The world went tilt-a-whirl again as Danny swung her off him and started shoving her over a landslide of debris, through the gaping hole that was about five feet from the ground.

People reached for her. People on the outside . . . were reaching for her. Firefighters—it was Moose, Danny’s former roommate, who helped pull her out.

Except then she did the math.

“No!” she yelled as she kicked and fought. “Not without him, I’m not leaving without—”

There were voices, a volley of talk around her as she was dragged over rough concrete blocks and bricks, splinters of beams and hunks of metal.

“Danny!” she yelled. “Get Danny!”

A gust of wind pushed the smoke back into the building and his hooded head and mask were briefly revealed, his arms pinwheeling as he tried to get over the avalanche. Their eyes met one last time, and even though they were separated by so much, she could make out the blue of his stare—or at least told herself she saw it—

The entire building collapsed without warning, the three floors dominoing down, ash, soot, smoke, and flames joining the rush of dusted concrete, brick and mortar, that exploded out of the hole.

“No!” she screamed. “Danny!”

Chapter 5

Tom had been waiting for three years for this call. This screaming trip across town. This pull-up-to-a-scene with screeching tires and sweaty palms, this choking panic, this paralyzing fear.

This reality that his sister was trapped in a burning building.

The slide show in his head was single frame, from the past and without a soundtrack: Anne at seven stuck up in a tree, jumping down so he could catch her; her at ten pedaling like mad on her bike to keep up with him and his friends; her at twelve with a jackknife slice across her leg, telling him he needed to take her to the ER, but not to say anything to Mom . . .

Her at their father’s grave, dressed in black, sitting next to their weeping mother in front of a hundred firefighters.

And then finally, on her first day on the job, wearing the navy NBFD shirt tucked into the same work pants he wore.

From the moment he saw her in that getup, he had known that this reckoning was coming. But good luck trying to get Sister to slow down, ease up, chill with the risks. No matter what he had said to her, she had refused to listen to him, and as he jumped out of his SUV at the scene, he hated her to his core at the same time he would have given up his own life to save her.

Their mother had already buried one member of the family. Anne had always seemed determined to make it two.

Tom went dead run to the clutch of ambulances by the incident command post. The warehouse beyond was a roaring fireball, more like a meteor that had crashed to earth than anything built by man, and he prayed Anne was out of there.

As he came up to Chip Baker, he demanded, “Where is she?”

Before the IC could respond, the question was answered. As the warehouse collapsed, three firefighters burst away from the disaster like they were being chased out of the building by demons, their escape path accessorized by a mushroom cloud of smoke and orange flames. Two of them were carrying someone.

“Sister!” Tom yelled.

He bolted toward them. As he came up to her, he wanted to do the medical assessment himself, and settled for searching her sooted, streaked face—or what he could catch of it. She was screaming and twisting against the holds on her arms and legs, the strobing effect of the engines and ambulances turning her suffering into stop-motion animation.

“Medics,” Moose said as the men kept running. “We need medics!”

Anne just kept fighting the men carrying her. “Danny!”

With a wrench and a kick, she nearly got free, one of her arms going flying and sending out an arc of blood into the air, the splash of red backlit by the flames.

Tom grabbed the firefighter holding her knees and yanked him away. “You’re hurt!” No shit. “Anne, stop fighting, you’re bleeding—”

“Dannnnnnnnnny!”

The EMTs rushed over with a flat board and neck immobilizer, and he and Moose lowered her to the ground.

Tom knelt down. “They’ll get him. They’re going to get Dannyboy. Sweetheart, look at me, I need you to calm down—”

Her wild eyes latched onto him through the tangle of her brown hair. “He’s still in there!”

More of that blood spooled out from her left sleeve, and he grabbed her elbow and cocked the joint up—

When he saw the stump at the end of her arm, he couldn’t process what he was looking at. No hand. Where was her fucking hand—

“We got this, Tom.” One of the medics shoved him back. “Let us work on her.”

“Where’s her hand?”

But then the board was under her, the neck brace was in place, and she was being assessed.

Where the fuck was her hand?

“Danny?” she shouted. “Don’t worry about me, you have to get him out of there!”

Tom looked toward the warehouse just as another collapse happened like there was a controlled detonation taking the structure to ground. If Danny wasn’t out, he had to be dead. No one could survive in that debris field.

As Tom refocused on Anne, a cold numbness hit him on the top of his head and flooded down his body. The sleeve of her PPE had been cut at the shoulder and removed by the EMTs, and what was revealed made no damn sense. A makeshift tourniquet had been applied to her bicep, the red nylon belt locked in place by itself. Down below? A surgical slice, the white of the bones glowing against the deep red of the muscle and the pale stripes of sinew and skin.

The fact that she had been moved roughly out of the building and jogged across the ground with that thing just looped on there like that made him want to yell at someone. What if it had unraveled? She could have bled out. And what the fuck had happened in there?

“Time to transport.”

The EMTs got to their feet and picked up the board by the grips. Tom took the IV bag without being invited to, and no one tried to stop him. They knew that when it came to his sister, he was going to help, and he was going in the ambulance, and if anybody had a problem with this, they could fuck themselves.

“Danny!”

As Anne continue to struggle, he spoke to her. “Stay tight, sis. You just stay tight.”

That hand. Dear God . . . her days as a firefighter were over.

It was what he had wished for all along. But not like this. He didn’t want it to happen like this.

* * *

Danny lay facedown and sprawled under a great weight, his body that of a soldier slain on a battlefield. Water was dripping on the back of his helmet and somehow finding a way into one of his ears . . . before it penetrated the cracks in his broken SCBA mask and got into his nose and mouth. It was definitely not blood. The shit moved too fast and it was cool—and it tasted like ash.

Yup, there was a big fucking crack in his SCBA mask, the seal broken, but at least the oxygen supply wasn’t compromised and enough air got pumped that he had something worthwhile to breathe. Which was good.

The rest of everything was bad. He couldn’t hear anything from his radio. And he had no sense of how long he’d been down. The air tank had a lifespan of about thirty minutes, and he’d been with Anne only six to seven—

“Anne . . .” he moaned.

Abruptly, his brain jammed with what he’d done to her, and he tried to reassure himself that at least he’d gotten her out. He’d seen her carried away. That was the last thing he remembered before he’d been hit.

What motivated him to fight was the need to find out what had happened next. Did his tourniquet stay in place? Or had the knot slipped or the length broken or . . .

Shit, he had to get out of here to make sure she was okay.

No vision, though . . . he couldn’t see a frickin’ thing and he couldn’t feel anything below his waist. Paralysis? Shock? Weight on his legs? He was on his stomach, he knew that much, and one of his arms was bent at a very bad angle. He should probably sense some pain there, too, but it was a no go.

With a curse, he tried to move something, anything—nope. He was totally trapped. After a couple more tries, he managed to shift an arm around—the one that wasn’t twisted like a pipe cleaner—and he strained to turn his head an inch. When he tried his legs again, they were immobile, and for a split second, he knew pure terror. Were they not moving because they were pinned, or had whatever had fallen on him severed his spinal cord along the way?