A Molotov. That’s what Gabriela had seen flying through the air. Standing at the broken window, looking at the destruction it caused, left her mesmerized. Never in her life had she seen a house fire. Ribbons of flame crawled up the spines of leather-bound books, a wild streak of fire gorged on the hardwoods and the carpet, spreading at the base of the bookshelf as it simultaneously crawled upward.

The heat gnawed at her skin. God help her, shouldn’t she be afraid? Shouldn’t she feel some kind of empathy? A man’s home, his footprints, his memories, his passions, his comforts, were being devoured right before her eyes. Dr. Markel might’ve profited off Flor’s misery, and a thousand other girls like her, but even he didn’t deserve to have his home turned to ash.

Gabriela watched in fascination and horror. The flames seemed to leap from the bookshelf in fits and starts, crawling up the far wall, while at the same time, writhing across the floor like the serpent slithering over the roots of the Tree of Knowledge. Part of her wanted to be taken by the flames. The pain would be all-consuming. It would drive her insane, engulfing her body, her mind, erasing her sense of self as it overwhelmed her senses and burnt into her brain.

But it would be over. She would be cleansed. Her mortal husk would be shucked, and her spirit would be free to revel in Glory on Highest, to bath in the light of eternity, to know the face of grace. She reached out. A leaf of flame brushed against her finger.

Gabriela reeled her arm in. What in God’s name was she doing? Standing in front of the fire like an idiot, losing her mind? But for the grace of God, she hadn’t already been shot down.

Turning from the fire, she stepped to the edge of the porch. She looked left, then right, and saw nothing but the fountain and the cars.

He was gone. Or hiding, waiting to kill her. Her hands trembled at her sides, so she grabbed the rail around the porch. If she could stay out of sight and get to her car, she could get away.

But… what then?

Back home to Flor?

At that moment, Gabriela held her last bead of hope. She could turn tail and run, or she could bite back her fear, risk herself against the fire, and fight for Flor’s life. The moment she’d called Dr. Markel’s office, she knew she had to press forward at all costs. This was her one shot at righting the wrongs of her life, of undoing her teenaged mistakes. Her justification for leaving her family back in the Dominican Republic was to give her newborn baby Flor a better life. Well, this was it, and this one chance was more than most people ever got.

Whether there was a murderer in the house, or a fire, or if Dr. Markel, himself, turned her away at the door screaming, pointing a gun in her face, Gabriela Ramos wouldn’t run.

She moved to the open front door. Inside, fire painted the rightmost entryway wall and inverted waves of flame rolled across the ceiling. Dr. Markel and his wife had to be in the back of the house near the kitchen.

She took a step forward, wondering if she could get past the fire, but a few feet in, the heat puckered her skin.

There had to be another way in. A place like this had to have a big porch and big windows for looking at the water on the backside of the house.

Gabriela hurried down the front steps, turned right, and ran through a flower bed. She hooked around a corner, followed the driveway past the garage, and came to a stone-paved path through a garden running parallel to the back of the house. To her far left, through the trees bordering the rear of the property, she saw lights tinkling far away. Below, she could hear the wash of waves assaulting the beach.

The garden gave way to a raised wooden deck. Gabriela sprinted up the pair of steps leading onto the deck and ran as hard as she could toward a pair of glass doors leading into the back of the house.

Through the back doors, she saw the fire had spread quickly. Smoke licked the walls and chewed the ceiling. She would have been able to see the front entryway, except for a partition wall on the right being blackened.

Suddenly, movement down low and to her left caught her eye. A man’s foot dragged on the floor like a wounded animal. She couldn’t see beyond the midpoint of his shin, but it had to be Dr. Markel.

Gabriela grabbed the doorknob. Her hand was slick with rivulets of her own blood, the knob was hot to the touch, and it wouldn’t turn.

The door was locked.

“Dr. Markel!” She banged on the glass, hoping he’d see her and could unlock the door.

He didn’t.

Gabriela turned and scanned the back deck. Maybe there was another entrance, or an open window, or a key left on the edge of the hot tub.

She checked, but nope. None of that.

However, there were deck chairs.

Gabriela grabbed the first one she saw. It was wicker wrapped around a steel frame, and it had some heft to it.

Wasting no time, she gritted her teeth, picked up the chair by its backrest, wheeled on her heel, and smashed the chair into the back door.

The glass cracked, but it didn’t break. So, she laid the chair on its back. She grabbed it by the legs. Holding it at her waist, she took a couple of steps back, and fixed her gaze on the door with a determination she hadn’t had in a long time.

Way back in her high school days, Gabriela had been the captain of the school’s varsity softball team. She was a hitter and a threat to sock a ball past the fence any time she was at the plate. Here, on Dr. Markel’s back porch, feeling the heat upon her face, she squinted at the door like it was the deadliest close-out pitcher she’d ever gone against.

Everything rode on this at-bat.

She saw it coming, low and just a little outside.

Gabriela set her shoulders, cocked her hips, then stomped her leading foot as she brought the chair around like she was going to knock the cover off the ball.

The hard, arched back of the chair smashed through the glass, and kept going until it crunched a second pane of glass, then tore into the blinds, and finally stopped when Gabriela jerked back on her swing, killing the chair’s momentum.

Her shoulders hurt more than they had in an exceedingly long time. She was no longer the conditioned athlete of her youth, but she didn’t have a second to stop and think about it. She ripped the chair free of the blinds. Tiny knives of glass came with it, most of them missing Gabriela, save a few splinters that caught in the legs of her pants. She was so pumped full of fear and adrenaline, she hardly felt them. Using the chair, she knocked out a few errant spikes of glass from the door before crouching below the smoke and stepping inside.

On the floor, Dr. Markel cradled his wife. She was as pale as moth wings against the spread of crimson beneath them. Markel kissed the top of her head and muttered something Gabriela couldn’t hear over the growling flames.

Mrs. Markel was still. And all that blood. Gabriela knew that she hadn’t heard her husband. She was already gone.

“Dr. Markel!” Gabriela shouted, then coughed as smoke fed into her lungs. She lowered her head, catching him glancing at her. He turned back to his wife, holding her tightly and muttering.

She wouldn’t be ignored. Not after all this. Gabriela dropped to her hands and knees and crawled toward him. She grabbed his foot, then used his legs as a guide through the thickening smoke of this man-made hell.

At his shoulder, Gabriela’s fingers slipped over wet, warm blood. His T-shirt was spongy and sticky. God, she hoped it wasn’t Dr. Markel’s blood.

“Please! I need to talk to you. Do you have any Anthradone here?”

“Anthradone?” His voice was a throaty rasp. “Who the hell are you?”

“I talked to you on the phone,” she said. “I’m the reporter—actually, I’m not a reporter, I’m—”

Why was she wasting his time? She had to get him out.

“It’s not important,” Gabriela said. “She’s gone, Doctor! Let her go. We have to get out of here—you’re dead if you stay here.”

He turned his head and looked directly at her, his pale blue eyes holding Gabriela’s own. It was funny, the way a person’s eyes said so much more than words ever could. About who someone was, where they were going, and what they wanted now.

Dr. Markel’s eyes told Gabriela he wasn’t leaving his wife’s body here.

“My daughter has Li-Fraumeni,” she said. “Please, you have to get out of here so you can help her!”

A blast of wind rushed up from behind. A deafening thump came behind it. Instinctively, Gabriela screeched and covered her head. Bits of ash and ember shot past, and hands of smoke took hold of her throat.

She coughed and hacked, looking behind her. The partition from the entryway had come down, revealing nothing but smoke as black as a new moon, cut by the deadly orange shimmer of a column of flame, roasting the back of her.

“Dr. Markel, my little girl still needs you!” Gabriela shouted over the fire. “There are people everywhere who still need you—you can’t stay here!”

Gray ash settled over him.

She grabbed Markel’s arm and yanked him away from his wife. He didn’t fight her.

Because he couldn’t have fought her. A splotch of dark red showed through the ash that covered him—and it was growing.

Dr. Markel had an open wound across his belly. He’d be gone within minutes.

“I can’t go with you,” Dr. Markel strained to speak. “I’m sorry.”

Then she’d already lost, hadn’t she? Before she’d come in this house, and risked her life against the fire, she’d lost. Her chance to cure Flor was gone. Gabriela lowered her head until it rested on Dr. Markel’s elbow.

God in Heaven, after all you’ve shown me, why would you take it away like this? Why would you take my little girl?

A hand weakly brushed against her forehead.

She lifted her eyes to see Dr. Markel struggling to say something. His mouth moved, but nothing audible came out. He motioned with his eyes. He wanted her to come closer.

Gabriela brought her ear to his mouth.

“In my office,” he said. “Laptop.”

She pulled away from him. “Laptop?”

He nodded, slowly.

“Where’s your office?” She checked the room around her, but the smoke curtained anything beyond a couple feet.

He turned his head to her right, his eyes focusing on something only he could see.

“Where?” She shook him. “Where is it?”

He moved like a rag doll. He was too weak to answer.

Gabriela peered to her right again and saw only smoke and darkness. Terror stung her like a red-hot pitchfork when she thought about going deeper into the smoke.

His office. It had to be in his office, and whatever was on that laptop, it was worth Dr. Markel using his last bit of strength to tell Gabriela about it.

So, she began to crawl into the smoke.

Moving through the heavier smoke was as bad as every living thing implicitly understood it to be. You didn’t have to train a dog to avoid fire, you didn’t see birds perching on burning trees, or hear about horses running into burning barns. Every human, every animal, knew. Gabriela suddenly had a little understanding of what motivated a firefighter to enter a burning building. Not doing so could mean the loss of innocent life.

When she looked back and realized she couldn’t see Dr. Markel, or the back door, or even her own feet, a deep, primal fear took hold of Gabriela’s heart—something more elemental than what she’d felt outside, where that gunman lurked, something that bit deeper than the first time Flor was diagnosed with cancer.

The fear threatened to chain her to the doctor’s living room floor. The devil called her name. He tempted her to stop and rest, to forget about her troubles, to stop struggling so damned hard.

Gabriela scrambled forward, holding her blouse over her face with one hand. She shut her eyes and held her breath until her head bumped against the wall. Then she backed away, reached out with her left hand, and felt a door frame, then felt an opening to another room.

She went in.

Here, the lights were off, and mercifully, the smoke wasn’t as thick, though not by much—it was thick enough to make her cough and wheeze. Gabriela moved forward, keeping her right hand on the wall, terrified to break contact with it and lose her way in the smoke. Suddenly, the top of her head bumped into something. It felt like another wood thing. Maybe a bookcase, or some kind of table or, she silently hoped, a desk?

She reached up, and her fingers immediately wrapped around a familiar shape—a pen—a whole mess of them. They spilled out and came crashing down on her head, and her heart felt lighter—she’d found the doctor’s desk!

A spill of light appeared against the ceiling, like someone clicking on a weak lamp. She rose up on her knees, until her eyes were level with the top of the desk. She saw a blurry reflection against a picture frame on the wall.

Then her brain put it together—the light came from a computer screen!

Both her hands swiped across the desk. They latched onto something hard and thin, and then they pressed it down until it shut with a click.

She snatched Dr. Markel’s laptop off the desk, sending a dozen things flying in every direction, and yanking the power cord loose. She didn’t care. She had his laptop. She had the key to saving Flor’s life, right here in her hands.

Wait. What did he actually have here? A formula? What was she going to do with a formula? She couldn’t synthesize the drug herself. She didn’t know the first thing about it.

No, no, there had to be a way. The Lord would open a way.

Maybe she could take it to one of Hildon’s competitors. She could sell it to them for money to pay off all the medical bills and work out a way to get enough Anthradone to cure her daughter, or she could ransom the formula back to Hildon. She’d get fired, but what did she care? So long as they gave her the Anthradone to cure Flor.

Flor mattered. Not a paycheck. At least, not one from a pharma company.

She hacked up a deep cough that sent her doubling over and catching herself against the hardwood floor with her elbows. She kept the laptop clutched to her chest.

All of this would be worthless if she didn’t make it out of the house.

Gabriela looked left. Hellish light danced against the wall opposite the door she’d come through, and smoke belched into Dr. Markel’s office. She went toward it awkwardly on one hand and both knees, still holding tight to the laptop, then looked out and saw nothing but a black-gray curtain backed by flame.

Dr. Markel’s body was in there, somewhere. God rest his soul.

She turned around and, as she worked her way toward the desk, she noticed a beacon of hope shining in through the smoke.

Gabriela crawled toward the light. She came to another wall, and felt her way around it, until she realized she was at a window—and it was open. Her free hand pressed against the window screen until it ripped out of the way.

Hoisting herself out, she tumbled through the window and escaped the house, landing on her back in a flower bed.

She lay there for a moment, her lungs sucking in clean air and pushing out the smoke as best they could. Her arms were numbed from the cuts, her eyes stinging, her heart bouncing in her chest.

Her journey out of the fire and flame was a miracle. God’s will was good, and she owed Him more than she could ever repay. She would sing His glory from now until the end of days.

She watched the chimney of smoke crawl up into the night sky, listened to the flames hollow out the house, felt the thud of what must have been a large beam falling to the ground somewhere inside.

The weight of something pressed on her hip. She lifted her head to see what it was and saw the laptop. Did she wreck it in the fall?

The machine was dirty. When she opened the lid, the screen was smudged with blood and soot—likely from when she’d grabbed it off the desk—but she had a login screen.

The laptop still worked.

She snapped it shut, then got to her feet. In front of her, the fountain shone white above the hidden spotlights, the caduceus wings spread. The angel who led her out of the fire.

Thank God Markel had spent so much money on that awful fountain.

She shook her head, then stumbled across the driveway to her car. Once there, she opened the back door, wrapped the laptop in one of Flor’s blankets, and carefully laid it on the floor behind her seat. It had to fit snugly; she couldn’t have it rattling around on the drive home.

Then, she got behind the wheel, started the engine, and slowly backed out.

When she cleared Dr. Markel’s big SUV to her right, she saw what remained of the house in her rearview mirror. The porch and everything on it were lost in the flames. Fire beckoned to her from the open window of Dr. Markel’s office.

The whole house would be gone within moments. She couldn’t have been in there longer than five or ten minutes, and the fire had spread pretty much everywhere.

She coughed again and put the car in drive. She looked up, checking the fires in her mirror one last time.

Then her throat went tight. A man’s figure stood in the driveway directly behind her. Before he had a chance to shoot her, she stomped the gas pedal.