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The shout from one of the firemen she raced past as they came out of the house sounded like Jason’s voice. A heavily gloved hand caught briefly at her arm but Laura was going fast enough to pull away easily.

‘Shelley’s in there,’ she shouted back over her shoulder. ‘Megan must be here as well.’

The heat inside the house hit her solidly as she ran through the front door but, surprisingly, the smoke didn’t seem too bad. Enough to make her eyes sting and force her to hunch her shoulders and keep her head lowered, but she couldn’t see any flames and she knew that the area of the house she had seen Shelley in was as far as it could be from the worst of the fire. If she could just get up the stairs she would be able to find them faster than anybody else because she knew where they were.

She also knew she shouldn’t be doing this. She could hear the shouts of the firemen trying to catch up with her. They would pull her clear if they succeeded. Number-one rule for rescuers – do not put yourself in danger. A rule for anyone at a house fire was to get out and stay out. But there was no time to think about anything other than a gut reaction. Laura was running purely on instinct and adrenaline.

This was Megan whose life was in danger.

Laura took the stairs two at a time, her eyes now streaming and a painful cough grabbing at her lungs. She heard even louder shouts from the firemen behind her and then she heard something far worse. The crack and rumble of timbers falling as the staircase she had just climbed collapsed.

There was no turning back now and Laura knew she only had a matter of seconds to find what she was looking for. The smoke upstairs was thick. And black. She dropped to her knees to find the only clear patch of air and crawled in a frantic rush towards what she desperately hoped was the room in which she had seen Shelley. God help her if she’d got it wrong!

Everything became a blur. She found the room. Shelley pushed past her at a one-legged crawl, her other leg trailing uselessly behind her. She shouted something at Laura but the words were made incomprehensible by racking coughs. And Laura wasn’t listening anyway because it was too hard to think of more than one thing at a time and she could see the small, still shape on the floor beside the window.

It had to be Megan.

The shattering of the window glass was followed by a more ominous sound of something exploding into flames nearby. Laura couldn’t breathe any more. Couldn’t think. But she didn’t need to. Rough, gloved hands were pulling at her, picking her up with Megan still clutched to her. And then she was in Jason’s arms.

‘Put one arm around my neck. Wrap your legs around my waist and hold on tight!’

If Laura hadn’t been so close to losing consciousness or so afraid of whether Megan was still alive or not, she might have been terrified of being carried down the long extension ladder, clinging to the front of Jason’s body like a monkey, with Megan wedged securely between them.

* * *

Tim came into focus a short time later.

‘You bloody idiot,’ he told Laura as he noticed she was awake.

She pulled the oxygen mask from her face. ‘Wh-where’s Megan?’ she croaked.

‘Right here.’

Laura struggled to sit up. Tim was bent over the second stretcher, with his stethoscope on a tiny chest. Megan’s face was covered by the paediatric oxygen mask that was miles too big for her.

‘Is… is she…?’

Tim glanced at Laura, then smiled as he lifted the mask from the baby’s face for a second. The sound of her crying became separated from the cacophony of shouting, sirens and equipment running outside the ambulance, and Laura laughed and sobbed and coughed all at the same time until Tim gently pushed her back down and firmly tightened the elastic string on her oxygen mask. Laura closed her eyes but not before she caught a glimpse of more ambulance officers rushing past the back doors with another figure on a stretcher.

And then Jason was there. Still in his full protective uniform, he seemed far too large to be standing in the back of an ambulance. His breathing apparatus tank was still on his back, the mask dangling beneath his chin. He ripped off his heavy gloves and his helmet and dropped them onto the floor. Then he reached for Laura’s hands.

‘You bloody idiot,’ he told her. Laura could see tears in his eyes as a wobbly smile appeared. ‘Don’t you ever do that to me again.’

Laura couldn’t speak. It was painful to breathe anyway and the look on Jason’s face was enough to make her think she was precious in her own right. He loved her… there could be no doubt about that. But was it a love that was separate from how he felt about his daughter? Did Jason even know that Megan was all right? Still unable to produce any words, Laura pulled one hand from Jason’s grip and pointed to the other stretcher, her lips curving into a smile just as wobbly as Jason’s had been.

Jason turned to look at his daughter. The tears that had brightened his eyes overflowed now and built into a trickle that carved a pathway through the grime on his face.

‘Thank God,’ he whispered. ‘I thought that was just too much to hope for.’

‘Sh—’ Laura coughed hard and drew in a ragged breath of oxygen. She pulled the mask from her face and tried again. ‘Shelley?’ she managed to croak.

‘Alive,’ Jason told her. ‘But injured. We got her out just in time. Couldn’t do anything to save her brother, or whoever he was, though.’

* * *

Whoever he was became clear much later that day.

Laura and Jason found themselves sitting that evening, side by side, on chairs pulled up to a bed in a side room on the orthopaedic ward of Wellington’s General Hospital. The woman lying on the bed had her plastered lower leg supported on pillows. Her arms and hands were heavily bandaged and her face was red with areas of peeling skin. With her eyelashes and eyebrows singed to virtual baldness, Shelley Bates looked nothing like the attractive female that had walked into their lives only days before.