ECHOES OF A BURNING NIGHT.

--- Fire has a sound. It crackles, yes—but beneath that is something worse. A roar. A living, breathing thing swallowing the night whole. I don't remember when the flames began, only that they were already everywhere when I became aware of them. But I remember one thing with absolute clarity. I wasn't supposed to be in that house. --- Heat pressed against my skin, fierce and suffocating, as if the air itself wanted me gone. Smoke clawed down my throat, burning my lungs with every breath I fought to take. My eyes stung, vision blurring through tears I didn't remember crying. I was on the floor. That much I knew. The rest was chaos. But even through the chaos — something in me was cataloguing. The exits. Where they were. Which ones were already gone. The structural sounds — which groans meant imminent collapse and which ones meant the building was holding, barely, for now. The direction of the heat — which walls were closest to the source and which ones still had seconds left. I didn't know how I knew these things. I just knew them. *"Cameron!"* The scream tore through the fire, sharp and desperate. A woman's voice. Fear-soaked. It echoed in my skull like it had been screaming my name for years. But underneath the fear — something else. Relief. Like she'd been looking for me. Like finding me here — in this burning house, on this floor, in this fire — was not a shock but an answer to something she'd been asking for a long time. I tried to turn my head, but pain exploded behind my eyes. Something heavy pinned my legs. I couldn't feel my right arm at all. *"Don't move!"* someone shouted. A man this time. His voice was strained, breaking under pressure. *"She's alive — she's still alive!"* Alive. The word felt strange, distant. As though it belonged to someone else. A beam collapsed somewhere above me, sending sparks raining down. The heat surged, licking closer, closer — until I screamed. The sound ripped from my chest, raw and animal, driven by fear I didn't understand. Hands grabbed my shoulders. Strong. Urgent. Shaking. *"We've got you,"* the man said, though his voice trembled. *"We won't let anything happen to you."* But something already had. I knew that with a certainty that chilled me more than the fire ever could. Another memory flickered — too fast to grasp. Glass shattering. A door slamming open. Someone pushing me forward. Run. The word wasn't spoken aloud. It burned inside my head. Not a suggestion. A warning. From someone who had known what was coming before the flames did. I gasped, fighting against the weight trapping me. *"I — I can't,"* I whispered, though I didn't know who I was speaking to. *"I'm stuck."* *"I know,"* the woman said. She was closer now, her face appearing through the smoke. Her hair was pulled back messily, her cheeks streaked with soot and tears. She looked terrified. But she also looked at me like I was something she had been afraid of losing long before tonight. Her hands were shaking as she brushed my hair back. *"You're going to be okay,"* she said. *"Do you hear me? You're going to be okay."* I wanted to believe her. But something in the way she said it — the particular desperation of it, the weight of it — told me she wasn't just talking about the fire. She was talking about something that had started long before this. The ceiling groaned — a deep, ominous sound. The man swore under his breath. *"We're running out of time."* *"No,"* the woman snapped. *"We're not leaving her."* A sharp pain tore through my chest as they lifted the debris pinning me. I screamed again, my voice cracking. The flames surged, embers biting at my exposed skin. *"Please,"* I whispered. *"Please don't let me die."* The woman's face crumpled. She looked at me — really looked at me, the way people looked at things they loved and were terrified of losing — and said: *"You won't. Not tonight. I didn't find you just to lose you again."* Find me. The word landed somewhere strange. She had been looking for me. Before the fire. Before tonight. She had been looking for me. That was the last thing I remembered clearly. The rest came in fragments. Sirens wailing in the distance. Arms carrying me through smoke and heat. The woman shouting something I couldn't hear — a name, maybe. Not mine. Someone else's. And then— Darkness. --- I woke up screaming. My body jerked upright, pain ripping through me so violently I thought the fire had followed me into the dark room. My heart slammed against my ribs, breath coming in sharp, panicked gasps. *"Easy,"* a calm voice said. *"You're safe."* I wasn't convinced. I looked down at myself — the unfamiliar hospital gown, the IV in my arm. My skin was bandaged in places, white gauze stark against the paleness of my body. The smell of antiseptic filled the air, sharp and clean — nothing like smoke. But the fire still burned behind my eyes. And something else burned too. A question I couldn't name yet. Something that had been lit by a woman's voice saying *I didn't find you just to lose you again* and hadn't gone out since. *"You were in an accident,"* the voice continued gently. A woman stood beside the bed, clipboard in hand. Her expression was professional, composed. Too composed. The kind of composed that was maintained rather than natural. The kind that took effort. *"What's my name?"* I asked. The question startled her. She hesitated. Not for a second too long. For exactly the right amount of time — the amount that told me the answer she was about to give had been decided before she walked into this room. *"Cameron,"* she said. *"Cameron Voss."* I watched her face as she said it. She didn't look at me the way people looked at someone when they were giving them their own name back. She looked at me the way people looked at someone when they were giving them a name that had been chosen for them. *Cameron.* I repeated it quietly. Nothing stirred. No recognition. No sense of belonging. But something else — a faint unease. The specific unease of a word that didn't fit the shape of the space it was supposed to fill. *"Do you remember anything?"* she asked. I closed my eyes. Searched the darkness inside my head. No childhood memories. No faces. No laughter or warmth. Just flames. Smoke. A woman screaming my name like she'd been waiting years to say it. And the word *Run* — burning in my skull like someone had put it there deliberately. Like a message left behind by a version of me that knew something this version didn't. *"No,"* I whispered. *"I don't remember anything."* Her expression shifted. Softened — but not with sympathy. With something more complicated. Something that looked almost like relief. *"You've been through something very traumatic,"* she said carefully. *"Memory loss isn't uncommon in cases like yours."* *"Cases like mine,"* I repeated. Not a question. *"You were pulled from a house fire two weeks ago,"* she said. *"You're lucky to be alive."* Lucky. The word echoed hollowly. *"What about the people who were with me?"* I asked. *"The woman. The man."* The nurse's lips pressed together. Her clipboard shifted in her hands — a small movement, barely perceptible. But I noticed it. I noticed everything. *"I'm sorry,"* she said quietly. *"They didn't make it."* Something inside me cracked. I didn't remember their faces. I didn't remember their names. But grief crushed my chest all the same — heavy and suffocating and entirely real, the grief of a body that remembered what the mind had lost. *"They died,"* I whispered. *"Trying to save me."* The nurse didn't correct me. She only reached out and squeezed my hand. But I was watching her face. And what I saw there wasn't just sympathy. It was the careful neutral expmuch to tell me. And exactly how much to leave out. *The question was —* *What were they leaving out?* ression of someone who knew more than they were saying. Someone who had been told — by someone, somewhere, before they walked into this room — exactly how