It’s warm in her room. That’s how X knows something is wrong. The heating hasn’t worked in her building for months, and the electricity has long since stopped flowing. She’s months behind on rent.

*

Y heads towards the flames, gripping the firehose. His team has been battling this blaze for nearly half an hour, but it’s just getting worse. Someone in a neighbouring building called in this apartment fire at around 1 a.m. There are at least 40 residents still trapped inside. Y drops his hose and runs.

*

X stumbles out of her apartment and immediately stumbles back in. The dark, acrid smoke is choking and blinding her. She won’t make it down the corridor. She is trapped.

*

Y speeds up the stairs, hearing nothing but his heart pounding in his ears and static on his radio. He makes out the words “evacuate” and “collapse” but he ignores them. Several residents run down the stairs next to him. He tries asking how many are left, but they’re too panicked to help. So he counts them. There are only 27.

*

Tears stream down her face as her thumbs fumble over her phone screen. X types out one final message to her mom. She knows this is the end and wonders how much it will hurt when the flames start to eat at her body. She hopes she remembers to pray in her last few moments. Before she can hit send, her door slams open.

*

God, this apartment is miserable, Y thinks to himself as he takes in the sparse (mostly broken) furniture, the grubby mattress on the floor, and finally the Latina woman with curly hair sobbing in the corner. “I’m with the fire department,” he calls out to her, “let’s get you out of here!”

*

X and the firefighter try staggering, and then crawling, down the corridor, but it’s no use. The smoke is getting too thick and the cheap wooden floor is crumbling underneath them. Pieces of the ceiling rain down as they rush back to her apartment. “We’ll have to go out the window,” says the fireman. X is too breathless to respond, so she just nods. The firefighter removes his helmet, revealing ocean-green eyes and cropped blond hair.

*

Y leans out the window and shouts. His crew look up at him from the ground where they’ve already begun to inflate the gigantic air mattress. It’s not long before he gets the signal that it’s okay to jump from his height. He calls the woman over and puts his helmet back on.

*

As she falls to the mattress below, X starts laughing hysterically. She doesn’t know why. She watches as her shitty, cracked apartment windows explode.

*

Y leaps from the window in the nick of time. He has a flashback to the time he was thrown from a horse at his parents’ country club. That time, he only broke his arm. He wonders how bad the impact will be as the pavement grows nearer and nearer.