I would not let anything happen to Tilly. If there was anything I could do to keep her alive, I would do it. The tissue in her hand had turned to pulp. We were moving, back into the hallway and up a flight of stairs. I took Tilly’s bag and held her arm steady as she navigated the steps, the crush of people around us becoming unnerved by the riotous sounds.

We pressed into a vault, a small room lined with filing cabinets and cardboard boxes, and the Marines shut a heavy double door behind us. For the second time in my short life, I was caught in a storm. Updates came sporadically and did little to soothe us. A clamoring mass of bodies had collapsed a segment of wall and then climbed over the bricks, bent rebar, and crumbled mortar to reach the outside of the embassy. They had set fire to the building, and the heat was seeping into the vault. Some said it was an attempt to smoke us out. Others shook their heads and said the guards were fully capable of managing a protest.

“Everything’s going to be fine,” Tilly said to me. She said it more times than I could count. I felt for the ring sewn into my pocket and touched it nervously.

The doors to the vault opened momentarily, and an American soldier with a gunshot wound was brought in. The woman at his side was pressing down on his wound. Her calls for a doctor went unanswered.

I jumped when I heard something pounding on metal behind me. On the far end of the room was a narrow hallway and a ladder that led to a hatch door. The hatch bent inward, cratered with the force of each insistent blow. The soldiers stood poised to fire, barely blinking. Sweat collected on foreheads.

Then the banging stopped.

In the fifth hour, Tilly began to cry so quietly that I might have missed it. I don’t think anyone else noticed. I leaned in closer to her. The room was starting to melt, the oxygen sponged up by eighty pairs of lungs and a simmering fire just outside the walls. When I lifted my foot, the sole of my shoe stuck to the melting vinyl of the tile floor. A patch of carpet caught fire. I heard a soft pop and fizz as a man drained a can of soda onto the burning rug.

The shouts and pops slowed, but the fumes worsened—smoke and vinegar. My chest tightened, as if all the people in this room were pushing against my rib cage. But Tilly was in worse shape. She vomited into a paper bag, all color drained from her face, then slid to the floor with her head between her knees. I knelt beside her, my clothes sticking to my skin.