The space elevator breaks with a noise like thunder rolling cross country. Probably it’s been cut or bombed or sabotaged, the way so many different people threatened. Or maybe it was built in a stupid place; the closer to the equator with those things the better, the whole scientific community said so. But none of that is what I really care about. I care about survivors.

This will be the worst scene I’ve ever worked, I think as I grab the bag, load up Riddle. As bad as when the starship burned up in atmo, though with that, survivors were impossible. Just pieces, human and machine, strewn across one of the hottest deserts in the world, gathered carefully and puzzled together in a hangar in Dubai, so big it rained inside.

The highways are closed, but nobody stops me as I drive west towards the dust cloud that’s growing or subsiding or the same size, I can’t tell, and then I’m in the fringes of it and can’t see the horizon anymore anyway. Riddle whines softly in the back seat. “It’s okay buddy,” I say, looking back. “We’re going to work.”

In disasters, there are people who flee, and there are people who go against the tide, go towards the fire, the cascading dust that turns the landscape to volcanic night. The radio is a paper bag crackle across all the bands, AM and FM, and my phone signal is a symbol I’ve never seen before. It’s as close to a dead zone as I’ve ever been in, and that includes the middle of the desert outside Dubai, Riddle air scenting, me keeping an eye out for the glint of metal or the flash of flag colors in the midday sun. They’ll have walkies on site, subvocal patches to stick on your throat and a bud to tuck in your ear like all the promises you cannot make when you find a person, if they’re alive. Those walkies work everywhere, even nuclear sites. I’ve never worked one of those nightmares; they use muscle robots, not dogs.

Riddle barks once, sharply, and I pull over so he can do his business. The streetlights struggle against the dust, sharp blue white LEDs making eerie puddles in the gloom, and Riddle sneezes as he comes back, swiping at his long Doberman snout with his paws. In the truck, I wet a bandana with a bottle of water and wipe him down while he licks my hands.

We have to be getting close. I peer at my fan of headlights and the gloom beyond, waiting for an updated highway sign or the first roadblock. Maybe I should’ve waited for other group members but time is so precious.

I spend some time wondering where exactly the thing broke. How much of it came down, how much burned up in atmosphere, and how much whipped off into space. How many people? Riddle stands up in the back seat, pokes his nose through the headrest at the back of my neck. “I think we’re almost there,” I say, and he grunts at me, noses again.

“Relax.” He settles back with a sigh.

Then there’s a riot of flashing emergency lights, hooked up to roaring generators that are probably going to choke to death on the dust. A guy in an industrial rebreather with a glow rod waves, and I inch my window down, ID ready. “Search and rescue,” I say. “Where are we gathering?”

He looks at me for a long time, then looks at the quivering wet end of Riddle’s inquisitive nose, stuck between my seatbelt and the window. “There’s a white tent you’ll get to before anything else,” he says. “There’s only so close anybody can get, but a couple of crawlers came down further out.” Crawlers, that’s what they call the elevator cars. “Thanks for getting here so quick,” he says, voice thick with filters and the disaster. I drive on, rolling my window back up. It’s a highway rest stop, acres of blacktop, lots of power hookups, sewer facilities.

I’m not the first, others were more local, but I’m in the first twenty. The fifth dog. “Not many people use Dobermans for this,” a man with a lab says.

“That’s true,” I say neutrally. There are medical tents going up. I wonder if the first survivors have walked out. I have to go into this thinking there are survivors.

“A lot of people are afraid of Dobermans still,” the man says.

“That’s true,” I say again, looking steadily at him. Riddle bumps me with his shoulder, and I look down into his happy face. I told him we were going to work, and I never lie to my dog; he’s wagging just a little. “Do they have a communications tent yet?” I ask as I get Riddle’s mask and hold it out. He pokes his muzzle into it, and I straighten the straps.

A woman with a border collie answers. “They’re still getting power to it. I’ll go with you.”

We walk over, her dog forging ahead, coming back into heel. They’ll start sending us in ASAP, and the rest of us will stand around and drink burnt-tasting coffee from a giant stainless carafe. We’ll suit up, suit our dogs up, and we’ll try to find the living and the dead. I wonder how many of us just got into our cars and came. It’s probably an indicator of whatever shambles our personal relationships have become. The woman isn’t wearing a wedding ring either, though her finger doesn’t have the pale mark on it that mine does. This is my first disaster since I electronically signed the divorce papers; I was training in Missouri when I got served, further proving his point that we’d grown irreversibly apart.

The comms tent lights up, and a couple of loudspeakers crackle and honk the emergency broadcast noise, so loud that the silence between repetitions rings in its emptiness. The border collie flattens on his belly, and Riddle’s ears go sideways, the fur between his shoulders ruffling like velvet stroked in the wrong direction. The lights go out again. Whoever’s doing the wiring is going quick, but if ever there was an emergency broadcast situation, this is one. Seems funny, how rarely I actually hear that noise, other than tests.

In our flashlights, the white tent is filled with tables, laid out with the kit we’ll get. Walkies, treats for the dogs, a nice touch. No people, and then the lights come on again, quietly, and a man in coveralls and a woman with a bright row of sharpies in her work shirt crawl from under one of the tables. “If you’d followed my organization, you wouldn’t have gotten the cables crossed,” she’s saying mildly.

“Tiny dots on extension cords don’t exactly help me in the dark, do they?” Riddle huffs loudly through his mask, and the pair become aware of us. “Oh, sorry,” he says. I can’t tell if he’s blushing or sunburnt. He starts off in the direction of another crew.

“You’re our first!” the woman chirps, gesturing us over, and picking up a tablet to log our IDs. “I’m Sally, you just come find me if there’s anything you need. You know the drill, the batteries in the walkies we’ll last for weeks. We’re spring meal logistics, so there’ll be something soon.”

“How soon will we be going in?” I ask.

“I can’t say for certain.” Sally looks down at Riddle, who’s looking back and forth between the people speaking. “Well aren’t you a smart one?” she says to him in a sweetened tone. He wags, and mutters back at her, muffled by his mask. “And a talker!”

The border collie woman introduces herself as Nan, the dog is Tweed. We’re all doing the mental math about survivors but don’t say any of that yet.

“I read about you,” Nan says to me. “In a feature about the Dubai operation.”

“That was us,” I say, fake cheerful like jetting off to Dubai wasn’t the final straw in my marriage. Like me and Bob hadn’t fought all night before I went to the airport, and he just kept asking why I had to do it, why it was up to me to go. And I went anyway. Like we didn’t limp on for another year before he moved out. Now he’s settled in working at one of those CRISPR facilities for medical pigs, free to flex his biologist muscles in ways he apparently couldn’t before.

Nan smiles, watching Tweed and Riddle investigate each other, both dogs relaxed in their body language. “I always thought Riddle was an amazing name for a search and rescue dog.”

“Years ago, I read about another dog somebody worked, named Puzzle, which is even better. I just didn’t feel right stealing it.”

“That’s fair. Border Collie names are easy, it seems like there’s only ever about ten, if your dog works.”

“This is a little different from herding sheep,” I say carefully, but she laughs.

“Very different! But it’s definitely work.” Nobody who comes will be a rookie; we’ve all done one of these before, a bombed building, a downed plane, a hurricane.

More people check in, and then they feed us, cooking the food from the freezers that the generators can’t handle. It’s smart, getting us all together and talking without booze and before the first body.

Sunrise is grimly on its way, red embers through the dust in the horizon by the time we’re tagged in. I rev Riddle up just enough with a tiny stuffed squeaky hedgehog toy. Bob never got how this jacks right into my system, into everything I need in life to get going and stay going. And after awhile, he stopped trying to get me to drop it. Stopped trying to get me to settle into a home life, stopped trying get me to have a baby. Met his own, separate friends. Had his own liquor cabinet. Slept in his own bedroom after one too many midnight calls.

Riddle still looks for him sometimes, waits at the front window of the new place, nose resting on the still. But Riddle lives for the work too, and if we aren’t deployed, we’re training with the group, or doing freelance nosework for police departments or private detectives. Missing persons and fleeing criminals.

I couldn’t see from where they set us up, but the landscape just past base is a burning hellscape. Debris, and blasted earth, the shells of buildings. The white-hot remains of the crawlers, the scattered entrails of elevator cables. The ground is cracked and blackened, and I crouch to lay my palm against it; not too warm, but we’ll all have to keep an eye on that. Some dogs will work without ever indicating pain.

There’s a call and response on the walkies to make sure everybody’s there and holding it together. In some quadrants, there are live finds, and my heart leaps every time. It’s enough that I stop keeping a mental tally. I don’t tally the bodies.

It’s hard to wrap my head around the size of this. The elevator structure is a broken-off tooth that juts jagged against the seething dust cloud, parts of it still powered and glowing impotently, like it’s both the beauty and the beast. Riddle’s got the beginnings of a live find, nubby tail tick-tocking back and forth methodically as he moves forward, swinging his head to air scent. He hasn’t alerted yet, though, and I called it in as a ‘maybe’ in progress. One of the crawlers, or part of it, is in our area. It’s busted through to one of the sublevels, looking now more like a subway disaster than a spaceborne transport; I hope it’s stable, jammed in tight.

There are people who deride what we do, who talk out the side of their mouth about how the dogs will give false alerts just to get cookies, because they think that’s what cookie training does. They’ve never worked a search. They’ve never seen dogs get depressed when they can’t find somebody alive. They don’t know the triumph, the satisfaction, of a live find. They don’t know. They speak from ignorance. They don’t know my dog, they don’t know the people I train with, they don’t know the job.

And then Riddle alerts.

All this time, we’ve been going towards that goddamn crawler in his inexorable air scenting zig-zag and he stops briefly and stands square, ears forward and tail up, staring at it, and barks once, twice, three times in rapid succession. He looks at me over his shoulder and I give him a thumbs up, and he moves forward again. It’s hotter here, but he’s not mincing his steps. He’s at the crawler, ready to just hop aboard, when I slap my leg once and he stops. I can’t really whistle with the mask on, the signal I’d normally use, and when he looks at me I give him the “go ahead slow” hand cue.

He puts his front paws on the edge of the crawler, and I watch it for movement, either a person inside or for the whole thing to crumble into the hole, and neither happens. He hops up, paws at the door that’s half crumpled and torn away.

Closer now, I see that while the nose of the crawler is horizontal, the passenger section is broken and dangling behind.

Riddle sticks his head in, his tail wagging furiously now, not the meditative back and forth of seeking, but the circular joy of finding. He barks again, one two three, hopping off the crawler to face me. I get to him, plant one of the little wire and LED flags we all got, flagging the site on the map that’s running, and put my hand on the crawler. It hasn’t moved yet, and I need to take the chance. It’s possible whoever’s in there won’t last for the further team, or won’t live through it shifting. I boost myself up and the crawler doesn’t move. Good. I take a breath and I look inside.

The lights inside flicker on again, off again. A crawler is set up kind of like a subway car, except everybody gets buckled in with roller coaster style harnesses. Those harnesses did a real good job keeping what looks like seven dead bodies hanging just where they are. And the eighth person in there is the live one, a little girl. She’s been looking at Riddle and smiling, but when she looks at me her smile falls off. It’s kind of funny to see a dog in a breathe mask and doggles; it’s kind of scary to see a human in a helmet, rebreather, and goggles. I pull the mask down off my mouth and nose, and smile at her. “Hey kiddo, looks like my dog Riddle found you. Are you okay? Does anything hurt?” She stares at me with big blue eyes, and I’m not a good judge of age, but I think she’s four or five like my niece, like more of a baby at that age than any of us remember being, but nobody wants to remember being a baby.

“I hurt all over,” she finally says. I can hardly hear her, there’s a noise I can’t really quite identify coming up through the crawler like it’s a cheap tin can speaker. Is it the crawler, or the machinery in the sublevels? I don’t know.

“Well stay really still, okay honey? We’re here to help you.” She’s down ten, fifteen feet. Three bodies between me and her, and I do say bodies, without need for confirmation. At least one is sheared through, maybe by the door when it came off. There’s a lot of blood, enough that I can smell it, the heavy copper taste hanging in the back of my throat. I test the edges of the entryway, see if it’s sharp enough that we need to worry about being cut to ribbons, but I guess it got hot enough that everything rounded itself off. I key the walkie. “Base, this is Mobile 17.”

“Mobile 17, Base is listening.”

“Base, I have Status 2 and multiple Status 3, confirm flag on my position.”

“Copy, Mobile 17, that’s confirmed. Sending Med 2.” It’ll be a drone stretcher and four people on foot, and they’re going to take some time to get here.

I go feet first, lowering myself carefully until the soles of my boots touch one of the seat uprights. I wait to see if it’ll hold my weight before I let go, and it seems solid enough.

“What’s your name?” I ask the little girl. The sideways seat rails aren’t monkey bars but I make do. I try not to think about the dead people I’m clambering past, that I’ll have to climb back up past, probably with a little girl on my back. It’s warm in here, and damp. Riddle patters his feet against the edge of the opening and I glance up at him. “Wait.” He mutters at me, but is no longer canted forward and ready to drop down.

“Alyssa,” she says, almost inaudible. Her fingers are in her mouth and I try not to think too much about it.

“Well hi Alyssa, I’m Jo. You already met Riddle there.”

“He’s big.”

What do people talk to kids about? I’ve never rescued a kid, only been around them when we went to see my husband’s sister. “He sure is. Do you have a doggie?”

She scrunches up her face at my profound adult stupidity. “No. We’re going to Mars and there’s no dogs on Mars.”

“You’re right, there aren’t. Just robot ones I guess.” Mars, they were taking this baby to Mars. Weren’t there regulations about that? Or maybe five is old enough. Or maybe the pediatricians of the world are still trying to get together and petition the age to be raised, to ten or something. Maybe—

I don’t know what causes it, but the crawler is jarred and shifts abruptly, right as I’m almost to Alyssa. She gives a little scream and my right hand slips on all the blood and I dangle briefly from just my left, struggling to get my toes braced before losing my grip entirely.

There’s a deep groan, and a noise like a giant grinding its teeth together, and Riddle jumps into the hole, free falling towards me with his paws paddling like he’s swimming. Breaking away, the passenger section of the crawler continues its roaring descent into the basement works. It’s falling, I’m falling, and Riddle hits me in the shoulder and the middle of the chest with a surprised yelp, catches me in the face with one of his paws. We hit one of the central upright pipes in the crawler, and I flail both my arms, trying to catch Riddle by the harness, trying to stop myself in the crawler so we don’t fall out the bottom or one of the shattered windows to be crushed. I catch Riddle, and kick into an empty seat, coming to rest against another strapped in dead person as the crawler stops moving again.

I struggle to catch my breath. Alyssa is shrieking, no words, and as soon as I can I shout to her. “Alyssa! Alyssa I’m still here, I’m okay. Talk to me kiddo, does anything new hurt?”  Riddle whistles through his nose and pushes his face against my neck, bumping the mask into me again and again, and I run my hands all over him but he seems fine. He doesn’t flinch, he isn’t shivering or shaking. I don’t know what I’d do if he wasn’t okay. Normally he wouldn’t be in a harness, so he couldn’t get hung up on anything, and I’m so glad I put him in it today. I never would’ve been able to catch and hold him if he was naked.

“I still hurt,” she says. I try to look up at her, can’t get a good vantage. I look down, where I see part of the elevator enclosure that holds the crawler. It’s twisted closed, like a squeezed wad of clay. Good, we won’t fall out the bottom, but the top seems so very far away now, and I wonder if some of my ribs are more than bruised. Two of my fingers are dislocated and my wrist is definitely broken.

“But is anything worse?” I fumble for the button for my helmet flashlight, twisting around for my first aid kit and flinching at the grind in my wrist.

“No,” she said. And then in an even tinier voice, so hard to hear with the roaring mystery machinery even closer “Are my mommy and daddy sleeping?”

Oh God. “Are they sitting here with you, honey? There’s a lot of people asleep here.” I get the smart splint on my wrist first, then let my breath out slowly. At the bottom of the exhale I yank my two fingers back into alignment. The pain spikes, and I ride it out, hissing through my teeth, and it subsides to an insistent ache. Where the fuck is Med 2? Riddle swipes at his mask with one paw, trying to get it off so he can lick me. “Leave it, buddy.”

“They’re over there. It’s dark and my eyes feel funny.”

Kiddo probably has a concussion, but I’m not a doctor, just certified in what I need for search deployment. “We’ll check on them after we get you out of here, okay? There’s a lot of people here and just one of me.”

“Okay.”

The walkie chirps in my ear, but no voices come through, just static. Well. Fuck me. I almost start laughing. I think I could really use a drink right now, and that thought messes me up but it’s not like I have the time to unpack those feelings right now. Maybe it’s because of the kid. But really, it’s not like this is ever easy.

I key the walkie in case they can hear me. “This is Mobile 17 to whoever can listen, me and my Status 2 are in the crawler that just took a tumble down that hole. I’m not getting a signal down here. Repeat, this is Mobile 17, my Status 2 and I are down the hole.”

Silence, then some more static. Maybe I catch an “understood” or “on our way.”

Alyssa looks down at me and I look up at her in my dust-speckled head beam. The light from outside is like a thin gray mist. I look at the seats, and the bodies, and I pat Riddle on the flank, scratch his side for a second, and he leans into me. “That’s Alyssa,” I say to him, pointing up. “Climb to Alyssa.” He shifts on me, sets his paws gingerly on the body next to us. The urban disaster training and testing is tough; for a lot of dogs, just a regular ladder is a big deal. It was easy compared to the human ladder I’m asking my dog to climb now. But he does, slowly and carefully.

You’d think with thumbs and higher reasoning I’d have an easier time of it when I start to climb, but it isn’t really the case. I slip a couple of times but don’t fall again, and I make it up to Alyssa again, sweating and breathing through my teeth. I should’ve chewed some aspirin when I was down there and had the kit open. Still no Med 2, with their ropes and spotlights.

“Do you have a little girl?” she asked me plaintively. Our faces are uncomfortably close together.

“No. I don’t have any kids, just Riddle.” I brace myself against the railings and check her over as best I can. I don’t want any bad surprises when I pop the release on her safety harness. Or should I wait? As if in answer, the crawler shakes, groaning. Whatever that noise was stopped, and in the quiet every shift of this thing echoes. Sitting tight is a luxury we do not have. “Why?”

She hesitates a very long time and I come up with all kinds of nightmare reasons being a mom is a qualifier for what’s going on with her, and then she says “I wet my pants.”

I actually sigh with relief. “Oh honey, it’s okay. I’m surprised I didn’t, when this whole thing fell.” Poor kid, she’s covered in blood and is very definitely not going to Mars for a good long while but she’s worried about some pee.

“Grown-ups don’t wet their pants.”

“I guess we don’t. Not if we can help it. Sometimes things are scary enough, though.” Or sometimes you’re too sick or too blind drunk. I get out the wipes, clean off her hands, her face, her neck. Her pulse is okay, considering, and the whites of her eyes are still white, and I can’t find anything bleeding or broken on her. Her arms and legs aren’t swollen, aren’t broken, seem restricted only by where she’s stuck sitting. One of her pupils is larger than the other. “This is pretty scary.” Which is worse, to say it’s scary or say it isn’t? I get a spare rebreather out of my bag. I don’t even need to ask her if it’s okay, she pulls it on like an old pro.

“It’s really scary,” she says, voice muffled. She seems relieved that I’d admit it. If only Bob could see me now. But helping a stranger’s kid isn’t having our own. “Is this the scariest thing you ever did?”

“Well, let me think about that.” I look up the way we need to climb. Unless they get the rest of the door off, no basket is getting down here. Or trying to do that might jar the crawler into a further fall. I don’t know how deep this rabbit hole goes. “Me and Riddle jumped out of a helicopter on a search once, that was scary.”

Her big eyes get even bigger. Her skin is very pale, and I wonder if she’s always like that, or if she’s bleeding internally. “You did?”

“We did. Somebody’s plane crashed in a place that was very high up, and it was the best way to get us there.” Maybe telling a kid disaster stories isn’t the best idea. “It was a little jump, the chopper was able to get pretty close to the ground for us. We’d had some practice, but practice is always a little different from real life. We found the guy in his pilot seat, hanging upside down in a tree. He couldn’t get down on his own, so it’s a good thing me and Riddle got there, right?” I have to unbuckle her but I also don’t want to use a dead person as a seat for her.

She giggles just a little. “He must have looked funny.”

I find a smile for her, nod. She’s gotta be in shock, no kid this little is this calm. Or maybe her parents gave her a downer for the beginning of their spaceflight. But she’s talking, that’s good. “He did, with his hair hanging down. We got him unstuck and then the helicopter came back for all of us.”

“Will a helicopter come today?” She actually sounds hopeful.

“Yeah, maybe. Hey, do you like piggyback rides?”  She hesitates, nods. “Do you want one? I think it’s the best way to get out of here.” What can a five year old weigh? Not more than Riddle, and I could hook his harness to my gear and climb with him.

“I guess,” she says. She’s got a distant look on her face and I’m ready to get a little panicky but I realize she’s looking past me to her parents.

“When my friends come they’ll help your mommy and daddy, okay?” I’m not lying but it’s closer than I like. You don’t make promises you can’t keep. “Let’s get you out of here.”

“Okay,” she says. I eyeball her one last time, cleaning off my hands, then look Riddle over again. Surprisingly fine. I’d say we’re lucky, but we’re literally in a hole.

“Riddle? Climb!” I point at the doorway above our heads. He flattens his ears and whines and I wait. He sighs like a sullen teenager and starts up, finding paw holds on the same uprights I gripped coming down. “Yes! Good boy.” He makes it to the final upright, sort of a decorative panel, a few feet below the door. I guess it was supposed to make a little vestibule at the entryway. Riddle looks down at me, whines again. “Up,” I say. He’s got a good vertical, he can definitely make it. He barks, gathers into a crouch, and jumps. He scrabbles, then pulls himself up and out of sight.

I look back at Alyssa, who’s watching me. “Okay, Riddle’s up there waiting for us. I’m going to unbuckle you, but I need you to hold on until I can turn around so you can climb on my back. Can you do that?

She sniffs a little, nodding. “Yes.”

“If you can’t, tell me. I can figure out another way.” This is a bad idea. The crawler shifts again, and I look up right as Riddle pokes his head back in the door and barks.

“I can do it,” she says firmly.

“Okay. Okay good.” Now it’s time to psych myself up. The buckle is jammed, but some pressing and wiggling gets it loose. Alyssa wraps her hands around the straps and pulls her legs up, putting her feet against the seat divider. I hadn’t noticed the dividers before; they were probably helping keep the bodies in place. “Ready?” She nods.

I let her go and turn around carefully. She’s got her arms wrapped around my neck in no time, and my pack crinkles as she wraps her legs as far around my midsection as they’ll go; she’s surprisingly strong, but I thought that about my nieces too. My husband’s nieces. I take a moment to adjust to her weight, then start to climb.

My wrist aches, but the splint does its job, flexing and stiffening and compressing as I move. NASA-developed tech, as so much of the good stuff is. Like the filters in our masks and rebreathers, and the imaging tech in the environment scanning drones. Little by little we get up to the door, then I’m boosting us through it, shoulders burning, breath coming in hot gasps, Riddle dancing in reunion excitement.

The crawler shudders and drops, just a little, and I cast around wildly for another, more secure surface. We’re hung up in a steel lattice infrastructure, staircases and lots of platforms, and I take a chance and step out onto the closest platform, finding the breath to call for Riddle, and move towards a support. The crawler groans again with our leaving and then slowly, screeching, grinds further down in the substructure.

The platform doesn’t budge, though, and I wait a few seconds, give it a chance to also start groaning like a beached whale. When it doesn’t, I say “Okay, Alyssa, you’re doing great. I need to put you down now, okay?”

She squeezes me tighter, then slowly relaxes. “I think so.”

I crouch and she clambers down. “It’s hard to be sure of anything right now, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” She goes to put her fingers in her mouth again, but the rebreather stops her, and then Riddle sidles over and gently bumps her with his shoulder, ears up and intent.

“Riddle wants you to pet him. How about you take a break and do that and I’ll see if I can get my friends on the radio.” There isn’t anything tinkerable with the walkies, of course; they’re such a high level of minimalist tech they might as well be magic. I power cycle the thing and try again. “Mobile 17 to base.”

It’s weak, but they come right back. “This is base, what’s your situation Mobile 17? Med 2 had to back off your location. Some debris fell, and your crawler was a casualty.” Sally sounds so relieved.

“My Status 2 is conscious, mobile, and cooperative. Unknown injuries. Me and Riddle are okay. We just need our ticket out of here.”

“Understood, Mobile 17, Med 2’s sending a drone down now to scout.”

“Roger that, Base.” I can only guess at how much worse falling debris made the scene. I hope we didn’t lose anybody. Alyssa is looking at me again. “They’re working on it.” Riddle paces the couple steps between me and her, keeping tabs. He sniffs intently at my wrist splint but doesn’t nudge it. When he goes back to Alyssa he noses against her ear and she gives a short squeal of surprised laughter. She doesn’t see Med 2’s drone come down, but I do, and give it a wave. It dips once in acknowledgement, and goes down to the crawler. It’ll get the heat signatures of the rest of the people in there and can detect the pulses of any survivors.

“Mobile 17, this is Med 2, lowering the basket for you now.”

“Music to my ears, Med 2.” I smile at Alyssa, even if she can only see it in the way my eyes crinkle. “Our ride’s here.”

Riddle has nudged himself up under her arm, and she hugs him. “The helicopter?”

“Well, the basket that’ll get us up top. We’ll ask about your helicopter ride.” There might be too much dust.

“Okay.” She takes a step towards the edge, probably to look up at where we’ll be going, but I take a bigger step to be there first, and Riddle circles around.

“See? You’ll strap in and ride up first, and then they’ll send it back down for me and Riddle.”

“I have to ride it alone?” She’s an articulate little kid, but she’s still a little kid.

“Well… I can send Riddle with you, then I’ll ride alone. Does that sound better?” She nods, looking at me, looking at the nesting basket. It would hold all our weight, but not the three of us individually crammed onto it, with all our limbs and gear. “Med 2, I’m sending the Status 2 up first, with Riddle.”

There’s a long pause and I think they’re going to refuse, then they come back. “Affirmative, Mobile 2, get it going.”

The basket will be back within minutes. It just seems like a long time. The space Riddle normally occupies next to me is loudly empty. It’s hard not to fling myself on the basket the moment it’s in view; the pressures of the day are starting to become apparent to me, in the comedown after a live find, the initial rescue aftermath.

They’ve already spirited Alyssa off to a waiting helicopter, to be checked over at the nearest hospital, and another med team has arrived. I guess there are more people alive, and I hope at least one of them is Alyssa’s mom or dad. I know better than to hope for both. I’m both too hopped up on adrenaline and too bone tired from what I’ve just gone through to hang around and wait for the result.

Riddle and I get back to the pop-up barracks, and once inside I strip off our gear, rub Riddle down, and stretch out on my bunk. He hops up next to me, and circles, finally settling into a little ball against my hip. The doberball, my husband used to say. I think about calling him, let the impulse wash over me and leave again, like standing at the edge of the ocean. No good will come of it.

I’ll get up and take another grid in a few hours. Sally breezes through to check my walkie and gives me lunch. She ignores the splint. There aren’t enough dogs and handlers here that they can afford to send me away. Nobody’s said why the damn thing broke; maybe it’ll take years before they make that final assessment. But here, in these precious first days, first hours, saving lives is all that matters.