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Page 26 of Venus

“Fuck,” I spit under my breath.

The building is coming apart and we are seriously running out of time. The fire is screaming through the walls like a wild animal, the smoke clawing at my mask like it’s ready to suffocate me. The fire surrounds me like it’s ready to feed on my flesh.

But I keep moving deeper into the flames, toward Trevor. I yell his name over the roar, and I feel my heart sink when I don’t hear him respond.

“Trevor!”

Another silent step. Then another. Then another.

And then—

“Carter!” I hear through a choked cough.

He’s fully pinned under a support beam, thick, splintered, and scorched by the heat. I’m not even sure he feels the pain in his leg where a stick of rebar has gone clean through, because his jacket is torn at the shoulder and the skin underneath is black and burnt to the bone.

“I can’t move,” he says frantically. Scared. No—terrified. “It’s crushing my leg. You have to go. Now— ”

“Shut the fuck up,” I growl, trying my best to lift the heavy beam. “You go, we go.”

“Fuck those sentiments, Carter. This is real life. You stay, we both die.”

“Then I’m dying with you,” I yell back. My gloves hit the floor as I reach for his discarded Halligan and go straight for the beam, rage in my jaw and panic bubbling high in my chest. It doesn’t move. I growl through my teeth. “Come on!” I scream as I try again, putting everything I have into it.

The beam shifts. Just an inch.

Trevor screams, and the sound cuts straight through me like a razor.

The roar of the smoke changes and we both look up. It’s thicker now. Darker. Hotter.

We both know what that means.

Flashover is coming, and we have seconds.

I look back towards the exit, and a very cowardly part of me weighs if I can make it in time. Instead, I pull out my radio.

“ Mayday, mayday, mayday. Engine One interior. We are trapped. I repeat, we are trapped.”

I drop the radio, not really caring if anyone responds at all, as I go back to trying to lift the beam. I hear a snap and then a rush of heat at my back.

Then something hits me, hard. A falling beam, or maybe the entire second floor. I just know my mask is now pressed against the concrete and the wind is knocked out of my lungs from the impact .

My mask has a crack in it. My hip feels dislocated. I can’t breathe anymore. My mask begins to fog up and I’m practically blind.

I try to move, but I can’t.

“Carter!” Trevor yells, reaching for me. I reach back, and we take each other’s hands as our PASS devices start blaring an alarm, signaling to everyone else how absolutely fucked we are. “I told you to get out!”

The heat is impossible now, like being tossed into Hell itself.

I squeeze his hand even tighter, and I think we both realize at the same time that this really is it.

“I love you, brother,” I tell him. Not loud, not frantic. Just the truth. Something calm and steady in our last moments.

He nods, eyes wet, body trembling from adrenaline and pain. “Yeah, love you too.”

The air shifts, and everything around us stills for a brief second before the roar of the fire consumes us in flashover. The whole room bursts into impossibly hot flame.

I hear the both of us screaming through the agony and the terror, but I never let go of his hand, and he never lets go of mine.

Then, silence.

Heat gone.

Light gone.

Just…nothing.