his shirt pocket burst into flames.