Forest fire, some disconnect in me thought, and for a fragment of a heartbeat, there was that confusion, torn between the smoke and the acrid smell of burnt rubber that only now began to sting my nose.

But then the second passed.

The confusion receded.

And all I felt was dread.

It settled in my soles and weighed me down, but I forced myself out of my car and across the street. I hedged closer, heartbeat a clamor at my temples. Then I was peering over the small decline to a shallow basin below.

Small reflections caught in my eyes where sunlight glinted off shattered glass, until the pieces shown like fallen stars in the dirt.

I followed the scene as if in slow motion, tracing those glass constellations until I wasn't staring at the smoke anymore, but at the two, crushed forms it was coming from, like cans that had been stepped on.

And suddenly, within a moment's span of looking and understanding . . .

I couldn't breathe.

Twisted metal.

Blinding lights.

All the oxygen had been pulled from the very world, leaving me alone.

I tried to squeeze my eyes shut as if to blot out what I was seeing, but I couldn't move. The image of the two cars, one overturned, the other steaming grey, seared into me, burning me.

The world spun around in vertiginous greens and blues, vignetted by smoke.

"Bellamy!" I couldn't catch my breath. I wasn't even sure if I'd said his name or just screamed it in my mind.

I didn't remember stumbling forward. Or running down the incline. The smoke made my eyes tear as my hands fluttered helplessly across the overturned car I didn't recognize, its color a deep blue.

But I knew the other one, upright but hissing. Maureen's car.

Bellamy's name was on my lips, but I couldn't get the air I needed to scream it, coming instead in a clipped, scraping breath. It was that day all over. Only this wasn't a memory. It wasn't a nightmare. It was real.

And it was happening again.

No, no, no, I silently pleaded. Once, twice, a thousand. Please. Not him.

Not him.

Some distant part of me was already trying to assess the damage. Even as my legs shook and my heart threatened to break through my chest, even as tears pooled in my eyes, suddenly blurring the smoke and the glass together in threads of metallic grey, I knew. Because for all of my failings, for all the times I couldn't fix anyone, I still had some foolish, inveterate instinct to try.

I inched forward, glass crunching beneath my shoes. I couldn't seem to be able to keep my eyes from Maureen's car, unable to think of it as anyone else's. It was turned enough away from me that I couldn't catch any movement from inside. The huge dent marring the metal carved out a new wave of panic in me as horrible images flashed through my mind, building awful possibilities that wouldn't just devastate. They would demolish. And then what would be left?

I hoped nothing.

A choked sound escaped me. "Bellamy!" I didn't know if it was a cry or a sob.

"Clarke?"

The sound punctured the stillness like thunder.

I didn't even look before dropping to my knees in a puddle of glass, looking through Jae's overturned car. And there, framed in the broken window on the opposite side was a familiar face, his brown eyes wider than I'd ever seen them.

All the breath crashed back into me. I stood again, quick enough to make my head spin as I ran around the front of the car to the passenger side. I was about to ask him where Octavia was, if he was injured, if so where-

But all of my questions, all of my thoughts, all my breath once again came to a sharp stop as I took in the form he cradled in his arms. Her eyes were closed, shadows falling from her lashes. Her face was ashen.

Octavia.

Dumbly, my eyes traced the shape of her, to where her left foot disappeared beneath the car.

". . . tried but I can't get her out!" Bellamy was saying. He looked up at me, the panic in his eyes a frenzy. "Clarke, help me! Please! I don't know if she's bleeding. She hasn't woken up. I need you! Help me!" He kept repeating those words, as if he had to convince me.

But before he'd even asked, I was already kneeling again over crushed glass, hunching down to make out the visibility of her pinned leg. I couldn't see anything. Quickly I grabbed Octavia's wrist, her skin cold, checking for a pulse.

I was aware of my own internal pleading again, synchronized to Bellamy's. What was there to feel anymore? To me there was just panic and ice and absolute terror.

A pulse thumped weakly against my fingertips.

I didn't allow myself to catch a breath. "She's alive," I said. "Did you call 911?"

Bellamy pulled his sister impossibly closer. "I left my phone. Couldn't find-"

I was already pulling out mine and dialing. It took them only a moment to answer.

"There's been a car accident," I said before anything else. I gave the operator the address and the details, and yelled at them once more to hurry. How many times did I repeat that? I tossed my phone over my shoulder and checked Octavia's pulse again.

The beats came a bit slower.

"No," I murmured. No, no, no . . .

"No, no. No! Dad! Can you hear me? Dad! Please don't-please hold on, okay? Someone's coming." They had to be coming. "Please! Just keep your eyes open, okay? Hold on-Dad, don't! Don't go!"

"What?" Bellamy snapped, his fear electrifying his voice.

I looked at her leg again, feeling fresh waves of fear pound me. Trying to drown me. "It's growing fainter," I said, so quiet it couldn't have been more than a whisper.

But Bellamy heard.

"Clarke," my name was a beg on his lips. "Clarke, you need to save her!"

Like the two times before this, all my studying, everything I'd read seemed to evaporate in the fury of my panic. Up and down merged. Suddenly it was just me, trying to keep life inside of someone and not let it slip through my unschooled fingers. And I didn't know how to do that. I knew words in a book. Techniques on a page. I had no training. No practice. I had experience with losing people, never with saving them.

A shudder ran the length of my spine.

"Where's Jae?" I asked, if only to distract myself. I hadn't seen him in the car, but he wasn't exactly the one I'd been looking for.

Bellamy shook his head. "I don't know."

I bit my lip so hard I tasted blood. "We can't-can't move her suddenly. I don't know where her leg is pinned, or what it's pressing against . . . she's already losing blood, but if there's debris or she caught a piece of glass, we can't risk accidentally pulling it loose or . . . she could bleed out."

Bellamy flinched at my words, the pain in his eyes agonized. "What do we do?" he gasped. He let go of Octavia long enough to grab my wrist. "Clarke, what do we do?"

I shook my head and pulled out of his grip, trying to think. "Do you have a jack in your car? Something that could help us lift it?"

Bellamy was already nodding. As gentle as I'd ever seen him, he removed Octavia from his lap and laid her on the ground, brushing some glass out of the way. "Be right back," he said, but I didn't know if it was meant for me or his sister.

"You'll be okay," I murmured to Octavia, running my fingers through her silky hair. I didn't want my voice to catch on the last word. Okay. Didn't want her to somehow hear the way my fear knotted my voice into doubt. "Help's coming," I told her. "It's coming."

"Please don't-please hold on, okay? Someone's coming!"

I wanted to tear the images away. Smash them against the ground in their own dust of glass. But I couldn't move, not until Bellamy had returned, the small device in hand.

"Okay," he said. He wedged it beside the greatest pressure point.

I turned around and snatched up my phone I'd thrown. "Okay, raise it slow, all right? Gently. Stop every thirty seconds to feel for her pulse."

A different kind of panic seemed to seize him. "What are you going to do?"

I turned the flashlight to my phone on. "I have to see where her leg is pinned and if we can pull her out without . . ." I couldn't think the words, much less speak them.

Bellamy blanched. Already he was pale, but this news compounded it. I could see him weighing what could happen, the risk, the questions in his eyes a silent conversation-what if you get stuck? What if we can't pull her out? What if the jack tears through the aluminum and you get crushed?-all encompassed in a single moment.

Then he swallowed, and his lips settled into a flat line. "You can do this," he told me.

I moved around the both of them, settling on my elbows at Bellamy's back. He hefted the jack's lever as quickly as he could, pausing twice to check for Octavia's pulse. The crevice of darkness before me steadily grew, opening wide like a mouth.

As soon as he'd turned the jack high enough for me to begin to wedge my way underneath, I steadied my phone's light before me, trying to get my bearings. Chunks of rock bit into my elbows. I forced myself to breathe past the panic as I inched closer, focusing on reorienting myself beneath an overturned car.

My gaze followed the length of Octavia's leg as I directed the beam of light down, until something wet and brilliantly red caught its reflection.

I couldn't quite stifle the gasp that escaped me, the sound of horror reaching back to Bellamy. "Stop!" The peal shredded my own ears. "Stop, Bellamy!"

"What?" he shouted back. "What is it?"

I was right. It wasn't the weight of the car that was causing the most detrimental injury. It was the sharp piece of aluminum, and the corner of it that disappeared into Octavia's calf.

Breathe.

Tears blurred my vision again, but I blinked them away. It took me a moment to find my voice, too lost in the ocean of my fear. "We can't move her," I said. It sounded like a whisper, but he was close enough to hear me. "This is . . . they'll need to saw through this. A piece of metal is embedded in her leg, but I don't know how deep it goes."

There are ten pints of blood in the human body.

I tried to guess how much blood she'd already lost. Too much.

"She doesn't have that time!" Bellamy snarled. I shuddered again, because his words echoed my own.

I knew she didn't. We were already moving slow. Everything was too slow.

"Clarke," the anger in his voice was gone, replaced once more by that pleading. That begging that was the most foreign thing I knew of Bellamy, because he did not beg. And I knew what he would ask before he did, as if the question were written bare just in the way he spoke my name.

"We have to try," he said, not in a voice of steel or in a tone of iron. There was no edge, and no fire, but only a desperate gentleness that seemed to rip more deeply than any of the cutting words he'd ever spoken to me.

The blood from my lip pooled in my mouth.

"Try," he repeated, more forcefully this time. "There's no one else, Clarke."

It was like another nightmare. But worse, because this was real, and it was mocking me.

There's no one else.

Panic encroached on me more than the darkness, pressing in on all sides, pounding me with those invisible waves. I angled the light between parts of the car, and set my hands gingerly to her calf, trying to block the surge of memory. But they were their own torrent, and I couldn't stop them anymore than I could undo them.

Ancient words spoken over raw wounds rushed to me like a cold draft.

"I can't keep losing people!"

"Finn is dead because of me! My Dad is dead because of me!"

"The first time hurt you," Bellamy's voice echoed back, spoken across a coffee table. "The second time broke you. But a third...would be enough to kill you."

"C'mon, Octavia," I whispered. "Please. Hold on." I could fix this. I had to fix this.

"I'm not afraid that it will kill me. I'm afraid that it won't."

A scream of frustration mounted in my chest, each memory a brick, building up until I felt like I was standing at the edge of the cliff with no way of getting down.

The small pieces of my broken world had caught fire, and now I couldn't help but watch them burn.

How many times do I have to fail at this?

"Clarke!"

The minutes seemed to fade out, trickling away like water in a desert. My whole world narrowed to these moments, cut in aluminum, painted in red. Somehow, my hands didn't shake. My grip was miraculously steady.

But everything else . . .

I couldn't speak of everything else. Right now, there was only this.

I forced my fingers to explore the wound, calling back once at Bellamy to give me two cloths, one to use as a tourniquet and the other to staunch the bleeding. I wrapped the white fabric under her knee, keeping it as close as I could. My movements were mechanical, like there was some disconnect between the calm of my fingers and the storm of everything else. Edges of the white soon turned deep crimson.

"Clarke," his voice cracked like a whip. "Her pulse is too weak!"

I shut my eyes, sparing myself just a moment. Just one moment. A breath in and out. A plea wrapped around too many failures. Another kind of too much loss.

"Dad, stay! Stay, Dad! Don't-don't go!"

"No, Finn, you have to stay awake, okay? I need you to fight, please, please! Fight for me!"

The memories superimposed, until one ended where the other began. The words pressed against each other like two sets of palms. Like intertwined fingers. Absolutely inseparable.

I let out my breath. Not Octavia, too, I asked. Please. Please, God. 

Let this time be different.

"Clarke!"

As straight as I could manage, I maneuvered Octavia's calf in the opposite direction, having to push hard to dislodge the metal. The sound stabbed at me, but it didn't take as long as I'd thought, the metal embedded closer to the surface.

The moment her calf was free, I crammed the cloth into the wound just as sirens pierced the air.

"Pull her out now!"

In one fluid motion, Octavia disappeared and I scrambled back, trying to find something to hook my foot around for leverage. Another moment later, hands were grasping my waist and pulling me back, too.

Light. Sirens. I coughed on smoke I couldn't see, too blinded by the light as if I had been under the car for ages, not minutes.

I blinked rapidly, trying to take in the chaos. The wailing was shrieking now as the paramedics pulled up. I searched desperately for Octavia, catching sight of her on a stretcher before she disappeared into the back of the ambulance.

Suddenly a hand was on my again, pulling me in the direction of the ambulance. I looked up to find Bellamy staring pointedly at where his sister had disappeared, his face a rage of panic, eyes still huge with fear. When we reached the back of the ambulance, one of the paramedics held out a hand to stop us.

"Are you family?"

Some numbed, delirious part of me wondered at the wisdom this paramedic clearly lacked to think his hand alone was enough to keep away a man nearly a head taller than himself.

"I'm her brother," Bellamy practically snarled, batting his hand out of the way.

The paramedic's green eyes found me. They were not unkind. "And you?"

Bellamy pulled me in with him. "Also family," he snapped. "Now drive."