The air shifts. I feel a change in pressure and trapped heat that doesn’t belong, but my body reacts before my brain does. My chest tightens. The faint smell of warm metal turns sharp and wrong in my nose. My pulse stutters and my hand shoots for the railing. I fumble for my phone, fingers clumsy, searching for the flashlight app I suddenly can’t seem to find.
“Not a fan of the dark?” Theo’s voice is dry.
“No,” I snap, ignoring him. My focus is on my breathing. But it’s too late. My body is shaking. The stairwell is shrinking.
I’m eight years old again.
The air had been heavy. And so thick that it felt like someone was pressing a hand over my mouth. Heat licked at my cheeks. Smoke curled through the tiny gap beneath the bedroom door, slowly at first. Then in steady gray ribbons that stung my eyes and clawed down my throat.
I remembered coughing so hard, it shook my whole chest, each breath scraping like sandpaper.
“Princess Kaori! The door is stuck, but we’ll get you out! I promise!” The guard’s voice was muffled. “Stay low to the ground!” he shouted.
I dropped to my knees just like he said. The tatami matswere rough against my pajama pants and bit through to the skin.
Darkness swallowed everything. One moment I could see the faint outline of the door; the next it vanished completely. I blinked hard, but it didn’t matter. The blackness stayed.
I reached up anyway and fumbled blindly for the door handle. But when I found it, heat seared my palm. I jerked back with a cry. I didn’t understand yet that I’d burned myself. That part would come later.
Panic surged through me. I pounded my fists against the door until my knuckles screamed. “Help! Please! I’m in here!”
Somewhere beyond the walls, something cracked. It was sharp and loud. For a second I thought the ceiling was about to fall. Tears spilled down my cheeks, streaking through the soot “Help!” I’d screamed again.
Nobody answered. There were no footsteps or voices. Just the low, awful groan of timber and the hiss of smoke forcing its way in.
I curled into a ball on the floor, trying to make myself as small as possible, as if being small meant safety. My lungs burned. My eyes burned. My palm throbbed. And somewhere inside me, something settled into a cold, absolute certainty—Nobody was coming.
“Minami?” Theo’s voice cuts through the dark. There’s something raw in it, something I’ve never heard before. “Kaori?” he tries again, quieter this time.
I blink once. Twice. My lungs seize like I’ve sprinted a mile in the Florida heat. The stairwell wavers into focus. Shadows swim at the edges of my vision as a narrow beam of light cuts through the inky darkness. Theo’s holding hisphone out. Then his hand, warm and startlingly gentle, closes around my shoulder.
There’s no fire or smoke. It’s just the building losing electricity.
“Hey. Look at me,” he says so softly, I barely recognize his voice. “Kaori, breathe. You’re safe. Nothing bad is going to happen.”
But my body hasn’t gotten the message. My chest keeps tightening. The air feels like someone siphoned half of it away. “I... I need.. . I need a second,” I sputter.
“You’ve got one.” Theo’s grip stays steady. “Breathe in through your nose.”
I try. It comes in a shudder.
“Out,” he tells me. I do as he says. “Good. Again.”
I latch on to his voice like it’s a handhold. In. Out. In. Out.
“That’s it,” he continues. “Now, focus on the here and now. Can you name three things you see?”
“Um . . . your luggage, phone, and my . . . my . . . my shoes.”
“Brilliant. Now three things you can touch.”
The flashlight beam is strong and bright. I stare at it until my eyes stop swimming. He shifts his phone slightly, and the light lands on my hands. My right palm is pressed to my blouse, fingers curled tight as if I’m holding something in place.
“My shirt,” I whisper. “The grit on the concrete stairs. And, um... your socks.”
He presses his phone into my hand, wrapping my fingers around it. “Hold that,” he says. “Point it at the steps.” His fingers brush mine—a brief, electric contact. Despite the heat of the stairwell, his skin is warm and steady, a sharp contrast to my own trembling.
“Okay,” I manage. My voice sounds thin.
