At 6:12 p.m., Anika saw smoke rising over Calder Street and understood, with immediate and irrational certainty, that it had come from her brother's workshop. The thought was not reasoned; it arrived fully formed, a conclusion her mind had reached before conscious analysis could intervene. She was halfway home from the library, coat unbuttoned, notes pressed beneath one arm against the wind. The smoke was not thick at first. It appeared as a dark ribbon above the row of warehouses beyond the intersection, twisting into the bruised evening sky. Traffic continued. Pedestrians crossed on the green signal. No one around her seemed to recognise what they were seeing yet.
Anika did. She took out her phone and called Ravi. No answer. She called again while already running. Her footsteps slapped the wet pavement, and her breath came in short, urgent bursts. Ravi rented a narrow unit behind a tyre shop, where he repaired old radios and record players that most people would have thrown away. He was patient with broken things in a way Anika had never managed to be. She often teased him for his stubborn attachment to obsolete technology, but secretly she admired the quiet dignity he brought to his work.
When she turned into Calder Street, people were standing still for the first time. Farther down, orange light flickered against the warehouse windows. Not Ravi's unit, Anika thought. Not his. Then she saw the open roller door. Flame moved inside like a living sheet. Smoke poured upward in black folds. Someone shouted, "Back up!" Another voice yelled for an extinguisher, then swore as if one had already failed.
She often teased him for his stubborn attachment to obsolete technology, but secretly she admired the quiet dignity he brought to his work.
Anika reached the opposite pavement just as a firefighter truck swung around the corner with lights strobing across the brickwork. The alternating flashes painted the scene in urgent pulses, illuminating the faces of onlookers who had gathered in small, hesitant clusters.
"You can't go down there," a police officer said, stepping in front of her. His voice was firm but not unkind.
"My brother works in that unit," Anika said. "Ravi Sen. He was supposed to be inside."
The officer's face changed, but only slightly. "Name?" He spoke into his radio, listened, then shook his head. "We don't have a confirmed occupant list yet. Stay back."
Stay back. The phrase was unbearable because it was sensible. Anika stood where she was told and felt herself dividing into two selves: the visible one, breathing, answering questions, watching hoses uncoil across wet concrete; and another self, frantic and speculative, building images she did not want and could not stop. She imagined Ravi trapped, his patient hands stilled, the records he loved reduced to ash.
Then, through the blur of movement and steam, she heard a familiar voice behind her. "You run slower than you used to." She turned so sharply it hurt. Ravi stood there in a soot-marked coat, one eyebrow singed, holding a dented toolbox against his side. He looked tired, dazed, and entirely alive.
Anika did not speak. She struck his shoulder once with the flat of her hand, then caught hold of him as if he might still disappear. "I went for wiring tape," Ravi said into her hair. "And when I came back, it had already started." For the first time since seeing the smoke, Anika let her body believe what her eyes had been given. The relief was so profound it felt like pain, a sharp release of tension that had been coiled in her chest.
As the firefighters worked to contain the blaze, Anika and Ravi stood together on the pavement, watching the orange glow diminish. The fire had not reached Ravi's unit, but the adjacent warehouse was gutted. He would be displaced for weeks, but he was safe. The crowd began to disperse, and the sirens faded into the distance. Anika realised that the story she had constructed in her mind, the speculative narrative of loss, had been withheld from becoming truth by the slenderest of margins. She thought about the phrase "Stay back" and how it had forced her to remain on the edge of knowledge, suspended between hope and despair. It was a lesson she would not forget: that uncertainty could be both cruel and merciful.