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Page 25 of Venus

The common room is holding it’s breath, like it’s waiting for something. We can all feel it. The silence, the tension. It’s thick in the air like black smoke. The calm before a storm. We’re all on edge and every sound has us jumping and ready for an alarm.

I sit on the edge of my cot, half-dressed and fully wrecked. Boots on, jacket open. My fingers grip the fabric of my pants like if I rip through them it’ll let the pain in my chest fall out of the hole. V’s voice is still stuck in my head.

She met my feelings with such hostility every time I tried to approach our situation with tenderness. I tried, I really did, to make it work her way, and I tried damn hard to get her to have a little faith in me.

In the end, all I got was a broken heart.

And her? I’m not sure I left any impression at all.

She never did anything that she didn’t warn me about. That’s the worst part. She’s right—I knew what this was from the beginning. She got to walk away clean, and I’m still bleeding .

Maybe she shouldn’t have kept calling me, but I also shouldn’t have kept running back. We’re both at fault for that, and it hurts.

Across the room, Trevor is eating Twizzlers like it’s the solution to all the world’s problems. If I wasn’t on shift, I’d be halfway in the bottle. Trevor holds out the bag to me, beckoning me to take a rope.

“If you keep staring at the floor like it’s gonna apologize to you, I’m gonna start worrying,” he says, candy dangling from his mouth. “At least talk to me, bro. Let me in like a good boy.”

I snort.

He shrugs. “It’s fine. You don’t have to say anything. Cooter’s heart’s a little sensitive right now.”

Despite his annoying teasing, I’m glad he’s here for me, even if he won’t say it directly. After the pain and quiet Venus left behind, it’s nice to know that his dumb commentary and stubborn loyalty are a constant in my life that I never have to worry about losing.

It might as well be the only thing keeping me upright.

My fingers just grip a piece of candy from his bag when the alarm hits. Both of us drop everything, and sprint to our gear.

Dispatch to Engine One. Structure fire in Mercer Street’s Industrial District. Workers unaccounted for.

Captain Rodriguez answers the call on the radio, confirming that we’re on our way with the engine and requests backup ambulances just in case .

We move fast. Faster than fast. This is the kind of call we’ve been anticipating all day.

And for some reason, I feel an anxious knot in my stomach, like this is the type of fire that will burn before I even see the flames.

The building is screaming by the time we get there.

It’s a three-story warehouse with a brick shell, belching smoke out of every window and poisoning the air around it as easily as food coloring in water.

We can feel the heat from the street. It’s suspected to have started as an electrical fire, and I’m not surprised.

These older buildings sometimes can’t handle the new-age machinery and it overheats the breaker boxes.

I’ve seen it a lot in this town, but usually the fires are handled with an extinguisher and a fast-acting worker.

This is probably the biggest structure fire I’ve ever seen in my time, and I have a feeling it will stick with me for a long time.

But I love these fires, because they’re learning opportunities.

When we get back to the station, we can go over what we can do better, and I live for that just as much as I do the flames.

I want to be Fire Chief someday, and these are the kinds of experiences I need to earn that honor.

“Westwood!” Rodriguez shouts. “We’ve got two unaccounted for. Take Knight with you. Search and rescue. Get in, get out, structure’s compromised. ”

Trevor and I give each other a nod and don our masks.

Jackson stops us. “Hey, be careful. Third floor’s already partially collapsed.

” He points toward one of the large, busted out windows on the second floor where you can just see the flooring of floor three falling into floor two.

He motions to Trevor. “Let me go instead. Stay with the engine.”

“Yeah right,” Trevor says, passing his Halligan from one hand to the other. There’s no time to argue, so Trevor follows me in, leaving Jackson to operate as point on getting the fire under control and to keep it from spreading to other buildings in the District.

We enter the building on instinct. The heat hits us like a punch. We move fast, finding the first worker near a back wall, burned and barely conscious. We drag him out in less than a minute, hand him off to the medics, and don’t even stop for a breath before we’re back inside.

In the few seconds we were outside, things inside the building got much worse. Thicker smoke, hotter fire, flames shooting out in every direction like tendrils reaching for us.

Something in the air feels off. Wrong. Bad. Like the building doesn’t want us there anymore, but there is still one civilian unaccounted for, and I’d die before I leave someone behind.

We clear the entire first floor and find nothing, so the both of us carefully make our way up the concrete staircase to the second floor.

It’s even hotter up here, and we both know we’re running out of time.

We do our best to crawl through the building, practically blind, when over the roar of the fire, we hear a crash and a scream .

“Back corner!” Trevor yells, shining his head light in the direction.

There’s a woman there, pinned under collapsed shelving.

She’s screaming desperately for help. Trevor and I have no time to sigh in relief as we unpin her and I hold her up under her shoulders to help her out.

Trevor watches my back as we make our way back downstairs and out the building.

“Take her!” I shout at Jacks, waiting there with a group of paramedics nearby. He takes her from my arms. I turn to make sure Trevor’s still behind me, but my heart stops.

He’s gone.

Crack. I hear the building start to come down, but I go back into the flames to look for my friend. I don’t think, I just run.

“Trevor!?”

Just at the staircase we came down, part of the building has collapsed. And there, half-buried under steel and blood soaking through his pant leg, is Trevor.