Dominic's POV
I see the smoke from the Triborough Bridge.
It's a thin black thread at first, rising straight up from a brick block in Astoria against the pale morning sky. Then it thickens. Then it leans. By the time Marcus takes the exit on two wheels, it's a dirty brown column, a hundred feet high, and I can hear the sirens over the engine.
"Faster."
"I'm doing ninety."
"Faster."
"Boss, if I put this car in a wall..."
"Marcus."
He puts his foot down.
I hold the dashboard with both hands. In my pocket, my phone is ringing. I don't answer. It's the man on the corner, Oyelaran, in a voice like a boy's: Boss, I'm so sorry, I got a call, it said you wanted me at the car, I don't know who... I cut him off.
Someone rang a trained man and told him in my voice to leave her.
Someone knew my voice.
Thirty-First Street is a river of red lights. Three engines already, a hook-and-ladder angled across the road, a policeman in a yellow jacket waving the traffic back with both arms. The apartment building with the green awning is burning like a torch.
Not the whole of it.
Only the staircase. The long brick shaft on the left side of the building, with its barred windows, is roaring orange from the ground to the third floor. Flames lick out of every pane. Black smoke bellies from the roof. The fire is climbing, floor by floor, like something alive.
The fourth floor is dark, and full of grey.
Her window is shut.
I'm out of the car before it stops.
"Sir! Sir!" The policeman grabs my arm. "You can't go in there!"
"My wife's in there."
"Sir..."
"My wife."
I wrench free.
I don't know where I find the strength. I run along the line of fire engines, through a corridor of hoses and men in yellow coats, and no one catches me. I'm vaguely aware of Marcus shouting behind me. I'm aware of heat, a great pressing wall of it, and a roar like the sea.
The building has a fire escape.
Black iron, zig-zagging up the back wall over a courtyard full of trash bins. I take the first ladder at a run.
It's cold under my hands.
It's the coldest thing I've ever touched.
Forty-one degrees, says a voice in my head, quite calmly. A hundred and one seconds. You've done this before.
Not in this body.
In this body.
I climb.
Second floor. The iron shakes. Smoke is rolling out of a broken window beside me in great grey billows, and the heat tears at my face. I put my sleeve across my mouth and go up. Third. A pane bursts and glass rains down on my shoulders.
I don't stop.
I think: Not again.
I think: Not again, not again, not again.
I reach the fourth landing.
A window. A rectangle of dark glass, shut tight. And behind it, pressed against the pane, a white face.
Odile Park, mouth open, hammering on the glass with both fists.
I smash the window with my elbow.
"Dominic!"
"Come on! Out!"
She comes through like a cat. I take her under the arms and swing her down on to the iron, coughing and gasping, with soot all over her face and a laptop clutched to her chest. I haul her toward the ladder.
"Go! Go down!"
"Serena..."
"Where is she?"
"The bathroom. She went to wet a towel. She wouldn't..." Odile's voice breaks. "She's frozen, Dominic. She won't come."
I let go of her.
I go in.
***
The apartment is full of smoke.
Not black. A dense, sour, brown fog, thick as wool, at head height. I drop to my knees. Below it there's a clear band of air, a hand's breadth, and I crawl through it with my eyes streaming.
The living room. The orange sofa. A crocheted blanket on the floor.
The kitchen.
The passage.
A strip of fire is creeping under the front door in a thin, bright, living line, and the wood has started to blister. The front hall is a furnace. I don't look.
Bathroom.
The door is ajar.
I push it.
She's sitting on the edge of the bath, in the dark, with a wet towel pressed over her mouth. She's bolt upright. Her eyes are open, enormous, fixed on a point on the wall, and she isn't moving at all.
She's gone.
Not here. Not in Astoria. She's somewhere else, a long way off, in a stern cabin with a hatch and the walls on fire.
I know that look.
I've seen it in a elevator.
"Serena."
Nothing.
"Serena. Look at me."
"Dom," she whispers, and I don't think she knows she's speaking, "I can't."
"Yes you can."
"It's burning."
"I know."
"I can't. I can't, I can't..."
I take her face in both hands.
It's wet and hot, and shaking violently, and under my palms I can feel her pulse hammering like a trapped bird. I lower my head until our foreheads touch, and I make my voice very soft and very slow, the way I did in the elevator, the way I did on the night of the boat in my dreams.
"I'm here."
"Dom..."
"I'm right here. I've got you."
"I'll burn."
"You won't."
"I will, I will..."
"Listen to me." I hold her gaze. Her eyes are green, and blind, and full of fire. "I went into the water four times. I'm going to carry you out of this building. I'm going to do it if I have to crawl. Do you understand?"
She's trembling so hard that her teeth click.
"You came back."
"Yes."
"You came back."
"I never left."
I put an arm under her knees and one round her back. I lift.
She weighs nothing.
She turns her face into my shoulder, and clings, and I feel her whole body go limp with the helplessness of a child, and I get to my feet in a roaring brown dark and go back through the passage.
The ceiling is glowing.
Overhead a section of plaster splits and drops, and a white-hot beam shows through, and the heat hits me like a fist. I turn my back to it. Something comes down across my shoulders, hard, heavy. I don't feel it.
The window.
A square of grey daylight.
I step through it.
The iron groans.
"Hold on," I tell her. "Hold on to me. Don't look."
"I can't..."
"Don't look."
I go down the ladder one-handed, one rung, then another, with her face in my neck and her arms round my throat. The fire roars. Glass flies. Somewhere below, men are shouting. A hose is playing on the lower floors in a great white arc, and the heat lessens, rung by rung, and the air turns from brown to grey to a blessed, cold, clear, rainy blue.
My boots hit the courtyard.
I fall to my knees.
I don't let go.
There are hands. Hands everywhere. Marcus, with a blanket. A paramedic with an oxygen mask. Odile, her face black with soot, sobbing and laughing at once. A fireman peeling Serena's fingers from my collar, one at a time.
"Sir. Sir. We need to take her."
"No."
"Sir..."
"Not yet."
"She needs oxygen."
"Then give it to her here."
They do.
I kneel in the wet courtyard in a pile of trash, with a burning building at my back and my wife in my arms, and a plastic mask fogging with her breath. Her eyes are shut. Her lashes are black. She's breathing in long, shuddering gasps.
She opens her eyes.
She looks at me.
"Dom," she says.
It's perfectly clear.
It's not Vera's voice.
It's the old one, low and cracked and gentle, the voice I've waited three years and five days to hear, and she says it with no fear and no anger and no pretence at all.
"Dom. You came."
I can't speak.
I put my forehead against hers.
"I'm not letting go of you again," I say.
She doesn't answer.
Her hand finds mine.
It holds on.
I don't know how long we stay like that. Long enough for the sirens to fade. Long enough for the smoke to thin, and the firemen to start rolling up hoses, and a thin pale sun to come out between the clouds.
Marcus kneels beside us.
"Boss," he says, very quietly.
"Not now."
"I'm sorry. It's her phone."
I look up.
He's holding it in his gloved hand, in front of me. It must have fallen from her pocket on the ladder. The screen is cracked. It's lit.
There's a new message.
An unknown number.
That was a courtesy, Mrs Hale. The next one comes without a warning.