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shutters, flinging those firebrands into porches, shattering windows .
    I’m trapped in my bed, feeling the searing heat. My heart is thumping through my ribs. I hear a baby cry, a woman scream. The flames arch again in a fantastic riot of yellow and red. Someone is praying; a figure runs straight into the flames without looking back, then a second person – straight into the inferno – and the cries stop and the only sound is wind sucking around corners, whooshing through the room, and roof timbers cracking in the roaring flames .
    And me sitting up and sobbing .
    Someone ran into the room and turned on the light. Mom held me and promised it would all be all right, that it wasn’t real, only a nightmare – the same way she’d soothed and comforted me through all the years.

    I knew not to share with Holly, or Aaron or Leo. Instead I chose Grace, once I’d checked with her that the medics had given Jude the all-clear.
    ‘He’s home,’ she’d told me when we met at the school gates. ‘They gave him new medication and warned him to stay inside until the smoke clears from the valley.’
    ‘I don’t get it,’ I told her as we headed for class. ‘Why do I always dream the same thing – the fire, the people burning to death? How come I believe I’m actually there?’
    ‘I have no idea. I never even remember my dreams, let alone relive them the way you do.’
    ‘So that’s it? It’s a recurring nightmare, end of story.’
    She nodded. ‘What else?’
    ‘You don’t think it’s a kind of sixth sense – something weird and extra sensory that most people don’t know they have?’ I almost apologized as I said it, knowing how crazy it made me sound.
    Grace wasn’t willing to give the idea any space. ‘Think about it. Make the link with the specific history of your house – not the actual house, but the plot it stands on – the fire, the tragedy.’ She hesitated, obviously not wanting to continue and hurt my feelings.
    ‘Go ahead – you’re planning to be the psychology major,’ I sighed.
    ‘Somehow that event has taken hold of you, deep down in your subconscious. Then yesterday, when we were discussing the latest fire out at Black Rock, it lit up those dark corners of your brain, and there you go again – classic nightmare build up.’
    So Grace was a rationalist, a budding scientist who didn’t believe in the paranormal – I already knew that.
    ‘Something new happened – I heard the baby crying,’ I confessed. And I feel connected; it feels like it’s happening to me.
    ‘Only in the dream,’ she insisted, blocking my way into the noisy classroom. ‘You hear me, Tania – only in your imagination.’
    ‘OK, yeah.’ I stopped there, didn’t press on to describe the link I felt to that long-gone child – the love and the pity, the helplessness when I heard her cry.

    Dad was home for a week after working two weeks on the Utah site. During his down time he likes to hike in the forest, fish in white-water rapids and read biographies of dead American presidents. This is down to his immigrant background. In Romania he and his family lived on the breadline in a tiny apartment on the tenth floor of a cement tower block in Bucharest. His dad traded black-market Levi jeans until 1986 when he fell foul of the Communist regime and the entire Ionescu family had to flee the country by stowing away in a shallow compartment concealed under the floor of a truck.
    And I guess while I’m on the subject of parents, you may have the wrong idea about my domestic goddess mom with the stack of sweet-smelling laundry and the ever-hugging arms. She’s also a commercial property lawyer working for a multinational energy company, renting office space all over the world. I’m serious – she’s a legal hotshot, so she was currently on a plane to Russia and Dad was on the couch with JFK.
    ‘They found firefighter guy,’ he told me, deep and staccato, when I walked in the house after school. ‘He took shelter