Part 3
Rook barked again from behind the fire door, one hard note followed by silence. He was not wasting breath on panic. He was telling Daniel exactly where he was.
Laura locked both hands around Daniel’s arm. “Exit is behind us. Stay on my shoulder.”
They moved with the first rush of staff toward the main hall. Kennel latches snapped open on both sides, dogs cried out, and shoes slid through water from a ruptured ceiling line. Daniel’s cane struck legs, crates, a dropped metal bowl. He shortened it and held Laura’s sleeve instead.
“Where did the fire start?” he asked.
“Electrical room beside the laundry.” Mike was coughing somewhere ahead. “It feeds the secure wing.”
“Rook’s behind that door.”
“I know.”
The group reached the lobby, where cold air rolled through propped-open doors. Staff handed leashes from person to person and tied frightened dogs to fence posts in the rain. A receptionist called names against a clipboard while Frank shouted the count back to her.
Daniel heard every number except one.
“Rook,” he said.
No one answered.
He pulled away from Laura and turned toward the building. The alarm flattened direction, but the smell gave him the line: smoke drawing through the secure corridor, thicker now and low enough to sting his throat from the lobby.
Mike came out through the inner doors on his hands and knees. Someone grabbed the back of his jacket and dragged him onto the wet tile. He coughed until he retched.
“The west hall is gone,” he managed. “Smoke to the floor. I couldn’t get past the cross door.”
Frank discharged an extinguisher into the doorway, but the white cloud vanished into black air. “Fire crews are six minutes out.”
“Six minutes from where?” Daniel asked.
“Station says trucks are on the county road.”
Rook barked again, fainter under the siren.
Six minutes was a number people used when they needed time to sound small. Daniel remembered a medic saying evacuation was nine minutes away while a man beside him bled into the dust. No one had lied. Nine minutes had simply been longer than the body could afford.
Laura stepped in front of him. “You cannot go in there.”
“I can follow the wall to the cross door.”
“You can’t see the fire.”
“Neither can anyone in that smoke.”
“That doesn’t make you fireproof.” Her voice broke on the last word. “Daniel, you met him twenty minutes ago.”
“He heard me say I’d come back.”
“That was before the building caught fire.”
“He doesn’t know that.”
Frank moved closer. “Mercer, listen to me. Going in would give the department two victims instead of one.”
Daniel opened his cane to full length. “Then stop me.”
For one beat, no one did. Perhaps they expected the blind man to hesitate at the smoke. Daniel stepped through it before hands found his jacket, twisted free, and followed the wall into the secure hall.
Heat changed the air first. It pressed against his cheeks and filled his mouth with the taste of pennies. He pulled the collar of his fleece over his nose, dropped low, and swept the cane ahead in fast, shallow arcs.
“Rook!”
A bark answered from the far end.
Daniel counted doorframes with his left hand. One. Two. The third opening should have been the supply room; a cart lay across it, and he climbed over by touch. The floor was slick beneath one knee. Somewhere above him, plastic popped and fell in soft, burning pieces.
“Again!” he shouted.
Rook barked. Daniel corrected toward the sound and found the closed cross door with his cane. Its push bar burned through his sleeve, but the door opened against a pressure of hot air.
The secure wing had become a tunnel of alarms and animal breathing. Rook struck the kennel front once, then stopped when Daniel called his name.
“I’m here.”
The cane found mesh. Daniel followed it to the gate and wrapped his sleeve around his hand before touching the latch. The metal shifted a fraction and jammed. He pulled again. Nothing.
Rook whined close to his fingers. The dog pawed at the bottom of the gate, then coughed, a harsh sound Daniel had not heard from him before.
“Back,” Daniel ordered. “Rook, back.”
The nails scraped away from the door.
Daniel braced one boot against the frame and put both hands on the swollen latch. It would not lift. Smoke crowded his lungs until his arms weakened, and for a moment he rested his forehead against the wire.
On the other side, Rook shifted his weight. Daniel heard the dog retreat several paces into the run, then turn. Claws dug into concrete with the same compact rhythm Daniel remembered from breach training long ago. The dog understood before Daniel gave the command. “Hit it,” he said…
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