DeStasio had seen him at the front window. That’s where we’d start, at the front perimeter. We’d have to stick together. The rookie had never been in a hard-core situation like this, and though we’d driven him through countless blindfolded drills, it wouldn’t be the same. The heat, the time pressure, the blackness.

It’s a whole different thing when you do it for real.

Normally, you never enter a structure without a hose line, both as a source of water to hold back the flames and as a lifeline back to the place where you entered. You stay on the hose—always, always—or risk getting lost in an unfamiliar space. You feel the couplings to know which way is out.

But we didn’t have a hose. The hose had gone around back with the pumper.

Here’s some irony: We’d ordered new radios, but they hadn’t come yet. Even good radios were hard to work in tough conditions, but the static on the captain’s line had been unacceptable. I read once that most firefighter deaths came back to communication problems, and that didn’t surprise me at all.

Did I think what we were doing right now could lead to firefighter deaths?

Yes.

But we’d just have to work like hell and hope for the best.

And find the boy, if we could.

Inside, we worked our way around magazine stands and lines of carts. I kept one glove on the guide line at all times, and alternated the other between feeling around the space and keeping contact with DeStasio’s boot up ahead. The rookie was behind me, doing the same.

I worried about our air supply.

We’d been in five minutes. The smoke was thick. Somewhere, a window blew out, but the smoke didn’t thin.

We kept crawling. I could only see filtered light down low and blackness up top.

Soon, I could see flames rolling across the ceiling.

It was going to be time to get out soon. I’d been in bigger fires than this, and hotter fires than this, but I’d never been so ill equipped. I remembered an old-timer back in Austin telling me when I was a rookie, “It’s an emergency until you get there. Then it’s just work.”

Somehow, this felt like an emergency.

Sixty more seconds, I thought, and then we’re out of here.

That’s when I heard Owen’s voice over my radio. Laughing. Actually, more like giggling.

“What’s funny, rookie?” I asked.

But no answer. Only more laughter. Why was he on the radio?

I turned back to reach for him, but he wasn’t there.

“Rookie?” I said. “Rookie, are you on the guide line?”

“I think I see a bunny rabbit,” Owen said, through the radio. Or—that’s what it sounded like.

“What is he babbling about?” DeStasio shouted, still moving forward.

More laughing through the radio.

There was no reason—at all—for the rookie to be laughing. Firefighters do plenty of laughing, but never, ever when they’re working a fire. “It could be cyanide poisoning,” I said. I’d learned all about it when I applied for the antidote kit. “It makes you kind of drunk at first before the real symptoms kick in.”

In theory, Owen had been breathing the air from his canister. But we’d moved fast getting in here. His breathing apparatus could have been ill fitting. Or leaking. Or knocked loose without his realizing it.

“Rookie, where are you?” I couldn’t see him. I beamed my flashlight behind me. But he wasn’t there.

I felt a sting of panic in my chest. “DeStasio, stop! The rookie’s off the guide line!”

DeStasio stopped.

I panned my flashlight around. Nothing but smoke. “Rookie, where are you?” I said into my radio. “What can you see?”

“Fluffy stuff,” he replied.

I tried to make my voice so authoritative that he would obey me. “Look for the beam from my flashlight and move toward it!”

Then I saw him. Crawling toward me around the end of an aisle, maybe ten feet away.

Relief. Visual contact. All I had to do was get to him and bring him back to the perimeter.

I started to move toward him.

But then two things happened, one after the other. The rookie—who must truly have been not right in the head to do this—stood up, like he was just going to walk over.

And then the ceiling collapsed.

Twenty-five

THE SOUND WAS unreal—like a thousand cannons going off at once. The ground shook like in an earthquake for much longer than it should have.

Then stillness—and the room went white.

I couldn’t see anything. Not even my hand in front of my face. I crawled toward where DeStasio had been, but I found an overturned shelf. I shouted into the radio, “Are you conscious?”

“I’m okay,” he shouted back. “But something got my shoulder.”

“Stay there, okay? I’m getting the rookie. I’ll come back for you.”

As I crawled through the whiteness, my radio crackled with a long blast of static—the captain, asking everyone in the crew to report their status. I reported in as I kept crawling, though I suspected the captain couldn’t hear me.

Next, another blast of static, most likely the captain calling a Mayday—and then, seconds later, the sound of all the engines outside blowing their air horns at once for forty-five seconds. The sound that means, Get the hell out. Now.

But I was focused on another sound.

Because in the seconds before the air horns started, I heard something more urgent. The rookie’s PASS device started going off. PASS devices let out a shriek if you’re still for too long.

I’d heard the sound before, but never like this.

It meant he’d been still for at least thirty seconds.

And that could mean anything.

I kept crawling, unable to see anything at all in the whiteness, navigating my way through the space using my memories of what I had seen before the collapse to form a mental map. Was I going the right way? I had no idea. Had I passed right by Owen without even knowing it? Anything was possible.

But I couldn’t change the visibility. All I could do was focus like hell. I could have been off by aisles, but there was nothing to do but try. If I was right about the cyanide poisoning, every second counted.

People say that emotions muddy your decision-making, but that wasn’t my experience that day. How I felt about Owen—and the sound of that PASS device—sharpened my purpose to a knifepoint. It’s like an article I once read about a teenage girl who’d lifted a car off her father after an accident and saved his life. Those were some pretty herculean feelings.

I thought about my mom saying, Love makes you stronger. And then I couldn’t help but understand—clearly and brightly and inescapably—right there in the middle of it all, that I loved Owen. I loved him. And it wasn’t stupid, or girly, or a waste of time. It was the thing that was going to save his life.

I was going to get him out of here.

Or die trying.

The white powder was starting to clear. Through the fog of it, with my flashlight, I caught a glimpse of what looked like Owen’s boot. I felt it to confirm, and then I felt all around.

It was him.

Ceiling debris had come down on him, and I had to shove it aside before I could start dragging him back toward the exit.

It’s a little bit ironic that the “fireman’s carry”—that iconic image of firefighters throwing victims over their shoulders—is not actually a technique we use in fires. Heat rises, after all. You have to stay low. You’d never stand up with a victim over your shoulder.