Part 1 — The Jacket Rule
She walked in wearing sun-faded BDUs and a past no one wanted on record; when the jacket slipped, the room would see the waveform that rewrites seven missing minutes.
The security guard didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to.
“No logos, no symbols on the training floor. Remove the jacket.”
Avery North stopped with one boot heel still on the rubber mat. The lobby smelled like disinfectant and coffee—clean, bright, hopeful in a way that made her palms itch. Overhead, fluorescent tubes hummed the same thin song she’d heard in too many hallways. She nodded once, tugged the zipper with a motion so practiced she could’ve done it in the dark.
The jacket eased back from her shoulders. Conversations thinned. Somebody’s paper cup squeaked in a tightening grip. And then the room forgot how to breathe.
Down the center of Avery’s back ran a black waveform—sharp peaks, sudden valleys—ending in a string of GPS coordinates small enough to read if you were close and steady. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t meant to be. It was a transcription of a radio that died mid-sentence on a night when the wind shifted and the world turned the color of a match head.
A young EMT trainee with a buzz cut took a half step forward before catching himself. “Is that…?”
He didn’t finish. The guard who had spoken first swallowed, eyes flicking from the ink to her face as if both might explain the other. Phones stayed in pockets, for once. Even curiosity had boundaries in a place like this.
Avery slid the jacket the rest of the way off and folded it over her arm. No rank patches, no unit names, nothing to invite a lawsuit or a memory she hadn’t chosen. Her other hand held a small duffel, scuffed canvas with a strap that had cut into her shoulder on longer days than this.
“North.” The voice carried from the hallway like a door swinging on a well-oiled hinge.
Director Elias Hale stood there in a plain button-down and work boots, the kind of man who made space go quiet without trying. His gaze landed on the waveform and didn’t flinch. Instead, he did something rarer: he recognized it, then looked away on purpose—granting privacy in public.
“Welcome to the Southwestern Response Center,” he said. “You’re early.”
“Traffic surprised me by not being terrible,” Avery answered.
A corner of his mouth moved. “It does that once a decade.”
The lobby remembered itself; voices rose in cautious, guilty threads. Hale stepped aside, and Avery walked with him down a corridor lined with framed photos: teams kneeling in dust beside ambulances; a grainy shot of a flood bucket brigade; a certificate thanking the center for “community partnership,” signed in a font large enough to shout.
“You’ll have the drill bay at 0900,” Hale said. “I’m told your lesson plans are… unconventional.”
“They’re simple,” Avery said. “We practice until panic runs out of places to hide.”
He breathed a short laugh. “You and I are going to get along.”
They passed an open classroom. Trainees hunched over tablets, scrolling through diagrams of splints and airway adjuncts. Sun found a seam in the blinds and laid a bright stripe across the linoleum floor. Avery’s steps matched the hum of the building—unconsciously, automatically—like she was syncing to a machine. Old habits. Old ghosts.
“Just so you know,” Hale said, quieter, “some folks are jumpy about Ash Ridge. The center’s donors don’t love the word ‘liability.’ People have careers to think about.”
“People have neighbors to think about,” Avery said.
He didn’t argue. The silence that followed wasn’t hostile; it was heavy the way a packed bag is heavy. You carry it because you chose what went in.
At the end of the hallway, Hale pushed open a door with a palm-print shine on the edge. The room beyond was a modest conference space—whiteboard, projector, a table long enough to seat a compromise.
Avery stepped in and stopped.
Three people in suits already sat there, legs crossed, notebooks open. A fourth stood by the projector screen, remote in hand like a conductor poised over a quiet orchestra. On the wall glowed a high-contrast photograph of a back—her back—cropped from shoulder to waist, the waveform tattoo rendered in stark black against skin. The coordinates were blown up next to it in clean block type.
No one introduced themselves. The man with the remote clicked once, and the image changed to a flattened audio line, labeled MINUTE 21:12—21:19. The line leapt, dipped, then cut off as if a blade had fallen through sound.
“Ms. North,” the woman in the center said, voice even. “We appreciate you coming on short notice. Before you begin instruction, we need to ask a few questions about your prior service. Specifically, a recorded call the night a helicopter landed short of Ash Ridge. There appear to be… discrepancies.”
The word hung there. Discrepancies. As if a night could be reduced to a small accounting error and fixed with whiteout.
Hale pulled out a chair for Avery. She didn’t sit. Her eyes traced the waveform on the screen—not the art, the math of it. She could count the rhythm of that minute by heart. She could feel where the last peak used to be and wasn’t.
“What exactly do you need?” she asked.
The woman folded her hands. “We need you to verify whether this is the original file.”
Avery’s duffel thumped softly against the leg of the table as she set it down. The sound was dull and definite, like the moment a stretcher meets the ground.
Out in the hallway, a phone rang and went unanswered. Somewhere a door closer hissed and latched. Hale stood very still, not blocking, not endorsing, simply present in the way a good foundation is present: unseen until you need it to hold.
Avery kept her gaze on the screen. She had returned to teach people how not to freeze when radios lied or went silent. She had not planned on meeting her own ghost this soon, in a room with carpet quiet enough to hide a heartbeat.
She laced her fingers behind the folded jacket, and the stitched seam bit gently into her palm—a reminder that fabric, like memory, keeps its shape if you respect it.
“Show me the rest,” she said.
The man with the remote cleared his throat. “There is no ‘rest,’ Ms. North. The official recording ends at twenty-one minutes and nineteen seconds.”
Avery felt the room tilt a degree she alone could sense, the way a pilot feels a crosswind before the passengers notice their cups shift. She lifted her chin, letting the fluorescent hum settle into the spaces between her ribs.
“Then you’re missing seven minutes,” she said.
Nobody moved. The projector fan whirred. Hale’s jaw worked once and stilled.
The woman in the center clicked her pen and set it down as if aligning it might align the world. “That is precisely the problem,” she said. “We need you to verify the recording from that night.”
Part 2 — Blood Memory, Not the Manual
The drill bay looked like a warehouse had learned first aid. Tape lines on the floor. Orange cones in a crooked grid. A row of manikins with faces too calm for what they’d seen. Overhead, a box fan rattled like an old window in a crosswind. The air smelled like rubber and coffee, a scent that told you today would rub your nerves until they shone.
Avery arrived early enough to hear the building wake—compressor cough, light ballast buzz, someone laughing two rooms away because they didn’t know they’d run out of laughter in an hour. She set her duffel by the wall and opened a plastic bin full of elastic wristbands: red, yellow, green. The red ones had scorched edges; she’d kept them that way on purpose.
At 0858, the trainees filed in. Twenty bodies, twenty different ways to pretend this was fine.
Rae came first, dark hair twisted into a knot that would not survive sweat. She had a steadiness you wanted to believe in. Miguel followed, wiping his palms on his pants and pretending he hadn’t. Dev trailed with a tablet hugged to his chest like a shield. June slipped to the far side, eyes taking in speakers, vents, exits—the places sound hides.
Director Hale stood near the door, hands in his pockets, expression neutral in a way that read as trust if you’d earned it. He nodded once to Avery and stayed out of the way.
Avery lifted a wristband, let it hang between her fingers. “Welcome to the drill bay,” she said. No microphone. The room leaned in anyway. “Today, we practice until panic has nowhere left to live.”
A few smiles. A few swallowed hard.
“Ground rules,” she went on. “One: If you drop your training device, you do not apologize to it. Two: If you can’t hear yourself think, think quieter. Three: We will follow protocol until protocol fails. If that sentence scared you, good. Fear is honest; we can work with honest.”
Dev raised a hand without raising it, a small lift of the tablet. “Respectfully, protocol is there so we don’t improvise under stress.”
“Respectfully,” Avery said, “protocol is there so you improvise better.”
He nodded like he’d filed the words away under “to be disputed later.”
Avery flicked a switch. The fan hummed to life. From a small speaker on a shelf came the layered soundtrack of bad days: wind, distant siren, voices that were more shape than language.
“Scenario,” she said. “A storm front knocks out power at a downtown bus shelter. You have limited supplies, limited visibility, and your radio works until it doesn’t. Half of your patients will talk too much. The one who needs you most may not talk at all.”
She handed Rae a small pouch. Inside lay a penlight, a few gauze pads, and a watch with a cracked face that still kept perfect time. “You’re on point for triage,” Avery said. “You call priorities. Miguel, you’re her hands. Dev, you’re airway and monitor—until I tell you otherwise. June, you’re comms—until there is no comms. The rest of you, pair up and be the city.”
Rae’s mouth parted. “Me? On point?”
“You live here,” Avery said. “You know how the wind sounds before it turns.” She met Rae’s eyes. “You’ll do fine if you stop trying to be perfect.”
Hale checked the wall clock and slipped out, the door sighing shut behind him.
Avery blew a short whistle. “Positions.”
They moved, not gracefully, but with purpose. Actors—trainees in cheap moulage that looked more like theater than injury—took their places: one on a bench holding an ankle; one on the ground, hand to chest but breathing; one sitting very still, arms wrapped around his middle, eyes too wide and too quiet.
The timer on Avery’s watch began. Thirty minutes to make good choices.
Rae took a breath and bent to the loudest problem, the ankle. “I’m going to look at you, okay?” Her voice softened on its own. “Miguel, can you—”
“Look up,” Avery said, not loud, but enough to cut through. “See the whole room before you kneel in it.”
Rae straightened. Her eyes skimmed the cluster of bodies, the plastic shine of manikin skin, the messy gravity of people becoming weight for each other. “Green, green, yellow…” she murmured, finger pointing. “Dev, can I get a sat reading on—”
“On the ground breathing,” Dev reported, already clipping a finger sensor. The monitor chirped to life, comfortable in its certainty. Numbers marched across the tiny screen. He smiled, faint and triumphant, at having caught something the moment asked for.
Avery walked the perimeter, hands behind her back, counting under her breath. The fan stuttered, caught, found its rhythm again. June cupped a hand around one ear, listening to the room like it had secrets.
“Dispatch, this is Bay One, we have—” June began into a handheld.
Avery shook her head. June caught the movement and adjusted. “Bay One to… anyone, stand by.” She set the radio down and started logging with a pencil that couldn’t lose signal.
Five minutes in, Avery flipped a switch. The monitor Dev relied on blinked, thought about dying, then did. The oxygen knob came off in his hand, a trick of loose threading and timing. He froze just enough for the room to hear the freeze.
Dev looked up, heat in his cheeks. “We need functioning equipment, or this isn’t realistic.”
“This is realistic,” Avery said. “What’s unrealistic is your expectation that batteries love you.”
He swallowed. “Protocol says—”
“Protocol says a lot of things. What do your eyes say?”
Dev shifted to the patient on the ground. He put his ear near a mouth, counted, watched a chest rise like someone changing their mind.
Rae hovered between two patients: the loud ankle and the quiet young man hugging himself. The ankle was performing pain like a hymn—clear, repetitive, persuasive. The quiet one’s lips had the color of paper edges and his breath was small enough to hide under a syllable. Miguel, following Rae’s eyes, reached for the ankle because reaching is easier than deciding.
Avery stopped at Rae’s shoulder. “What’s your world in three seconds?”
“Three patients, one ankle possible sprain, one chest pain likely anxiety, one… I can’t tell,” Rae said. She moved the penlight to the quiet one’s pupil. It shrank slow. “Sir? Can you take a deep breath for me?”
He nodded, barely.
“Green, yellow, yellow,” Rae said, fast, and snapped a yellow band on the quiet wrist.
Avery said nothing. She moved on. June’s pencil scratched. Dev’s jaw worked. Miguel put a makeshift splint on an ankle that would walk by lunch.
Ten minutes. The fan made the kind of sound you hate at 2 a.m. because it means the power might be thinking about leaving. Someone laughed—a nervous little thing—then shut it down as if the room had rules against joy.
Fifteen minutes. Avery called, “Freeze.”
No one loves that word. It feels like failing even when it saves you. The room stilled on a hinge.
“Look where your hands are,” Avery said.
Miguel’s hands were on the ankle, neat and kind and irrelevant.
June’s hands were on her log, exact to the second.
Dev’s hands hovered near air that didn’t care about being monitored.
Rae’s hands had gone empty. She flexed them like she had to remember they were hers.
Avery walked to the quiet young man and took his wrist in two fingers. “You tagged yellow,” she said to Rae.
“Yes,” Rae said. “He’s responsive, breathing—”
“Quiet,” Avery said. The room obeyed the instruction and the adjective.
She laid her open palm just under the rib cage, not pressing, only listening with skin. “You hear that?” she asked. “You don’t, because you’re listening with the wrong part.”
Rae leaned in. Dev did too, pride and protest both suspended by curiosity.
Avery’s voice lowered. “He’s breathing like the room owes him air. That’s not a complaint; that’s a confession. He’s telling you he’ll be out of currency soon.”
Rae’s eyes flicked to the face. “But his numbers—”
“We don’t have numbers,” Avery said. “We have a person.”
She took the red band from Rae’s pouch and placed it on top of the yellow, not replacing it, letting both sit there like a before-and-after. “Red,” she said. “Now you adjust the universe.”
Miguel shifted, embarrassed by the ankle on his conscience. He moved toward the red without being told.
Avery didn’t smile. This wasn’t for smiles. “Reset,” she said. The room woke from its freeze like a body out of a cold river. People moved and this time they moved better.
They ran the last twelve minutes in a rhythm that would’ve sounded like competence to anyone passing by. It wasn’t clean, but cleanliness didn’t save people. Attention did. The quiet patient got the right seat, the right hands, the right calm. The ankle got empathy without resources. The one on the ground learned that breathing is a skill you can rehearse.
The timer beeped. Avery cut the fan. Silence collapsed over the bay, softer than you’d expect.
“Circle up,” she said.
They formed a ring with a wobble in it. No one wanted to stand where they’d have to meet her eyes first. She solved it by looking down, giving them the grace of the first sentence.
“You did not fail,” she said. “You stored information under stress. It didn’t all land where you meant it to, but it’s on the shelf now. Next time you’ll reach faster.”
Miguel nodded, grateful to be salvageable.
Dev shifted, still carrying an argument that had lost weight. “If equipment—”
“—fails,” Avery said, finishing for him, “you don’t. You fail when you decide you’re only as capable as your tools. You are not a monitor. You are a person with hands and eyes and a brain trained to notice. Use your inventory.”
June raised her pencil like a white flag. “I heard… the fan change pitch before the monitor died,” she said. “Like the room was warning us.”
“It was,” Avery said. “Rooms always warn you. They just don’t care if you’re polite enough to listen.”
Rae kept her gaze on the scuffed floor. “I tagged wrong.”
Avery let the words sit long enough to be their own correction. “You tagged fast,” she said. “Speed is not the enemy. Guessing is.” She glanced at the yellow-and-red on the quiet wrist. “What made you go yellow?”
“He wasn’t asking for me,” Rae said, voice small. “The ankle was.”
“The ankle was loud,” Avery said. She paused. “Pain is persuasive. Panic is louder. But absence is the quietest, and it kills the most.”
Rae nodded without lifting her head.
Avery bent, gathered the bands into her palm, then turned them over so the scorched edges showed. The red was blackened on one side, as if it had learned about heat and decided to remember.
“Don’t apologize,” Avery said. “Fix it.”
Rae looked up, ready, cheeks flushed with the kind of shame that can turn into fuel if someone strikes it right.
Avery met her eyes. “You just did what a town paid for.”
Part 3 — The Missing Minutes
Morning made the center look harmless. Sun lit the trophy wall. The lobby plants tried their best. Coffee steamed like hope in paper cups. Avery stood at a stainless table in the supply room, wiping the scorched edges of red wristbands with a damp cloth—a habit with no purpose except to remind her why they were burned.
Hale appeared in the doorway with a folder the color of a bruise. “They want a statement,” he said.
Avery didn’t stop. “Who’s they?”
“Our partners,” he said, choosing the word like it might bite. “Legal, risk, public affairs. Pick a lane.”
He slid the folder across. A cover letter lived on top, polite to the point of anesthesia. Beneath it, two pages headed SUMMARY FOR TRAINING RECORD: INCIDENT NEAR ASH RIDGE. Avery read phrases built to survive meetings: unexpected weather, communication complexities, successful life-safety actions. Nowhere did the pages admit a radio that went quiet and stayed that way. Nowhere did they admit seven minutes.
“They want you to sign before noon,” Hale said. “Confirmation that this matches your recollection.”
“My recollection has nouns,” Avery said.
Hale’s mouth moved like he might smile if the stakes were lower. “I asked for the original audio,” he said. “They sent an archival copy.”
“Ends at twenty-one nineteen?”
“Like someone respected a tidy timeline.” He lowered his voice. “Some folks don’t mind a mystery if it means fewer headaches.”
“Headaches are honest,” Avery said.
He drummed the folder once with two fingers, then stopped himself. “Be careful,” he said. It didn’t sound like a warning so much as a request.
The comms room felt cooler than the hall, a box with acoustic panels and the solemnity of a small chapel. June sat at the desk with a pair of battered headphones draped around her neck, elbows braced like a runner at the blocks. Her pencil lay next to a spiral notebook where neat handwriting marched in straight lines even when life didn’t.
“You got the file?” she asked as Avery stepped in.
Avery nodded and placed a thumb drive on the desk. The plastic clicked. “Archival copy.”
June slid the headphones on, then offered them across. “Share.”
They leaned until shoulder met shoulder, the cord slack between them. June clicked play. At first there was only room noise—breath close to a mic, the faint scratch of fabric. Then a voice that used to be Avery’s in a life that ran hotter: “MAY—” and then not even a syllable, just the ghost of one. Underneath it, a wash—noise that had shape if you knew how to listen.
June closed her eyes. Her lips moved without sound, like she was counting to a number not everyone believed in. She tapped a finger on the desk: tick-tick—pause—tick. “That bed isn’t radio,” she murmured. “It’s too round. Hear how it swells, then falls? Like air losing something to push against.”
“Compression artifact?” Dev said from the doorway he hadn’t been invited to. He held his tablet under one arm, the way some people hold grudges. “Low bit-rate files do that.”
June didn’t look up. “So do rooms,” she said. “Every room sings. You just don’t always deserve the song.”
Dev leaned on the doorframe, comfortable in skepticism. “We can’t build conclusions out of poetry.”
“Try listening instead of building,” June said. She toggled the speed down a hair. The wash deepened—less hiss, more breath. A metallic rattle surfaced and sank again, the way pebbles roll at the edge of a wave.
Avery felt the old life move under her skin, the way a scar itches before rain. “Back it up three seconds,” she said.
June obeyed. “…MAY—” and then the wash, rounding, dropping, a soft clatter like something spun itself loose and found a place to rest.
Dev lifted his hands. “It could be anything.”
“It could,” June said. “Except I heard something like it last night in the drill bay.”
Avery turned her head. “When?”
“Right before your monitor died,” June said. “The fan changed pitch. Like power sagging. Like a system handing off to nothing.”
Dev smiled because facts comfort him even when they’re thin. “So the building is haunted by faulty outlets.”
June finally looked at him. “Or we were trained for a world where electricity keeps promises.” She rewound again, slower still. “This isn’t silence. This is something winding down.”
Avery rested a knuckle against her lip, the way she did when she didn’t want words escaping before they were ready. She could feel where that minute had been, the shape of a gap you carry even if nobody else sees it.
“Save a copy,” she said. “Date-stamp it.”
June did, hand steady on the mouse. Dev shifted, not quite willing to be caught caring.
Hale’s shadow crossed the frosted glass. He opened the door like someone entering a room where an animal might spook. “They’re ready for you,” he said to Avery. “Conference room.”
June looked at the clock. “It’s not noon.”
“They’re early when they want something,” Hale said. “Late when you do.”
The conference room felt more crowded with the same number of chairs. Papers waited in tidy stacks. The projector slept with a square of light still visible on the wall like a day that forgot to end.
“We appreciate your cooperation,” the woman in the center said. Today her hair was pinned tighter, as if tidiness could protect her from weather. “We’ve prepared a teaching-safe statement for your signature. It will allow you to continue instruction while avoiding… confusion.”
Avery took the document and read. It swapped the word failure for intermittent, turned we waited into we coordinated, and replaced we lost contact with noncritical audio variance. She felt tired in the old way—the way that had nothing to do with sleep.
She set the paper down. “If the statement is meant to teach, it should say what happened.”
“It says what needs to be understood,” the man with the remote said. His smile wasn’t personal. It belonged to a set of teeth that had learned boardrooms. “When we emphasize stability, communities feel safer.”
“Communities feel safer when they can trust us,” Avery said. She kept her voice flat enough to set a level on. “And trust begins at the place where words stop auditioning.”
The third suit, quiet until now, folded her hands. “No one is questioning your service. We are trying to prevent misinterpretation.”
Hale leaned an elbow on the table. “A file that ends in the middle of a word is misinterpretation.”
The projector, as if insulted, woke with a soft fan-whine. The screen flashed the waveform again. The minute marker sat there like a polite lie.
“We’ve reviewed the available material,” the remote man said. “Twenty-one minutes and nineteen seconds comprise the official record.”
“And the minutes after?” Avery asked.
“Do not exist in our possession,” the woman said. She chose the phrase with care.
Avery glanced at Hale. His face stayed calm the way water stays calm when the temperature is changing.
The woman slid a second sheet across. “There’s also a confidentiality addendum. Standard when training intersects with ongoing reviews. It will protect everyone involved.”
“From what?” Avery asked.
“From speculation,” the woman said. She lifted her pen as if good intent could be notarized.
Avery looked at the pen, then at her hands. Tiny ridges from the jacket seam still pressed into her palm. She wasn’t angry. Anger was directional; this felt like weather—present whether you wanted it or not.
“I’ll review it,” she said.
The woman nodded, satisfied with progress quantified in paper.
Hale walked Avery out. They paused in the corridor under a fluorescent that blinked once every twelve seconds like an anxious eyelid.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Define okay,” Avery said.
He took that as the answer it was. “There’s a rumor,” he said. “That somewhere in the old hangar, there’s a scorch mark people keep painting over. Every time a fresh coat dries, it comes back like a watermark. Some folks call it superstition. Some call it physics doing grief.”
Avery let out a breath that had been paying rent in her chest for years. “Rumors are lazy truths,” she said. “But they’re still truths trying to stand up.”
He lifted a shoulder. “If there’s a way to hear what’s not being said, June will find it.”
They turned the corner into the comms room. June had the file up, the speed at ninety percent, the volume low. The sound that filled the space wasn’t dramatic. It was ordinary in a way that made it worse: a low round tone fattening, then thinning, a clink that was too soft to be staged.
June didn’t look away from the screen. “Listen,” she said. She tapped the timeline with her pencil. “Right here, the pitch drops a whole step. That’s not static. That’s rotational mass losing load.”
Dev opened his mouth, then closed it, uncertain where to shelve the words.
Avery leaned closer. The tone wasn’t a siren. It was the absence of one. In her body, something lined up, the way a bone knows when it’s back where it belongs.
June’s voice was a whisper made of certainty. “Radios don’t die like that,” she said. “Engines do.”
The room held its breath. Outside, someone laughed in the lobby because their day still believed in simple things.
Avery reached for the mouse and dragged the playhead one second forward. The tone dropped again and then the file ended, clean as a door closing.
She felt the tilt that only pilots notice.
“Then we’re not missing silence,” she said. “We’re missing what came after the quiet.”
Part 4 — The Day the Wind Turned
By midweek the drill bay had learned their names. It answered with the things a building can give—shade, echoes, a stubborn hum that steadied hands more than any speech. Tape lines had gone from guesses to lanes. The cones looked less like hazards and more like markers on a map the class could finally read.
Avery rolled the box fan to a new angle and clicked it on. The blades found their voice, higher than yesterday, like the air had different opinions. She set the bin of bands where Rae could reach without looking and laid a cracked-face watch on the table like a metronome for courage.
“Same scenario,” Avery said. “New problems. Today, you’ll meet a room that won’t cooperate.”
Rae tied her hair back tighter. Miguel shook out his hands once, then tucked them in his pockets so the shaking had nowhere to go. Dev arrived with his tablet and, after a look from Avery, set it facedown. June stood by the whiteboard and drew three small circles in a vertical line.
“What’s that?” Miguel asked.
“Silence code,” June said. “If comms go out, three taps means ‘move,’ two means ‘hold,’ one means ‘stop.’ It’s not official. It works anyway.”
Dev lifted an eyebrow. “You just made that up.”
“Most good habits started that way,” June said.
Avery split them into positions with the ease of someone dealing cards she’d shuffled a hundred times. “Rae, triage. Miguel, you travel with Rae. Dev, airway—no monitor until I say so. June, you’re listening for the room, not the radio.” She pointed at the rest. “You’re the city. Make choices and don’t apologize for them.”
She blew the whistle. The bay exhaled into chaos.
It looked like a dozen other drills until it didn’t. A manikin coughed because a trainee made it cough. Someone shouted, “I think I’m fine—actually I’m not fine!” with the kind of acting that would never win an award but might save a neighbor. On the floor, a teenager with a fake scrape sat too still, hugging his belly the way you hug secrets.
Rae scanned faster now, eyes high before they went low. “Green, green—Miguel, leave the loud ankle for last. Dev, you have—”
“Breathing,” Dev said, ear near mouth, counting with two fingertips on a wrist. Without his screen he looked like someone who had just lost a limb and was learning he could still stand. “Slow, shallow, delayed response to voice.”
“Yellow for now,” Rae said, snapping the band. “But I’m watching you.” She moved to the teen. “Sir, I need you to look at me.”
He tried. It took work.
“June?” Avery called.
June had her palm on the cinderblock wall, eyes narrowed as if she could see through concrete. “Fan pitch is wobbling,” she said. “Like the room’s breathing wrong.”
“Plan for it,” Avery said. She walked the perimeter without touching anything. Her hands rode behind her back, fingers loosely linked, so they wouldn’t waste themselves on fixing what didn’t need fixing yet.
At minute six, Avery twisted a dial. The overhead lights dimmed a shade you could ignore if you wanted to. The oxygen flow stuttered and resumed, not quite reliably. Dev inhaled like the room had bumped him.
“Eyes,” Avery said. “Numbers later.”
He nodded and went back to the chest rise, the color at the lip, the way breath pauses when fear makes a fist of it. “I need a seat,” he said. “Upright. Now.”
Miguel slid in with a folding chair, checks his own wrists like he could borrow steadiness from himself. Rae guided the teen up, speaking calm without lying. “You’re doing good,” she said. “We’re going to help your body remember it knows how.”
The fan whined a half-step lower. June tapped twice against the table leg—hold—and the room obeyed without asking who had made the rule.
Avery flipped the timer face down for a heartbeat and then righted it. “Reset your minds,” she said. “Your hands are fine.”
The next five minutes ran like a song the class hadn’t known they knew. Miguel’s trembling turned into speed without hurry. He tore strips of cloth with his hands instead of looking for the roll he’d put somewhere; he made a brace from a piece of cardboard that had once been part of a box. Dev’s voice dropped out of its defensive register. He started asking questions people could answer even when they were scared: “Does it feel worse when you move this?” “Is talking making it harder to breathe?” “Want me to count your breaths with you?”
Rae tagged the loud ankle green and didn’t apologize to the ankle for the demotion. Then she knelt in front of the teen and matched his pace until his breaths heard themselves and did the math.
“Freeze,” Avery said at minute fourteen. The room hated it and needed it.
She crouched, palms on her knees, at the edge of the ring they had made around the teen. “Where were your eyes, Rae?”
“On him,” Rae said.
“And before they were on him?”
“On everything.”
Avery nodded. “Keep that chain.” She looked at Dev. “What told you to ask for the chair?”
“His shoulders,” he said, surprised to hear it out loud. “They were talking.”
“Good,” Avery said. “Learn that language.”
The fan recovered its pitch like it had changed its mind. June rolled her shoulders, tension evaporating in clicks.
“Unfreeze,” Avery said. “Let it end well.”
It did. Not perfect. Better. The timer announced thirty minutes with a cheap beep that no one minded hearing this once.
“Circle,” Avery said.
They gathered. Sweat gave everyone the same complexion. Pride tried to sneak in and was allowed to sit in the back as long as it kept quiet.
“You’re storing good habits,” Avery said. “You didn’t wait for permission to be useful. That’s the job most days.”
Miguel shifted his weight, the tremor gone. “Did it look like a real call?”
“No,” Avery said. “Real calls are uglier and kinder. But this was real enough to make next time more possible.”
Dev balanced the tablet on his thigh but didn’t turn it on. “When do we get the story?” he asked, then softened it. “If we’re allowed.”
“What story?” Avery said, and then spared him from having to say the name.
June glanced at the bands in Avery’s hand. The red edges looked singed even in fluorescent light. “Those are… from there?”
“From a day like that,” Avery said. She turned one over between thumb and forefinger. The blackened bit caught the light and threw it back in a small, stubborn line. “We set down short of where we meant to be because the wind stopped asking and started telling. The radio went quiet. We made a plan with what we could touch.”
She didn’t talk about what the air smelled like. She didn’t talk about flames or heat or the sound that eats the end of a word. She talked about lists. About counting faces and keeping the count honest. About telling people what you were doing while you did it, because being human is part of medicine. About a small hand that found her sleeve and made her stay with it until staying meant both of them walked away.
“We triaged with bands and with time,” she said. “We moved people who could move. We carried the ones who couldn’t. Someone started a rhythm by tapping the stretcher with a ring. We matched our pace to the ring so we wouldn’t run out of breath before they did.”
Rae’s fingers tightened around the pouch of wristbands. “Did you know—then—that you’d… keep the bands?”
“I didn’t keep them,” Avery said. “They kept me. They reminded me later, when I wanted to forget, that guessing politely is not the same as deciding correctly.”
No one spoke for a long beat. The bay settled, as if it had been holding its own breath.
Hale appeared in the doorway with a flyer in his hand. The paper was slick and new, colors bright enough to sell anything. COMMUNITY READINESS DAY stood at the top in generous letters. Below: a schedule, bullet points, a photo of the drill bay looking cleaner than it ever did when useful.
“News,” he said. “This weekend the center will host a public demonstration. Donors, local press, a few officials. We’ll run a scripted mass-casualty drill, very family-friendly. There will be a food truck.” He made the last word sound like both a promise and a problem.
Dev’s chin lifted. “We’re the demo?”
“You are,” Hale said. His eyes moved to Avery. “And they would love if you’d narrate. Talking points provided.”
Avery watched the fan blades turn their small weather. “Talking points like ‘intermittent issues’ and ‘noncritical variance’?”
Hale didn’t answer because he didn’t have to. He held out the flyer. Avery didn’t take it.
June tapped the whiteboard with her pencil—one tap, then two—stop, hold. “Forecast says dry front Saturday afternoon,” she said. “Gusts late day. Power grid advisory: conserve.”
Miguel blew out a breath through his teeth. “So we’ll pretend in front of cameras while the wind auditions a real role.”
Hale slid the flyer onto a table corner. “We do the work we can see,” he said, the closest he came to a sermon. “And we do it well enough that if it matters, it matters the right way.”
Avery felt the smallest tilt—the pilot’s tilt—like a coin tipping inside her chest. She looked around the ring: Rae holding the pouch like a promise, Miguel with his sleeves shoved up like someone who had decided to stop being nervous in public, Dev with his tablet face down and his eyes up, June listening to a room that, for once, told them the truth.
“Okay,” Avery said. “We’ll run the script. Then we’ll run the part life actually uses.”
Hale nodded, a fraction. “There’s one more thing,” he said. “They moved the demo outside. Better light for the cameras.”
The fan dropped a note and stayed there. Somewhere in the building, a transformer clicked like a throat clearing.
Avery lifted the red band, charred edge catching the fluorescent glare, and felt the seam of memory press into her palm. Outside, the afternoon wind stirred and then stilled, as if deciding which direction it preferred.
“Outside,” she repeated, almost to herself. “Late afternoon.”
June’s pencil hovered. “That’s when the wind turns.”
