24. Ryder
RYDER
I hear the alarm before I hear her voice.
A thin, vicious shriek cuts through the phone speaker, tearing across the engine bay while I stand with one hand braced on the open locker and my other wrapped around my cell. Alex’s name is bright on the screen. Her breathing is wrong. Coughing, dragging, scraped raw by smoke.
Then the station tones drop.
Mason Street apartments. Structure fire. Possible entrapment. First floor. Elderly female. Second victim.
My blood goes cold in a way fire never makes it.
Josh looks up from beside the engine, one boot half-laced, his hand frozen on the pull strap. He sees my face before dispatch repeats the address. Whatever is left between us from me keeping his sister’s secret disappears under the sound of Alex coughing into my ear.
I shove the phone against my shoulder and drag on my turnout pants.
“Alex.” My voice comes out flat. Too controlled. Wrong for the way my hands are moving. “Stay low.”
She coughs again. The alarm screams behind her. I catch a broken sound that might be my name, then Mrs. Vance coughing, then the scrape of something heavy against the floor.
Josh is across the bay before I get my coat buckled. “Is that her?”
I don’t answer. I can’t put her name to the fire we’re going to respond to…not yet. If I do, my brain might split clean down the middle and I can’t have that.
Casey yanks the driver’s door open. Captain Bell is already barking assignments. Gear slams. Air packs thump against shoulders. The bay doors rise with a grinding roar, and wet daylight spills across the floor.
My phone crackles.
“Fire,” Alex manages.
Then the line fills with coughing so hard I feel it in my own chest.
I climb into the engine with the phone still in my hand. Bell grabs it from me before I can argue and looks at the screen long enough to understand exactly whose call it is.
“Cook.” His voice cuts through the siren as we pull out. “You do your job, or you stay outside.”
The engine lurches onto the road.
I meet his eyes, and whatever he sees there makes his jaw tighten.
“Do your job,” he repeats.
I nod once because that is the only answer I have.
Josh sits across from me, already masked by fear he doesn’t know how to hide.
His knee bounces once before he pins it still with his hand.
There is soot on the cuff of his coat from a call earlier.
He keeps staring at my phone in Bell’s hand, like if he looks hard enough, he can drag his sister through it.
Bell puts the phone near his radio. Alex’s call is still connected. The personal alarm wails. Her breathing fades in and out beneath it.
“Alexandra,” Josh says, and the use of her full name tears through me worse than yelling would have.
No answer.
The engine takes the corner hard onto Mason. Smoke is already visible above the roofline when we hit the block. Not rolling from the whole building yet. Concentrated low and ugly from the first-floor hall and one unit near the front.
Mrs. Vance’s curtains hang crooked in the window. The living room window is open a few inches.
The alarm is louder outside.
She did that. Alex got it near the window.
“That’s my girl.” I whisper to no one.
The engine stops and I’m out with the rest of them, boots hitting wet pavement, helmet down, gloves on. Rain spots the visor. Neighbors crowd the far sidewalk, held back by a cop I barely register. Someone is crying. Someone else is pointing toward the first-floor windows.
I see Alex’s car at the curb.
Then nothing matters but the window where I know she’s at.
Bell catches the back of my coat before I break formation. “Cook.”
“I’ve got the window.”
He nods, his helmet bobbing. “You go with Casey. Mask on. Two victims. Just like any other call. Quick grab.”
The order saves me from myself because there’s no way in hell I’m not getting her.
I mask up, grab the tool, and cross the slick grass with Casey at my shoulder. Josh moves with the hose team toward the hall entrance, but his eyes stay on the window until smoke takes him from view.
The window frame is swollen, half-jammed, the latch bent where someone hit it from inside. The glass cracks under the Halligan and gives with a sharp burst. I clear the frame with one sweep, rain and smoke mixing in my face while Casey calls for the stretcher.
Inside, the apartment is black-gray and orange at the edges. Heat presses hard from the hall side, but the living room is still reachable. Barely. The personal alarm screams from the floor.
I go in low.
The floor is hot through my gloves. Smoke chews at the room in layers. TV flickering on mute. Tea cup tipped near the recliner. Bear spray on the couch. A heavy flashlight near the window, streaked with paint and metal dust.
Then I see Mrs. Vance.
She’s on the floor near the couch, curled toward the window with Alex’s sweatshirt sleeve pressed across her mouth. Alex is beside her, one arm thrown across Mrs. Vance’s waist, fingers locked in the older woman’s housecoat like she refused to let go even after she went unconscious.
And the roof is hanging on by a thread, chunks of material already scattered around and across them.
Alex’s eyes are closed.
Her face is gray under soot.
Her body doesn’t move.
Casey shoves past my shoulder. “Move.”
The command gets through because it has to. Otherwise, I’m going to shatter.
I pry Alex’s fingers loose from Mrs. Vance’s housecoat as gently as gloves allow, and Casey takes the older woman first. Mrs. Vance coughs when he lifts her, a weak, wet sound that means she’s alive. Alive matters. Alive is a word I understand.
Alex is silent, and I don’t see her chest rising.
I get one arm beneath her shoulders and one beneath her knees. She’s too limp. I’ve carried people out of smoke before. Dead weight has a language that’s easy and complicated all at the same time. My body knows it before my mind is willing to let it be true.
My head smacks the window frame on the way out. I barely feel it.
Hands reach for us from outside. Josh takes the back of my coat. Someone else yells for EMS. I keep Alex against my chest until Casey’s voice cuts through the mask and rain and sirens.
“Put her down, Cook.”
I drop to my knees in the wet grass with her still in my arms.
“Now.”
I lay her on the stretcher they shove under us. My gloves go to her neck before anyone can stop me. Pulse. Find it. Find it now.
Casey’s hand knocks mine aside.
I almost hit him.
Josh gets there first.
His hand clamps around the shoulder strap of my air pack and hauls me back just enough for Casey to get in. Josh doesn’t look at me. His face is wrecked, eyes locked on Alex while EMS moves around her with oxygen and shears and practiced hands that do not belong to me.
“Don’t make them work around you,” he says quietly.
The words are rough. Almost gone under the noise.
I stay on my knees.
I should be fighting this fire. I should be running back into the building to help. But I can’t move from this spot. I can’t let the last time I see her be this.
Casey has two fingers at Alex’s throat. Another medic fits oxygen over her face. Someone cuts through the sweatshirt at her collar. Her arm falls away from her side, slack and wrong, palm open to the rain.
“Pulse,” Casey calls. “I’ve got a weak pulse.”
My breath comes back wrong.
Weak pulse. Not enough. Better than nothing. Not good enough.
They lift her onto the stretcher. I stand too fast and nearly go after them before Josh’s hand locks around my coat again. This time he looks at me. His eyes are red, wild, and familiar in their terror.
Behind him, Mrs. Vance is on a second stretcher, oxygen mask fogging over her mouth. Her hand shoots out when they roll her past, catching my sleeve with surprising strength.
I lean close before anyone tells me not to.
“She wouldn’t leave me,” Mrs. Vance rasps beneath the mask.
Her fingers dig into my coat.
“Window,” she coughs. “Hit the alarm. Put sleeve over my mouth.” Her eyes sharpen for one second, watery and fierce. “Stubborn girl.”
Then the medic moves her away.
I turn back to Alex’s stretcher.
They are loading her now with the oxygen and a monitor and a whole ass bag of supplies they’re going to need to keep her alive. Words I know too well are leaving Casey and the other EMT’s mouth. Smoke inhalation. Unresponsive. Possible head impact. Prep airway.
I try to climb in after her.
Casey puts one hand against my chest. “No, Ryder.”
I look down at his hand.
Josh steps beside me before I do something that gets me dragged away from the ambulance by people who know me.
“Ride with me,” he says.
I don’t recognize his voice. Maybe he doesn’t either.
The ambulance doors close and that sound will live in me forever.
The ride to the hospital happens in Josh’s truck because someone takes my gear, someone else tells me to get out of the road, and Josh keeps a hand hooked in my shirt like I might run alongside the ambulance if he lets go.
He drives badly. Too fast, then too slow, braking hard at a yellow light before running it when the ambulance clears the intersection ahead of us.
Neither of us speaks.
My phone is in my hand, and I don’t remember how it got there. Alex’s name is still in my recent list with the time beside it. I stare at it until the numbers blur.
At the hospital, fluorescent light replaces smoke.
They take Alex through one set of doors and Mrs. Vance through another.
Alex’s parents arrive within minutes, her mother wearing two different colored slippers and no coat.
Nia is with them, one arm around Mom’s shoulders, her own face pale under the calm she is forcing into place.
Remy shows up still in uniform, rain in his hair, jaw tight when he sees the soot on my gear and the blood at my temple from the window frame.
No one asks me if I’m okay, which is good because I wouldn’t know what lie to use.
A nurse stops us outside the treatment area with a hand raised, practiced and kind and unbearable. “Immediate family only right now.”
I stop.
Josh nearly runs into my back.
For one long second, I wait for the line to hold. Brother. Parents. Not me. Never me, no matter how many locks I installed, how many nights I watched, how many times she slept in my shirt.
Josh looks at the nurse.
“He stays.”
The nurse hesitates.
Alex’s mother turns, eyes swollen and wet, and reaches for my wrist. Her fingers close over skin, soot and all. “He stays.”
No speech. No forgiveness. No permission I don’t deserve.
Just Alex’s family circle opening up just enough to let me in.
We wait in a room with beige walls and a coffee machine that burns everything it touches.
Josh paces until Nia puts both hands on his face and makes him sit.
He lasts twelve seconds. Alex’s father stands near the wall with his arms folded, staring at nothing.
Her mother holds the sweatshirt they cut off Alex, folded in her lap inside a clear plastic bag.
My hands still smell like smoke even after I scrub them raw in the bathroom sink.
Mrs. Vance is awake before Alex.
A nurse tells us that she has smoke irritation, minor burns on one hand, and is only being held for observation because of her age. Minor. The word should help. It does, until I remember why.
Alex kept the sleeve over Mrs. Vance’s mouth. Alex got the window open. Alex set off the alarm. Alex protected someone else while smoke filled her lungs and then she used her body to protect the other woman.
Josh looks at me from across the waiting room. He doesn’t tell me to stop moving. He doesn’t look away either.
“She got her out,” he says finally.
I drag my gaze to him.
He swallows hard. “Mrs. Vance. She’d be dead if Alex left her behind to try and save herself.”
I nod because if I try to speak, the sound that comes out will not belong in a hospital waiting room or any public space.
The doctor comes through the doors a few minutes later. Maybe an hour. Maybe three. I’m not sure because time has stopped behaving in ways I can measure or even understand.
Everyone stands.
She looks at Alex’s parents first. “Alex is still unconscious.”
Her mother makes a sound so small I almost miss it.
“We’re treating the smoke inhalation and monitoring her oxygen levels closely. She also appears to have struck her head when she lost consciousness. The CT shows swelling on the brain.”
The room holds completely still.
Brain. Swelling.
I know those words. I know all the words she says after them. Monitoring. Neurology. Too early to know. Watching pressure. Keeping her stable.
I understand every piece of it.
None of it gives me anything to do to help her.
I can break a window. I can crawl through smoke. I can carry her out of a burning room with my knees sinking into wet grass and my hands locked beneath her body.
I cannot reach inside her skull and make the swelling stop. I can’t drag the smoke out of her lungs.
The doctor is still talking when Josh’s hand closes around my arm.
This time, he isn’t holding me back.
He’s holding on, because he’s just as close to breaking as I am.