Page 152 of Flint’s Strike

Twenty minutes later, I move on to the next building. This one takes half an hour. Double the square footage, double the photographs to review. Another accident. I mark it as resolved on Nate’s spreadsheet.

The third one is where shit goes sideways.

I catch it on the suppression system coverage map. There’s a sprinkler head marked on the Apex report that doesn’t show up on Kurt’s post-incident photographs. But it’s only one. He could have missed it. That section of the building took the brunt of the damage.

I leave the file open. I’ll talk to Kurt in the morning and get his take on it.

The fourth file loads, and I read the address twice before my mind catches up to what the rest of my body already knows. I don’t move. I can’t.

My shoulders lock as my fingers curl against the edge of the desk. My lungs stop somewhere halfway through a breath, and for a second, I can’t seem to make them start again.

I remember the halls. How my boots felt on the floor. My hand on the radio. Heat against my face shield. Smoke everywhere. The catwalk collapsing. The sound my femur made when it shattered. The building shifting and groaning around me until I listened to it come apart over a radio channel I still hear in the space between awake and asleep.

My body remembers all of it. Every muscle. Every minute.

Kurt’s the investigator of record. I read his name in black and white on the cause-and-origin report, dated and filed before I’d even regained consciousness in the hospital.

You don’t have to do this.

Kurt’s been here for a decade. He mentored me when I first started. If he marked this fire as accidental, it was accidental.

But I open the building plans and the photographs anyway.

The suppression system in my section of the third floor was insufficient. It should have covered all the way to the break room, but in the photographs, it stops eight feet short.

I remember where the fire found me. I remember how far away I was from the water. How I could almost reach it.

Kurt wouldn’t miss that. Would he?

I keep reading.

One of the support beams near the stairwell was missing its fire-resistive coating. Kurt’s photograph proves it. Bare steel catches the light flash in a very particular way.

Stop. Shut it down and go home.

I still can’t move.

Because the next set of photographs show the stairwell.

Something’s blocking part of the exit. Beams that have no business being anywhere near that part of the building. A support wall sits eighteen inches to the right of where the plans put it.

That’s why Zack couldn’t get out.

No grown man in full gear would have made it through that gap.

“Stairwell’s partially blocked. Metal’s groanin’ like a sombitch. Need another minu⁠—”

Even after seven years, Zack’s voice is as clear now as it was then. I’ve heard it so many times, I stopped listening to the words a long time ago. I focused on the sound. The static. The collapse. Then nothing.

I hear the words now.

Zack wasn’t hacking away at debris that fell during the fire. He was fighting his way through a wall that was never supposed to be there.

Apex should have caught every problem during the initial inspection. The missing coating. The inadequate sprinkler coverage. The blocked stairwell. Someone signed off on that building anyway.

Kurt’s report came after the building burned down, but fire doesn’t destroy everything. It left evidence of every one of Apex’s crimes. And he didn’t catch any of it.

I call Kurt. Each ring is like a punch to the gut. After four, his voicemail picks up.