I turned back toward the entrance, but the path I'd come through was gone now. Flames climbed where the doorway had been, fed by something that burned hotter and faster than wood should burn. I tried left. A wall of fire. Right. More flames, eating through what used to be the storage room.
The building groaned around me, a deep structural sound I knew too well.
My radio crackled, Liam's voice cutting through the static.
"Cal! Cal, do you copy? We just got a message from dispatch. Lucy Moreno called in. She's not inside. Repeat, she is not inside the building. The café closed early today. No one is in there."
Relief hit me so hard my knees nearly buckled. She wasn't here. She was safe. I'd run into this building for nothing, but it didn't matter because Lucy was alive.
"Copy," I managed. "I'm heading for an exit."
"Front's fully involved. There's a service door, southeast corner. Can you get there?"
I turned, tried to orient myself. The kitchen, maybe. Or what used to be the kitchen. The fire had transformed everything, eaten through walls and fixtures until the layout I thought I knew had become a maze of smoke and flame.
"I'm moving."
A beam crashed down somewhere to my left. I dodged, hit a wall that shouldn't have been there, bounced off and kept going. The smoke was so thick I couldn't see more than a foot in front of my face. My mask was running low on air. Every breath tasted like burning.
"Cal, what's your position?"
I didn't know. I'd lost track of direction, lost track of the exits, lost track of everything except the need to keep moving. Left felt wrong. Right felt wrong. The fire was everywhere now, closing in, and I couldn't find the way out.
"Cal! Do you copy?"
Static. Something had hit my radio. Debris, maybe, or it was the heat warping the electronics. Liam's voice dissolved into crackling noise, then silence.
The ceiling groaned overhead. I looked up and saw the cracks spreading, saw the way the roof was bowing inward, and I knew with absolute certainty that I had maybe two minutes before the whole thing came down.
I thought about Lucy. About the last time I'd seen her, the way she'd looked at me in the firehouse kitchen when she found out about the promise. I'd let her walk away because I thought I didn't deserve her, thought loving her was a betrayal of Mateo.
Then I was going to die in a fire, and she'd never know that the promise stopped mattering the moment I fell in love with her.
She'd never know that I would have chosen heranyway. That I did choose her, every day, every moment, even when I was too scared to admit it.
A voice cut through the smoke. Not Liam's voice. Not anyone from my crew.
"Cal!"
I thought I was hallucinating. The heat, the smoke, the lack of oxygen—your brain did strange things when it was dying.
Then she grabbed my arm.
Lucy. In jeans and a jacket, no gear, no protection, nothing but sheer desperate will. Her face was streaked with soot, her eyes streaming, a wet cloth pressed over her nose and mouth.
"This way," she shouted. "I know the way out." She coughed, choking on smoke, but kept pulling.
"What are you?—"
She didn't let me finish. Just pulled, harder, and I followed because I didn't have a choice. She moved through the smoke like she had a map in her head, dodging debris I couldn't see, turning corners I didn't know existed.
She knew this building. Five months of closing shifts, of taking out trash, of walking these floors in the dark. She knew every step of this place.
I didn't.
She did.
Left. Right. Through what might have been a doorway. The ceiling cracked behind us, a section of the roof coming down where we'd been standing seconds before. Lucy didn't slow down. Just keptmoving, kept pulling, kept navigating through the hellscape like she'd been born for this.
