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She was running toward the billowing smoke.
She sprinted past people lining sidewalks, glass shards twinkling thickly from the street.
A massive man in that same uniform as she’d seen in the airport minutes earlier was on the flagpole. He was too huge. From her distance, Mary could see that as he went up, the flagpole slowly leaned under his weight.
He slid back down again.
Now, the team was trying to get up the side of the building, scaling from window to window. They were right. Without equipment, if they were making a rescue, it would have to happen from the exterior.
Leaning her head back to find the victim, Mary’s gaze caught on the balcony.
Two boys.
Two baby boys.
Mary’s mind did some kind of crazy jujutsu move, and those babies' faces were her boys'. That was Kyle and Kaleb. Her kids. Hers. She had to save them.
Her head swiveled frantically for a way to fly to their side, and her gaze landed on the pole. She didn’t weigh as much as that man did. And she had been taking classes; she knew how to climb a pole. She could get to her boys.
There was a sensation in her chest of immense power. Of strength. Of capability. Her whole being seemed to swell and shift, morphing into something she didn’t recognize.
Powerful.
She was powerful.
The next thing she knew, she was next to the flagpole, toeing off her tennis shoes, flopping to the ground, yanking her belt open, and scrambling out of her pants and shirt. To climb the pole meant her flesh had to make as much contact as possible. The cloth would make her slide.
And there she was, wrapping her legs, reaching her arms, gripping at the brushed metal surface.
She was climbing toward the inferno. “Hang on, babies. Hang on. I’m coming,” she screeched up to them.
Chapter Eleven
In her dance class, three, sometimes four, was the number of times that Mary had been able to grab and pull her body up the studio pole. This was five stories. She knew these things in the back of her head. She also knew that unless someone with a big assed ladder showed up, the babies would die.
They’ll die. They’ll die. The babies will die.
When she leaned her head back, she still saw Kyle and Kaleb’s faces staring down at her—the same black curls and rosy mouths, but these were held wide and tight with fear.
The pain of their anguish ground behind Mary’s sternum with excruciating force.
Hitch breathing, she reached and pulled.
Mary peripherally knew that the men in gray were working hard to get in place. She was aware of how one man climbed onto the teammate for added height, then reached for the sill and did a pull-up with inhuman strength. It was heroic. But ineffectual.
Even if the guy who made it to the fourth floor had some Peter pan-like, “I can fly!” move up his sleeve, once up, what could that man possibly do to get the children down?
What way did she have to get the children down, for that matter?
Mary’s brain wanted to process, to form a plan. But there was something deep and primal driving her. She had no choice but to act. Maybe there was a strategy somewhere hiding in the thick folds of her gray matter, and it just hadn’t presented itself yet.
She made it to the top. She was just under the flag now. Parallel to the balcony.
There was a woman near the boys that Mary hadn’t seen before. Hope and despair etched her face as she wrapped her arms—streaked with black—around the boys.
The heat was intense. The smoke filled Mary’s lungs as she squinted past the sting in her eyes.
“Hey!” the man’s voice broke into Mary’s awareness. “Hey!”