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There’s a red alarm box on the wall beside the extinguisher bracket. I hit it with the bottom of the extinguisher. The plastic cover breaks. I pull the handle inside. Nothing changes. The alarm is already going. Everything’s already going.

I’m dizzy.

I sit down. I don’t mean to. My legs just fold, and I’m on the floor with my back against the door, and the fog is all around me, cold and white, and the strobe keeps going flash, flash, flash somewhere above me.

There’s a steel bar on the floor near my foot. A piece of the rig that came down. I get my hand around it. I think I’m going to jam it into the door, or bang it on the door. I can’t remember what I was going to do with it.

My chest hurts. I’m breathing too fast and it’s not helping.

Billy Bob will be waiting for me at Merek’s, on his moose blanket by the door.

Tav’s on the other side of that wall. Twelve feet away. Two minutes, he said.

I bang the bar on the door, once. My arm’s too heavy to do it again.

Then the door takes a hit.

It’s so hard the whole frame jumps against my back. I fall forward onto my hands. Behind me, through the steel, a voice roars, not a word, just a sound, and the door takes another hit, and another.

On the fourth one, the door comes off.

I don’t see him at first. I see the shape. The fog’s rolling out past me into the corridor, and in the middle of it, there’s a shape, enormous and black, with horns, ducking through the place where the door used to be.

“Tara.”

He almost never says my name. It’s always Boss.

Then he’s got me.

He scoops me up off the floor, one arm under my knees and one behind my back, and turns and goes, fast, out through the broken doorway and down the corridor, away from the fog. The alarm’s still going. People are shouting. Somebody’s yelling into a radio.

My face is pressed into his throat. His fur is damp and smells like sawdust and the white fog and him.

His heart is pounding against my cheek, too fast, too hard.

His breath is ragged. His arms are locked around me. And his hands are shaking. Both of them. I can feel it against my back and my knees.

He carries me all the way up the back stairs. He kicks open the fire door at the top, into the cool air of the loading dock. He doesn’t put me down. He just stands there with me in his arms, in the open air, breathing.

“Breathe,” he says. “Boss. Breathe.”

I breathe. It works this time. The air goes in and it helps. I cough so hard I see stars.

“Good,” Tav says. “Good. Again.”

After that, things happen in pieces.

William, coming down the dock at a run, his wings half open. Pell behind him with the big red first-aid bag. Somebody with a green oxygen cylinder and a clear mask. William’s stone hand on the back of my head, holding the mask on my face, while Tav still won’t put me down.

“Tav,” William says. “Sit down with her.”

Tav doesn’t move.

“Tav. Sit down. You can hold her sitting down.”

Tav sits. He sits right down on the edge of the loading dock with his legs hanging over, with me in his lap, and his arms don’t loosen at all.

The Club’s healer comes up from somewhere. Her name’s Odette. She has bark-brown skin, and a hospital badge from OHSU still clipped to her cardigan. She clips a little device on my finger and looks at the numbers, and listens to my chest with a stethoscope, and asks me what day it is.