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Behind me, Jules groans when Luka and the firefighter help him over fallen debris.

“Maggie?” he calls, voice rough.

“I’m here,” she answers against the mask.

“You better be,” Jules says, coughing after every word.

Her fingers tighten in my shirt. “I’m okay.”

She’s lying.

They both know it.

So do I.

A section of the ceiling cracks above us. The firefighter ahead curses and signals left. I turn with Maggie in my arms as burning debris crashes down behind us, scattering sparks across the floor where we stood a heartbeat earlier. Heat bursts against my side. Maggie jerks in my arms, and I wrap myself tighter around her before the motion can jostle her again.

“Move!” Luka shouts.

We move.

The side corridor is narrower, thick with smoke, and littered with broken glass from a shattered interior window. I keep my footing by instinct, stepping over tangled hoses and chunks of drywall while Maggie’s hand stays locked in my shirt. The exterior door appears ahead, propped open by a firefighter, and daylight cuts through the smoke like a blade.

Fresh air is twenty feet away.

Then the upper frame above the exit gives a violent groan.

The firefighter by the door shouts a warning.

I see the beam come down before anyone else reacts. I turn my body, putting my back and left arm between Maggie and the falling wood. Pain tears across my forearm, hot and vicious, as the burning edge strikes and slides away. The smell of scorched fabric and skin cuts through the smoke.

Maggie cries out behind the mask. “Alexei!”

“I’m fine,” I tell her.

It is a lie, and she knows it.

Her eyes flood with fear as she tries to reach for my arm. I hold her tighter and keep walking.

The moment we break through the doorway, the noise outside engulfs us. Sirens. Shouting. Animals barking from every direction. Volunteers crying. Firefighters calling orders across the parking lot. The world is too bright after the shelter’s smoke-filled dark.

Maggie drags in a broken breath as I carry her onto the pavement.

A paramedic rushes toward us. “Set her here.”

“No,” Maggie coughs, trying to twist in my arms. “Jules.”

“He’s behind us,” I assure her.

Luka emerges with Jules supported between him and the firefighter. Jules’s face is gray beneath soot, and blood marks his temple, but his eyes find Maggie at once.

“There she is,” he rasps. “I told you I was too pretty to die in a supply closet.”

Maggie starts crying then. Silent tears cut clean paths through the soot on her cheeks while the paramedic guides me toward a stretcher. I lower her onto it with care, but she refuses to release my sleeve until Jules is placed on the stretcher beside hers.

“The animals,” she says, her voice raw behind the oxygen mask.

A young volunteer overhears and hurries over with tears streaming down her face. “They’re out, Maggie. All of them. Every dog, every cat, Peanut too. Everybody made it.”