Smoke pushed through the gap under the roof door in a thick gray rope, low at first, then climbing.
“We need to figure this out fast,” Tomas said. “We don’t know how long this roof will hold.”
Nico lifted a hand. “Wait. Do you hear that?”
They listened.
Sirens. Thin at first, then closer, layered the way they get when more than one truck comes from more than one direction.
Mia moved to the parapet and raised herself just enough to look over.
Down in the street, headlights swung wide around the corner. Two vehicles that had been sitting near the mouth of the alley pulled out fast, no lights, cutting across the oncoming lane hard enough that a horn blared somewhere below and kept blaring after they’d gone.
Mia dropped back below the parapet.
Behind her, the smaller boy was struggling to breathe. What had been shallow breaths a minute ago had turned ragged, with a wet catch at the top of every inhale. Lucía grabbed both his hands and gave them a quick shake.
“Hey. Breathe with me.”
She took a slow breath, and the boy tried to follow.
Tomas crouched beside them and put a hand between the boy’s shoulder blades. “You’re okay,” he said. “We’re getting you off this roof.”
Mia heard the catch in Tomas’s own breath before she saw the red in his eyes.
“You’re struggling too.”
“I’m fine.” Tomas kept his eyes on the boy.
Mia watched him for a second.
He finally looked at her. “I’m fine.”
The second boy had started coughing too, though not as hard, one hand pressed over his mouth like that might help.
The sirens swelled until they seemed to fill the street below, then cut off almost together.
Doors slammed. Boots hit pavement. Voices carried up between the buildings, sharp and overlapping.
“Someone’s on the roof!” someone shouted from the street.
A moment later, a beam of light swept across the upper edge of the building, briefly whitening the parapet before moving on.
“Anyone on the roof, make yourself visible!” a voice called through a bullhorn.
Mia rose just enough to lift both arms above the wall.
The beam swung back and locked onto her.
“We see you! Stay where you are!”
“There are kids up here!” Mia shouted. “Hurry!”
Within seconds, the aerial ladder swung out from the truck bed below and rose toward the parapet in slow mechanical stages.
The ladder settled. A firefighter appeared at the top of the ladder and swung a leg over the parapet wall. “Who’s first?”
“Him,” Lucía said.
She took the smaller boy by the hands and guided him toward the ladder, talking to him the whole way. The firefighter caught hold of his jacket and helped him onto the first rung.
They waited until the boy was several rungs down and another firefighter below grabbed him.
The second boy climbed onto the first rung, coughing but steadier on his feet, one hand white-knuckled on the rail as he started down.
The firefighter steadied him until the firefighter below could take over, then climbed back onto the roof.
As he came back over the parapet, his attention went straight to Tomas. He took in the red eyes and shallow breathing, then heard the catch in his chest.
He pointed at the ladder. “You’re next.”
Tomas looked at Mia.
“Go,” she said. “Somebody has to keep them from panicking down there.”
He went.
Nico caught Lucía by the arm.
“You next,” he said. “I’ll be right behind you.”
Lucía climbed over the parapet and started down. Nico waited until the firefighter below had her before following.
Mia stood alone on the roof.
Smoke threaded around the edges of the roof door. Renato was somewhere below it, behind smoke and fire and a stairwell she couldn’t go back into.
She looked toward the ladder.
There would be police down there. Firefighters. Paramedics. Questions about what had happened, who she was, how she’d ended up on the roof of Renato’s burning gym.
She couldn’t afford to end up in someone’s notebook tonight.
But there was no other way down.
“Ma’am.” The firefighter’s mask hung loose at his neck, face soot-streaked. “Ma’am, you need to come now.”
She went to the ladder.
She kept her eyes on the rung in front of her and climbed down one rung at a time, refusing the hand the firefighter kept offering from below until she reached the truck and climbed down to the street.
Hoses crossed the pavement in thick black lines, firefighters braced behind the nozzles as they drove water into the building. Runoff streamed along the gutter, carrying ash with it in gray streaks.
Two ambulances sat nose to the curb with their back doors open, paramedics moving between them and a cluster of people from the buildings across the street who’d come out to watch, arms crossed, faces lit orange and blue by turns from the fire and the light bars.
Police had started arriving. Not many yet. Two cruisers, officers stepping out and talking to a firefighter who pointed back at the building, at the roof, at the group of them still standing near the ambulance bumpers.
The smaller boy sat on the edge of a gurney with an oxygen mask strapped over his face, shoulders hunched, Lucía crouched in front of him with a hand on his knee. The second boy sat nearby getting his pulse checked.
Tomas was coughing hard enough now that it had turned into something closer to retching. A paramedic guided him by the elbow toward the open ambulance doors.
Nico stood a few feet off, hands jammed in his pockets, looking back and forth between the burning building and the street like the two things ought to add up to something and didn’t.
“Where’s Renato?” someone in the crowd said, loud enough that heads turned. Nobody answered.
A firefighter heard it and came over to Mia. “Is there anyone inside?”
“The gym owner. He was shot in the roof-access stairwell. He didn’t make it out.”
The firefighter turned toward his crew. “We’ve got one still inside. Roof-access stairwell.”
He pointed to two firefighters standing near the truck. “You two, with me. Move.”
The three of them headed toward the building, pulling their masks into place as they went.
Mia watched them disappear through the smoke.
“Ma’am?”
She turned.
A paramedic stood beside her, a young guy, maybe thirty. His eyes went straight to the blood soaking through the wrap at her side.
“Ma’am, you’re bleeding. I need you to sit down for me.”
The elastic wrap had soaked through dark on one side, blood mixing with soot until the whole thing looked closer to tar than anything else.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re bleeding and you can barely stand straight. Sit down, let me look at you. What’s your name?”
That was the question that opened the door to the rest. A name meant a record. Tonight. This address. This fire. Something that could be cross-referenced against everything else she’d left behind. She wasn’t ready to be found sitting in the middle of it.
“I need a minute,” she told the paramedic, and stepped past him before he could get a hand on her arm.
She found Nico first. “Stay with Tomas and the boys,” she said. “Don’t leave them.”
“What about—”
“Stay with them.”
She didn’t wait for whatever he was going to say back.
The officers were still near the cruisers, talking to one of the firefighters. Nobody was watching her.
Mia cut between the second ambulance and the idling fire truck. The crowd past the tape was just shapes now.
She looked back once.
Lucía was still crouched by the gurney, one hand on the boy’s knee, but her face had turned, tracking Mia across the gap between the vehicles.
She didn’t call out.
Mia kept walking.
Behind her, the sirens stayed with the burning gym.
When she couldn’t see the orange glow anymore, she ran.