Tamsin was in Littlehampton, posing as an idle middle-class lady interested in both old and new technology. The particular part of Littlehampton that she was in was one of the worst parts of the neighbourhood. It was the part that bordered Durdon, near the river, and the sprawl looked more industrial than residential still. She was accompanied by her sister, Gwyneth, and their serving-man, and all three of them were looking speculatively at a series of giant tanks and pipes ringed by catwalks and crowned with fragile-looking railings. It was an old gasworks, previously used for the creation of coal gas for lighting, but made obsolete some years ago by the introduction of liquefied natural gas. It was now used for storing natural gas, and Tamsin and Gwyneth were there to scout out the possibility of buying illuminating gas wholesale, as they used a great deal of it in their shows for various effects.

They had arrived precisely when a steamer of gas was arriving from Africa, slightly ahead of schedule, and were asked by a representative of the company that now owned the gasworks to wait in the offices, as their tour of the facility would have to be postponed until the gas had been unloaded from the tanker. Tamsin and Gwyneth complied after exactly the right amount of protests that they were busy and had scheduled many other things that day, even though in reality they had not. The representative promised to see that their tour commenced at the earliest feasible time and they settled in to wait in the office with just a touch of feigned irritated impatience. Once the door was closed, they dropped the façade and began to snoop through office.

On the tanker ship steaming into the river docks adjacent to the old gasworks, an inexperienced and none-too-bright crewman was smoking a celebratory cigar abaft of the midship deckhouse. Though there was a stiff wind coming off the river, abaft the deckhouse there was very little circulation at all, shielded as it was by the structure. Sheltering out of the wind, the crewman smoked and congratulated himself on having completed his first run to Africa successfully, returning with a full cargo of natural gas.

Also sheltering out of the wind, or rather simply not disturbed by it, was a growing cloud of vaporised gas, the result of a small hole in one of the tanks. It produced no odour at all, having not yet been mixed with an odorising agent, and the crewman was entirely unaware of its presence. He smoked his cigar with the happy expectation of returning to his family that night with a sizeable pay-cheque cashed in. Dreamily breathing the tobacco fumes in and out, he did not realise that the first mate was shouting and running at him until the cigar was snatched out of his fingers and thrown overboard. His eyes naturally turning to follow the removed pleasure, both he and the first mate saw glowing ash fall off the end, and he had just enough time to realise his mistake before the vapour cloud, by this time dense enough to sustain a flame, caught fire. The flame travelled through it to the source of the leak at once.

The tanker exploded.

In the gasworks, Tamsin and Gwyneth felt nothing at all as they and everything around them ceased to be. One moment they existed, and the next they did not. No bodies would ever be found.

The explosion cleared out a half-mile radius instantaneously, and set everything surrounding the blast-radius on fire. The river, interrupted in its flow, resumed its normal course. Steam rolled up in huge clouds as it touched the depression in the land, mixing with the mantle of greasy black smoke that hovered over the explosion and flash-boiling a few victims along the way. Large portions of the slums no longer existed, and the manufacturing districts, filled with warehouses of especially flammable stuffs, roared up joyfully. The sonic boom from the explosion was deafening, and the ground-quake that rippled away from the epicentre knocked many off their feet. The sun was entirely blotted out by the smoke in some places, and shone red through the sudden pall where it could be seen at all. Smaller explosions dotted the manufacturing districts along the river as stores of industrial dynamite and flour mills caught fire.

The fire brigades made no effort to stop the fire or save the city. Large numbers of the volunteers were dead in the first explosion, and it was patently obvious to anyone still alive that nothing would stop the flames that poured even more smoke into the sky. The flames skittered through the slums without opposition, and spot-fires began to spring up throughout the untouched parts of the city as flaming debris, cinders, and ash fell out of the sky. A massive exodus of people began to clog the streets, and huge crowds of people soon ringed the earth outside the city.

The Great Fire of Lindebo had begun.

The shock wave from the explosion knocked Mads off his feet, and astonishment at the sudden change from a clear sky to an immediate smoke cloud kept him off them for a while.

Then realisation of what had happened hit him, and he scrambled up and began to run towards the part of the city where his sister lived. He had enough of a vantage from where he was to tell that it had not been obliterated by the explosion. Some minutes of running later, he was nearing the burning part of the city, having spotted a corridor of unburned streets that would allow him to cut through the city much faster than going around. He turned a corner onto a street, the flames only one street away, and was all set to run through the corridor before it burned when he was arrested by the sound of someone desperately sobbing inside a house.

He spared a moment to glance inside, and saw an old woman scraping a heavy trunk across the floor, trying to flee while burdened thusly. He informed her, “The fire’s only a street away.”
She told him between her sobs, “I can’t leave it. He’s dead.”
Mads said, rather unsympathetically, “Come on! You ain’t got time for that!”
The woman continued to sob and pull at the trunk, much too heavy to carry at speed even for Mads, and completely impossible for one as small and frail as she. “My husband, his things! I can’t leave them, they’re all I’ve got!”
“He wouldn’t want you to die,” Mads reasoned with her, coming forward to take her arm and try and pull her away.
She had obviously lost some of her rationality in stress of the situation, because she threw herself across the chest as if clutching the dearly departed. She moaned softly, “No, no, no, I won’t leave him!”
Mads gave up, urgency overriding any attempt to be polite. He simply picked her up off the trunk, his strength easily overpowering her, with the brief and unnecessary explanatory comment, “We gotta go.”

He carried her outside, running up the street at a good clip. At the other end of the road, the fire could be seen advancing on the neighbour houses to the one they had just left, and he cursed. There was no help for it but to take the old woman with him, but his route to check that Mother and Nils and Grette were all right was cut off now. She had cost him the minutes that were his window to safely get through the now-burning area. Gritting his teeth, he resolved that he would find a way to them, and carried the old woman a couple blocks further. When he was fairly sure she would not try and get back to her trunk, he set her down.
She instantly made a beeline back the way they had come, and he ran after her again. Restraining her, he said, “Look, Nan, you go that way, you’re gonna get burnt to crisps.”
Out of her mind, she only sobbed and struggled. Mads wondered what he should do, as he needed to get to his own family, yet he could not leave the woman when she was like this.
His dilemma was solved when a young man of sixteen or seventeen ran up. “Thank you, Mister! I thought I would be too late!”
Mads kept hold of the woman, even though she stopped wrestling with him at the sound of the young man’s voice. “You would have been. She your nan, then?”
“Yes, Mister.”
“Here you go then. She keeps trying to go back.” Mads unceremoniously handed the old lady over to her grandson.
“Thank you, Mister.” With that last comment, the young man hurried off, consoling his grandmother as best he could. “It’ll be all right, Nan. You’re with me, we’ll get out of this and figure out what to do…”
Mads turned away from them, his attention now focusing on another objective.

He skirted the edges of the fire, not much impeded by anyone on the almost-deserted streets, trying to find clear way that would allow him to get where he needed—to get to Grette’s house. He passed through the smoke, beginning to hack from it, until he thought to cover his face. Going into an empty house, he shucked off his coat and tore a sleeve from his shirt, wetting it in the undisturbed water-basin and tying it around his face. He quit the place, pulling his coat back on, and resumed his search for a clear way. By and by he had worked himself to the mill-district on the edge of the river, and was just contemplating using it as an avenue of searching for Nils’ ship, when he caught motion out of the corner of his eye.

There was an old man down the road, attempting to pull open a clearly locked mill door. Mads would have written him off as a looter, except that the elderly fellow was calling to someone inside. Approaching him, Mads could hear panicked children’s voices from within. Seeing the smoke drifting from the back, Mads at once knew what the trouble was. This mill was one of those mills, probably a threading-factory, that employed children, because their small fingers were the right size to slip into the slight spaces in the machinery. Moreover, the owner or operator of the mill did not trust the children to fulfil their work-hours if given free access to the outside, and had locked them in. The old man might know one or more of them, or he might just be a fellow with a kind heart, but he was not trying to loot the place, only to free the children.

Mads came up beside him and asked him to step aside, which he did without a word. Mads spent a moment examining the padlock on the door, noting the thickness of it but also noting the rusting of the latch it was threaded through. He backed up two steps and then threw his weight at the door. It cracked a little, and the latch became loose. He did it again and the door burst open, striking a child that had been standing too close behind it. Mads recovered his balance before he fell over the boy, and, picking up the stunned child, ordered them all out. Since they were already pushing to get out, it was unnecessary, but his strong voice carried over them, and his second and much-needed order to stop shoving and go out in an orderly fashion stilled some of their panic. He carried out the child in his arms and was all set to leave the place when the boy tugged at his coat.

“Some went to the back, to try the other doors. They haven’t come back.”

Looking at the old man, who was gathering the children in a cluster about himself, Mads could see that a mutual understanding linked them. Mads set the boy down and asked him, “How many?”
“It was Jenny and Mary, sir. Dennis and Jack went with them.”
Mads smiled at the boy. “Well, my lad—”
“My name’s Will, sir.”
“Well then, Will, my lad, I’ll tell you what. I’ll go and find them.”
“Will you, sir? I’ll help you.”
“I will, on my honour. But I need you to wait with this nice fellow over here, Mr…?”
A glance at the old man, and the elder filled in, “Bunberry.”
“…Bunberry. Can you do that for me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right.”

Standing up, Mads gave the boy over to Bunberry’s care, and went into the mill. He could see by the clouds of smoke rolling up from the back that it was no longer smouldering, but actively on fire now. It was a thread-factory, he saw; his first guess had been correct. He made his way between hulking machines, some of them still going even though there was no one to guide the thread and keep it from making massive snarls on the floor. Five minute’s search and calling and he found both boys and one of the girls, and escorted them out. The wooden upper parts of the building were blazing by that time, and none of the three had any idea where the missing girl, Jenny, had been left. They were confused by the smoke and had lost her. Mads went in again to find her.

Two minutes later, the smoke inside was so thick that he could barely see anything, and his calls seemed to bounce back at him. His sleeve-mask had dried out and he himself was beginning to feel numbed by the smoke, when he heard the girl crying. He also heard the factory above him creaking and cracking, and adrenaline gave him new purpose and strength. Following the sound of the crying on his hands and knees, he came across Jenny. She made no protest as he scooped her up and draped her across his back, and crawled back the way he had come. Sounds of an eminent collapse banged over their heads, and when he saw the light of the main door, he stood up and ran for it, shifting the child from his back and holding her firmly underneath his arm. The mill went silent except for the snapping of flames for a moment, and then a rumbling din started above him, growing ever louder as he neared the relative safety outside.

Throwing himself and Jenny through the portal as a portion of the ceiling started to fall in on them, he escaped back into the street. He landed on his back, Jenny’s weight added to his own, and shocks of pain went through him. She scrambled off, and he rolled over, gasping for breath. Will ran up to them, and it was just when he was getting to his feet, trying to smile past the aching pain in his back, that the mill collapsed, and debris was flung everywhere. The children screamed and huddled together around the old man, but were not seriously injured. Mads however, was knocked back to the ground by a flying stone, and as he was lying there spread-eagled, a huge steel beam toppled from its long-standing upright position to land squarely on his lower chest and legs. Mads screamed. The pain was unlike anything he had ever felt before, even when he had been shot, and he gave no thought to what had happened to either of the children near him.

Not, that was, until he felt a small hand take his, and another stroke his face gently, trying to wipe away his copious tears. The beam had missed Jenny. He tried to smile at her, but it was difficult. Bunberry came up, and by his glance at Mads’ side Mads was compelled to look also. He found Will looking up at him, scared and hurting. The beam had also fallen across the boy, and they were pinned next to each other. Mads looked back up at Bunberry, and said as normally as he could, “Take the rest away. It’s not safe here.”
Bunberry said, “That’s too heavy for us to shift.”
“I know. Just get them away.”
Bunberry nodded, leaned down to squeeze Mads’ hand, and picked up Jenny, who was crying too now. “Rum luck, fellow.”
“It happens.” Mads smiled at Jenny through the tears that still wet his cheeks despite her efforts. “You be good now.”
She nodded and whispered, “I will. I promise.”
Bunberry took her and the others away and Mads was left with only Will beside him, just as stuck as he was.

The pressure of the beam was immense, and he could barely keep from screaming again. It was only that he felt it would be unkind to Will to lose his head when the boy was silent as a mouse that kept him from it. There was only the sound of the burning factory and pained breathing for a while, and then Will, his voice small, said, “It hurts, sir.”
“Yeah,” Mads mustered a ragged laugh. “It kinda does.”
“I’m going to die.”
Mads had nothing to refute that with, so he said, “Me too.”
“I’m scared.”
Mads gathered what was left of his strength to put an arm awkwardly around Will, squeezing the boy to the side of his chest. “At least it won’t hurt after, eh?”
“I don’t think I’ll go to heaven.”
“Me either, my lad, me either. Shall we make a pact?”
“What kind of pact?”
“Let’s say that whoever croaks first gets to wait for the other before going in either place. That way if we don’t get into heaven, at least we’ll be company for each other, yeah?”
“All right. But you have to remember to wait, sir.”
“On my honour, I won’t forget.”
“It’s a pact, then.”
“It’s a pact.”
There was no further reply, and Mads felt the little body next to him still, even from breathing.

Will was dead. Mads turned away from the small corpse next to him, and with nothing to prohibit it anymore, no one to be strong for, he began to scream. He screamed his lungs flat, he screamed his agony to the empty street. No one heard, and within ten minutes the street was quiet again.