29. Lena
Lena
Somewhere in the distance, I hear sirens.
At first they don’t feel real. Just a thin, wavering sound buried under the crack and roar of the fire, too far away to matter yet.
For one stupid second, when Knox gets me through the broken wall and out onto the walkway, I think the worst of it is behind us. Then I turn, look back, and understand all over again that it isn’t. Vale and Havoc are not with us. They’re still inside. They didn’t make it out.
I can see what he’s about to do before he even says it.
Knox turns toward the wall, and I grab his arm before I even know I’m moving. “No.”
He looks at me, and there’s nothing uncertain in his face. “I have to go back.”
Another crash sounds from inside the room we just escaped, louder this time, deeper, followed by a rush of sparks through the broken opening. The heat pushes out in a wave hard enough to make me flinch. Then I hear it, the awful groan of the ceiling giving way somewhere inside.
My whole body goes cold.
“Knox—”
The rest of the ceiling comes down with a violent roar, and I scream before I can stop myself. Not his name. Not anything useful. Just sound.
I wrench free of him and lunge toward the doorway, toward the room, toward the fire and the smoke and the stupid, impossible thought that if I can just get back inside fast enough I can do something, anything. I can’t stand out here while they burn?—
Knox catches me around the waist and hauls me back hard enough that my feet leave the ground for a second. “No.”
I fight him. “Let me go!”
“You go in there, you die.”
“I don’t care!”
That’s not true.
Or maybe it is for the one second I say it.
The smoke is rolling thicker now. Fire is snapping across the ceiling of the second room too, slower than the first, but coming. I can barely see through the hole anymore, just orange and movement and falling debris and nothing that looks survivable.
I twist in Knox’s grip, trying to get free. “Havoc!” I scream. “Vale!”
No answer.
That’s worse than if I heard them screaming.
Knox turns me to face him and grips both sides of my head, forcing me to look at him instead of the fire. “Lena.”
I’m crying now, which makes me angrier than anything else. My eyes sting from the smoke and panic and the force of it all. “No, no, no, you can’t?—”
He kisses me. Just like that.
Hard and sudden and warm in the middle of all that heat and terror, cutting straight through the words in my mouth. It isn’t soft. It isn’t romantic. It feels like a decision. Like something he gives me because there isn’t time for anything slower.
When he pulls back, I’m too stunned to fight for half a second.
That’s all he needs. He pushes me backward through the exterior doorway onto the walkway, one hand still on my shoulder to keep me moving, his eyes locked on mine.
“Stay out here,” he says.
My voice breaks. “Knox?—”
“I’ll be back.” He says it like an order. Like a promise. Like the difference between them doesn’t matter right now. Then he turns and goes back into the smoke before I can stop him.
I try to go after him. I barely get two steps before someone grabs me hard around the arms and yanks me back. I twist on instinct, half-wild with it, and find myself staring at a firefighter in a yellow helmet and breathing mask, shouting something I can’t hear over the fire.
“Let me go!” I scream.
He doesn’t. He drags me farther back from the walkway, putting his body between me and the room as another team rushes past with hoses and axes and a violence of their own, organized, trained, indifferent to the fact that for me this is not a structure fire, not a job, not an incident.
It’s them.
“There are people in there!” I shout, coughing on the smoke. “Three men, three men are still in there!”
The firefighter says something into the radio clipped to his shoulder, then tries to push me farther back again.
I fight him for half a second, then stop because the sound of the water hitting the flames changes everything.
Steam bursts up in white clouds. Somebody smashes a window three rooms down.
Orders get shouted. Boots pound over concrete.
The whole motel seems to tilt around the effort of containing something that already feels too far gone.
“There are three men in there,” I tell another firefighter who comes toward me. “One of them went back in. The other two were trapped. Please.” I hear how thin my voice sounds and hate it.
The woman in front of me, older, soot-smudged, calm in the terrifying way competent people are calm, nods once and says, “We heard you.”
That should help. It doesn’t.
I stand there in the parking lot with smoke in my lungs and ash settling on my skin and watch the room burn while strangers try to save the people who somehow stopped being strangers to me before I noticed it happening.
And in the awful pause between one shouted order and the next, I finally admit it to myself.
I care about them.
Not in the abstract. Not in the convenient, temporary way I’ve been pretending. Not as a side effect of fear or adrenaline or sex or dependency. I care in the stupid, dangerous, irreversible way that makes everything worse because it means there is something here to lose.
I care about all of them.
The realization is so clear it almost feels cruel.
Of course this is when I know it. Here, standing outside while fire crawls across the roofline and men in helmets run in and out of the smoke and I have no control over anything except whether I keep breathing.
I wrap my arms around myself because I can’t seem to stop shaking.
What if one of them doesn’t come out?
What if none of them do?
A firefighter passes me carrying a section of hose over one shoulder, another following with a pry bar.
Somebody farther down the line shouts for more pressure.
Water slams into the outer wall. Steam erupts again and for a moment the doorway vanishes behind a white cloud so thick I can’t see anything.
I take a step forward before I realize I’ve moved.
The woman firefighter catches my arm. “Stay back. Or you’ll get seriously injured.”
I don’t care, I think. Let me get hurt. All of this is happening because of me.
I pray. I don’t mean to. The words just start happening in my head because there’s nowhere else for them to go.
Please.
Please.
Please.
I haven’t prayed in years, not properly, not with any belief behind it, but that doesn’t seem to matter. I stand there in the motel lot with smoke in my lungs and soot on my skin and I pray.
The firefighters keep working. Water hammers the side of the building. Steam rolls up in hot white bursts. Someone is shouting near the engines, someone else near the broken room, and I keep staring at the same place until my eyes burn.
Then movement. At first I think it’s another firefighter coming out through the smoke.
Then the shape changes. One man. Then more than one. A staggered outline forcing itself through the white and orange like something my brain refuses to trust fast enough.
Knox.
For one insane second, he looks like a mirage, not real at all, just a figure made of smoke and heat.
Then I see the shape of Vale dragged half against him, Havoc on the other side, all three of them blackened with soot and ash, moving with the ugly, stubborn momentum of men who have decided not to die yet.
My heart slams so hard it hurts.
“Knox!”
I don’t remember starting to run, only that I do and then someone grabs for me and misses because I’m already there, close enough to see Vale’s face gray under the bruises, Havoc coughing hard enough to fold at the waist, Knox still on his feet somehow, one arm under Vale, the other shoving Havoc ahead of him.
The firefighters take over in a rush, helping Vale and Havoc who are coughing.
Knox takes one more step toward me like he was aiming for me specifically, like he needed to see me standing there before his body was allowed to fail.
His eyes find mine through the soot.
Then his knees buckle.