Chapter 2

The burning roof cracked behind me as I ran toward Elena Alvarez’s house.

She lived four doors downhill and was recovering from surgery on her left eye. If she had left, I could keep moving toward the highway. If not, her Jeep might be my only remaining vehicle.

Smoke pressed low over the street, turning late afternoon into a copper dusk. My lungs scraped with every breath, and the gravel Ethan’s tires had thrown had opened a thin line of blood above my ankle. I kept hearing his arithmetic—two lives against one—and hated that part of me still expected his truck to reappear.

Elena’s front door stood open. Her Jeep waited in the drive, but she was behind the house, bracing both hands beneath a collapsed section of her tool shed.

“Bruno’s under here,” she coughed. “The beam trapped his back legs.”

A frightened bark came from beneath the boards. Ten feet away, the propane tank’s relief valve released a shrill hiss.

I dropped beside her. “Do you still keep a jack in the Jeep?”

“Under the rear seat.”

“Get it. I’ll keep him still.”

Elena ran without wasting a second arguing over whether an old dog was worth the time. I flattened myself beside the gap. Bruno’s gray muzzle appeared through the smoke, his teeth bared from pain until he caught my scent. Then he pressed his nose into my palm.

I had spent years teaching frightened children to breathe before I cleaned a wound. “Stay with me, Bruno. We’re all leaving.”

Elena returned dragging the jack and a tire iron. Together we slid a paving stone under the base. I pumped the handle while she guided the metal head beneath the beam. Each lift bought us an inch, but the scorched wood groaned above my shoulders.

“If that tank gets louder, we run,” Elena said.

“We run with him.”

The distinction mattered. Ethan had treated safety as permission to discard someone; I needed my next choice to prove his rule had not become mine.

When the beam rose high enough, Elena locked both arms around the jack to keep it upright. I crawled into the hot, splintered opening, looped Bruno’s canvas lead behind his chest, and pulled. He yelped once. The boards shifted, scorching my palm, but Elena planted her boots and held.

Bruno slid free just as the jack kicked sideways. The beam slammed down where my shoulder had been.

Elena seized my jacket and hauled me backward. For a moment we stayed on the ground together, Bruno trembling across our legs while ash gathered on his black coat. No one spoke; the propane valve whined through the orange light, saying what none of us needed to.

We got up.

At the Jeep, Elena tossed me the keys. Her healing eye watered so badly she could barely keep it open.

“You drive,” she said. “I know an old fire road if the highway is blocked.”

That made her my partner, not another person I had to carry. She climbed in beside me and pulled Bruno across the rear seat while I started the engine.

At the end of the street, a deputy’s SUV blocked the highway. Fire rolled across the asphalt beyond him, and he waved us back before turning toward another stranded car.

Elena pointed uphill. “Maintenance gate. Half a mile.”

I followed the dirt shoulder until a steel gate emerged from the smoke.

A chain as thick as my thumb held it shut.