The first sound that hits her isn’t a voice—it’s the brutal whine of metal and the hungry, electric rasp of the fire crew’s tools. Somewhere high above, someone is cutting, sawing, trying to make space where there isn’t any. And down in the chaos, inside the aftermath of impact, a little girl named Chloe is awake enough to know one thing with absolute clarity:

She can’t be left alone.

“Control—” the radio crackles, clipped and urgent, and then the call becomes a countdown in code. “Stand down… reallocating… higher priority.” For a moment, the air seems to lurch with the system’s cold efficiency—people being moved, units being reassigned, seconds being spent like currency.

But for Chloe, time isn’t abstract. Time is her mother’s absence. Time is panic breathing down her neck.

She’s being strapped, assessed, kept still as best anyone can manage while the noise rips through the space around her. The world turns into flashes: hands hovering, someone asking questions, someone else promising pain relief, voices trying to sound steady in a place that is anything but.

Teddy checks in anyway, because it’s what they do. “Linda, are you OK?” she asks—softly, carefully—as if politeness could slow the terror.

Chloe doesn’t even answer the way people normally answer. She sinks instead into a loop of need. “Mm. …It’s better.” The words barely hold together, as if they’re being pulled out of her by force. Then the real plea rises, fast and raw.

“I want my mum here.”

“I just want my mum.”

“I want my mum… I want my mum…”

It’s not a request. It’s a demand from the part of her that refuses to understand emergency rooms and rescue protocols. For Chloe, “rescue” is not the big operation above her—it’s the one person she believes should be reaching down to hold her.

A paramedic steps in, introducing himself like a lifeline. “My name’s Iain. I’m one of the paramedics.” He speaks to the girl and her father at the same time, trying to split the storm with calm. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Mike.” Her dad answers, voice strained but present. “This is my daughter, Chloe.”

And then Iain is down there with the next layer of triage—checking the parts that hurt, the things that don’t look right, the nerves that might be waking up. He asks Mike to help him with one small test: can she wiggle her fingers?

Chloe tries. She wants to prove she can still do what people expect—wanting to cooperate even while fear is clawing at her chest. But the answer is a hesitant no. Not yet. Or not enough.

“It’s OK,” Iain says, and he means it, because there’s no time for frustration. “One step at a time.”

The fire crew keeps working. The saw starts again, louder this time, like it’s trying to drown out every fear that’s already too loud. Above them, hands cut and shift and extract. Below them, Chloe’s body is tense, trembling with the effort of staying still for people who are strangers—but who she has to trust anyway.

“Calm down,” her dad begs, half to her and half to the universe. He reaches for her like he can physically soothe her. “Take another deep breath on that for me.”

But Chloe’s eyes don’t settle. Her mind doesn’t stop scanning for her mum. She flinches away when someone touches her—“Don’t touch me!”—because every touch feels like the world refusing to deliver what she needs most.

Then Iain tries something else: he turns, just slightly, toward the only missing piece. “Mike—can I have a word?” he asks, low and urgent.

Mike’s answer lands like a punch.

“There’s no way of contacting her mum,” he says, and the words are flat, exhausted with grief. “For her own sake. We need to keep her nice and still.”

Iain’s face hardens, not with anger—just shock. Because he hears the line that changes everything.

“Her mum’s dead,” Mike continues. “She died last year. So it’s just the two of us.”

No one says it out loud at first. There’s a brief, sick silence where the implications settle into the room: the girl’s fear isn’t new—her terror is anchored in a truth she doesn’t know how to hold.

“I’m so sorry,” Iain says, and it’s the only honest thing he can offer.

Chloe doesn’t understand what “sorry” is supposed to fix