Page 46

Was she already dead?
Mary leaned over her shoulder and yelled, “Mother.” Then hacked up a lung.
“Ready!” he called.
Yeah, well, Mary realized that the woman’s deadweight was beyond her capacity. Unless this woman was actively clinging to Mary, there was no way this was going to work.
But what were the options?
The sirens wailed below, but they were too far away. By the time the trucks pulled up and the ladders raised, it would be over for this woman and maybe for Mary, too.
Mary climbed through the open bars. Then, lying on her stomach, Mary inched her way to the edge and peered over at the Tool Guy below her, seeing him for the first time.
It was the guy from the airport. The man waiting for his beautiful dog.
It felt right that she had a moment of non-urgency to see this man before they were tossed together into life-or-death circumstances.
It felt like some kind of hand had moved them into place. He was at the airport, too. Had he also been brought in for this task?
Pre-ordained.
Written in the stars.
Mary cupped her hands around her mouth to project her hoarse voice down to the guy below her. “I can’t hold the woman’s weight and hang upside down, and you can’t hold her weight perched on that window like that.”
She saw that he’d cut the shutters open and kicked the window clear. Smoke billowed from that apartment, too. The fire had moved down to his story of the building.
“I’ve already figured this out. I’m coming up. My teammate is moving up to take my place. We lower the woman. Then I lower you. And I’ll follow.”
He was already roped up in a hasty made of lime-yellow webbing, the color for emergency equipment. Something about that color calmed Mary’s system.
In her job in the emergency department, there was adrenaline—lots of it. Everything was life or limb. She’d learned to maneuver around the adrenaline with muscle memory. She didn’t have much in the way of repetitive practice to apply at this stage of the rescue, but a man with lime green would. He did. His team did. They knew what they were doing. Trust.
“Lace one of those ropes through three rods, then send both ends down to me.”
She knelt on the ceramic tiles, complying with the directives. Her knees burned. Mary conjured cool nights in the woods with the fire blazing up, heating the knees of her jeans to scalding temperatures while the rest of her froze, though everything here at this moment was painfully hot.
After she followed the directives, Mary pushed the mother over next to the bars, angling her face outward. She had no idea what was inside that apartment, what toxic fumes were billowing out, and no idea why this woman was unconscious. Was it smoke inhalation or something more?
The man moved with practiced ease up the side of the building.
But in the end, how brave was he?
How determined?
Would he stay to get both the other woman and Mary down? Or would he assess his own chances of survival and bail?
Lying under the blanket of smoke, Mary got herself as far out of the way as she could so Tool Guy had space to maneuver.
Smoke billowed through more of the building’s windows as the fire spread through the interior.
Soon, Tool Guy might receive his orders to abandon his position.
When he saved himself, Mary would lose her own shot at survival.
Had she flown to Tallinn to die?
The woman with the star charts had sent her to this place on this day to do the thing.