Still on her knees, she moved forward, feeling her way round the obstacles, trying to find a suitable place to tie off the line. Suddenly, there was a loud crack, then a series of pops, and the heat bloomed as debris rained down on them.
“Flashover,” shouted Bryan. She felt him grab her waist belt. “We’ve got to get out of here. Forget the line, Rose.”
Even with Bryan ’s weight dragging at her, her momentum carried her another foot, her hand still outstretched with the line.
“I said forget the fucking line, Rose. Evacuate! Evacuate!”
Even though her stubbornness, her refusal to let the fire get the better of her, was one of the things that made her good at her job, she knew he was right. Going on would be suicidal, and nothing could have survived this blaze without protection.
Hemmed in on one side by a sofa, on the other by what seemed to be stacks of lumber, Rose tried to turn back the other way. As she maneuvered her body round, her gloved hand came down on something that yielded beneath her fingers. It felt malleable, like flesh, with the brittleness of bone beneath.
Rose looked down, blinking eyes burning and swollen from the heat, and felt the bile rise in her throat. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “We’ve got a body.”
On this morning there had been no drifting slowly into consciousness, no lingering in imagined wholeness, no savoring the memory of life as it used to be.
Fanny Liu opened her eyes and took stock, reluctantly. It was later than usual, that she could tell by the angle of light in the sitting room window, but still overcast, as it had been the previous day. She slept, as she had since she’d become unable to manage the stairs, on an old velvet-covered chaise longue that had belonged to her mother. For once in her life her small stature was a blessing – a few inches taller and her feet would have hung over the end of her makeshift bed. At night the arms of the chaise cradled her, offering a solid comfort; in the daytime her bedding could be tucked away, allowing her to maintain an illusion of normalcy.