by Ted Hayes

Fire was RK-88's job, and in essence, his life.

He was built for fire: covered from head to toe in matte black, ultra-high-temperature-resistant armor plating, he could walk through the flames of a burning apartment building effortlessly. He even drew power from the fire via a Peltier network that transformed heat to electricity. Fear was not a part of RK's design, and his human teammates at NYFD Ladder 59 Rapid Intervention Dispatch took great pride in his abilities.

But today, for the first time in RK's memory, when the sirens began to blare, he felt a twinge of something unnameable.

Soot-black arm draped along the truck window's edge, RK stared out at the landscape of lower Manhattan rolling past: shuttered and hollowed homes and businesses, the immense complex of the New York OmniCorp Arcology, the seemingly endless camps of the Washington Square shanty town. Humans going about their lives, pushing strollers, arguing, embracing.

The fire was a small brownstone, once stately, ancient by modern reckoning. It had been called in early, but there were reports of someone trapped inside. A frantic woman—a mother?—screamed on the sidewalk, held back by police.

RK-88 usually took this in dispassionately, focusing on the variables pertinent to his task: presence or absence of visible flames, smoke venting from windows or doors, location of fire hydrants. But as the truck pulled up, RK found himself watching the woman. She was wearing a red and orange, floral-print dress—a trivial absurdity for her clothes to be colored like fire on this day. Her face was contorted with terror, cheeks wet with tears.

Before the truck had fully stopped, RK and his team were leaping from the truck, moving rapidly into action. Rogers bolted for the pumper's controls, McCarren for the attack line. RK could run into a burning building without need for respirator, mask, or even helmet—but he wore a helmet nonetheless as part of his uniform. Despite the tremendous differences between him and his human company, he had always been treated like a teammate. He had even been given the honor of carrying the company's pride axe on the first day of academy.

The anthroid sprinted directly through the front door and into a hellscape.

The fire was alive, writhing, and all-consuming: a burning lifeform, able to extend itself and grow, multiply, leaving behind only the crumbling husks of what once fed it.

RK-88 scanned the scene with high-dynamic range thermal sensors. No signs of life yet. In his mind's eye: the bereft woman's face, screaming, sobbing.

He had never had a thought like this before.

He ran into the next room, once a living room, now an infernal oven. Nobody. No—a child could be in a bedroom upstairs.

It would occur to RK only later that he somehow knew to look for a child.

He doubled back to the entry hallway, where flames were beginning to lick up the walls with hungry orange tendrils.

He heard screaming—a child's screams, punctuated with coughs. Upstairs.

RK ran. The steps groaned. Fire was replaced with smoke, thick black billows of it. Light from the skylight above filtered lazily through it. RK's multi-echo LIDAR scanner still picked up the traces of walls, edges of doorways, even the frames of family pictures on the wall, soon to be lost forever.

The screaming had dissolved entirely into coughing and seemed to no longer be audible, not even with advanced filtering. RK dared hope the child was still alive enough to cough.

RK-88 had never hoped for anything before.

There—a crumpled heap of pink on the floor. A dollhouse, toys. Down the hallway, through—