“I’ll do my best to get an ambulance, but this town is blown to shit.” He swallowed. “I love Sam like a sister, Grayson. We’ll get someone there. I’m with Josh, and we’re already at the intersection of Rucker Boulevard and Eighty-four. We’ll be there in a couple minutes. Let me make some calls.”

I hung up without waiting for him to finish. He needed to get a fucking ambulance here, not baby me. “Avery?”

“Yeah?” she asked in a shaky voice.

“I need you to tell me if you start feeling more pressure, okay? If I do anything that squeezes you?” I flipped another brick.

“Okay.”

“What’s on top of you? Is it hard? Heavy? I need an idea of what’s pinning you.”

She was quiet.

“Avery?” I pushed the bricks faster.

“Sam.”

“What?” I paused.

“It’s Sam. She’s on top of me. She covered me when the lockers fell.”

My eyes closed as pain tore through my chest, at war with the overwhelming pride I felt in her. “Of course she did,” I said. “She loves you, Avery.”

“I know.” She squeaked the last part.

I dug and dug until I was joined by other hands. Josh and Jagger.

“Fuck. Grayson, look at your hands,” Jagger said, pulling at my arms.

My fingers were raw, dripping blood. “I can’t feel it. I don’t care.”

“Let us take over,” he urged while Josh started pulling the support beams off and away from the pile.

“If it was Paisley?”

Fear lanced through his eyes, and he clamped down on my shoulder. “We’re going to get her out.”

We dug, soon joined by other people, some in uniforms, some not. Finally we reached the blue metal lockers. “She’s directly under these,” I said so they didn’t fuck up and hurt her.

Six of them gripped the sides of the wall unit and then lifted slowly while I crouched next to the floor. As it rose, I saw her fingers dangling. “Stop! She’s wedged in one of the lockers!” I couldn’t pull Avery out, not without knowing if she had neck trauma. “Step three feet toward the showers.”

The group did so, and I crawled under, then rolled until I was directly beneath where Sam hung in a macabre suspension, her eyes closed. Don’t think about it. Don’t you dare. Her arm was twisted in an unnatural angle that sent saliva into my mouth. Livable. The other had a gash that was steadily dripping blood, but not pulsing. Cosmetic. It was the blood that ran in a steady stream from her hairline, down her cheek, and dripped off her chin that worried me.

I carefully dislodged her hips from where they held her pinned, and then worked her shoulders out one by one. I was slow, exceptionally careful not to jar anything that could break her spine. If it wasn’t already broken. Shut the fuck up. There was never a complaint from the crew that held up the heavy locker system.

Freeing the last inch of her shoulder, she dropped the twelve inches to me, landing heavily on my chest. “She’s free!” Slowly I lifted my hands to test her pulse.

Steady. Strong. Thank you, God.

Her nose lay in the hollow of my throat, her forehead resting under my chin. I felt every breath she released, and kept rhythm with my own breathing, like I could do the work for her. Slowly the lockers moved until all I saw above me was blue sky.

The storm was already gone.

“Is she okay?” Avery asked, lying next to me.

“Don’t move. There are paramedics ready to take you, but don’t move in case you injured your back or your neck.”

“Is she okay?” she repeated.

“I don’t know. Did she wake up at all while you were under there?” Please.

“No.”

My eyes squeezed shut against the panic that crept up my spine, infecting every nerve with the need to fight, to do something. Anything.

The paramedics came for Sam first, laying the backboard on top of her and then maneuvering the straps between our bodies until she was tight. They kept asking if I was okay. Was I hurt? Was I uncomfortable?

What did any of it matter?

She wasn’t awake.

She was warm but lifeless. Nothing would wake her, nothing would bring her back. I pushed her long blonde hair out of her eyes and prayed. We’d made it out of the car, the water, but this I couldn’t pull her out of. I was powerless.

Fuck. Sam wasn’t Grace. I couldn’t compare the two, but that was all my brain wanted to do.

I followed the paramedics out, passing Maggie, who was being held back by a first responder. “Avery’s okay,” I told her.

They lifted Sam into the ambulance, and I climbed in with her. “Sir…”

“Where she goes, I go.”

I stared him down until he nodded his head and let me in.

“I heard somewhere that this helps with the nausea,” Jagger said as he handed me a ginger ale and sank into the empty waiting room chair next to me.

“Yeah, and what asshole told you that?” I took it and popped the top. The taste put me back in another hospital. Another waiting room where I’d sat alone, waiting for news. Waiting for them to release Owen from the small line of fucking stitches he’d needed, to give me news on Grace.

“This guy who’d lived through a hell of a lot more than I had and somehow came out the other side.” He leaned back against the waiting room chair. “I called Ember. She’s on a flight with Sam’s mom. Josh is headed to Montgomery to pick them up.”