Fireboy pushed up through the subsoil into the hot dry earth beneath the bonfire. With a thrust he emerged into its raging heart, sloughing earth and ashes from his fat little torso. He squatted cross-legged in the centre of the heat, mouth pressed into a line, looking this way and that.

‘How dare they,’ he growled.

Beyond curtains of flame he saw people gathered around, people smiling and laughing, people holding hands up to the heat, people poking sticks into his blazing domain. Everywhere children twirled sparklers in shapeless circles.

'How dare they play with fire.'

Fireboy spat a fat gobbet of sparks into the night. A man shied away, lifting aside his son, then laughed as the sparks showered into blackness. He took his place near the fire again, the boy tucking his head into his father's neck. Look at you, thought Fireboy. A stupid little boy. I could tell you a thing or two about fear. Try getting through this life without a father. Or a mother. Try that and see if it makes you cry.

The boy squinted into the fire; it seemed to Fireboy that he looked directly into his own fiery little eyes.

'You’ll see something soon enough,' he growled.

Fireboy had lately finished an apprenticeship in Australia. Now that was a place where you could have a fire. You could burn up whole communities there, destroy human hopes and dreams, take actual lives. Over there, if the mood took you, you could scorch the earth.

Not that he’d done much scorching. They'd never allowed him close to the action, always stuck him on a hill as look-out for the dousing helicopters. ‘When you grow up, Fireboy. You have to learn the when and the where even if you do know the how.’ That was the sort of thing the Firemeisters who owned him said. ‘You need to mature, Fireboy.’ Mature? He was mature. Mature enough to know that the most satisfying sight on this earth was a human torch.

And now this. His first solo responsibility. A bonfire party in England.

Not exactly 9/11.

‘It doesn’t matter what the job is,’ they'd said, ‘there’s always an opportunity.'

Fireboy laughed, and with it waves of red heat pressed out from his body into the fire. People shielded their faces, made remarks about the amazing fire, how it was all in the construction, how well ash trees burned. At that point the boy who had been frightened picked up a stone and threw it hard into the heart of the fire. It struck Fireboy on the head. He screamed. White flame streamed from the wound. He stood up, shook his arms, turned his face to the boy, hunched himself over and growled low and deep.

He called on forces deep beneath the crust of the earth.

The bonfire exploded into white.

The spectators cooked instantly, remaining upright. Heat pulsed for hundreds of miles, deep into the countryside. It took everything with it.

Except the little boy.

Who stood by his father’s corpse, untouched.

And alone.