Their house was in flames and looked to be tilting. A big dogwood tree I’d climbed a hundred times as a kid had fallen onto the Allens’ truck. As I got closer, I shouted, trying to be heard over the fire’s roar. I could hear my voice’s vibrations in my head but not the words.

As I reached the house, part of the roof collapsed, and flames shot out. Mrs. Allen had died of cancer a couple of years ago, but Mr. Allen still lived here with his two teenage kids, Henry and Violet. I’d been friends with Peter, Henry, and Violet when we were growing up. Now Peter was in college, and the only thing I had in common with fourteen-year-old Henry and Violet, a petite, consciously social high school sophomore, was that we rode the same bus to school.

Fire spat out of every window I could see, including the broken glass porthole in the front door. There was no way to get into this place. There was no way anyone could be alive. I ran around to the back, just to be sure.

The rear of the house was in better shape than the front, but smoke was billowing out of the second floor. I thought I’d leave, but then I heard more glass breaking and looked up to see a window shattering and a pale hand reaching out. Then a face.

Someone was inside—about to die.

Without thinking, I leaped onto the trellis on the side of the house to climb toward the skinny roof over the sunroom. If I could reach that roof, I could get to the window.

Although I wasn’t light, the trellis held as I climbed, and I scrambled onto the roof as a window above my head burst and flames and glass showered over me. Ducking and covering my head, I crunched over the glass shards to reach the window, where the hand no longer waved.

I wrapped my hand in my jacket and punched out the rest of the glass. Gray smoke poured out as I vaulted myself inside and dove to the ground, where the air was better. Kneeling under the window was a girl. Violet. I hoisted her up, she wrapped her arms around my neck, and I scrambled to the window and deposited her onto the roof, gently, so she wouldn’t roll off.

I ducked back down and crawled around the floor, my lungs feeling raw and strangely cold. I bumped into another body, this one heavier and more solid. Mr. Allen? I found his arms and pulled him to the window, then climbed out and dragged him through from the roof, where Violet was lying and coughing.

How to get them down? It was too far to jump. I thought for a moment, then leaped back through the window as Violet protested weakly. Having knocked into a twin bed moments earlier, I yanked off the mattress, folded it as much as I could, and shoved it through the window, taking care not to knock Mr. Allen and his daughter off the roof in the process. Once outside again, I dropped the mattress to the ground below us, a ten-foot drop. It would have to do.