The first explosion takes out the windows.
Glass bursts across the hall and the force throws me sideways. I hit the floor hard, one arm taking most of the impact, and for a few seconds everything becomes one terrible sound—people screaming, alarms going off, concrete breaking somewhere above us.
Then, through all of it, I hear my name.
“Emre!”
I push myself up. Smoke is already spreading across the hall, thick enough to hide the far end, and people are running toward the exits, knocking into chairs and each other as they go.
“Saoirse!”
No answer.
I move against the crowd until someone grabs my shoulder and almost pulls me backwards. “Leave! The roof is coming down!”
“Saoirse is still inside.”
“So are other people!”
I shake him off and keep going. The building shudders beneath my feet, and I know enough to understand what that means. I know this structure—the columns, the walls, every possible route out of it—and I know it has already taken more damage than it was ever meant to survive.
I should turn around.
Instead, I call her name again.
Then I see her.
She is on her knees near the centre of the hall, her hair loose around her face and blood running from a cut above her eyebrow. The relief that hits me is so sudden I almost stumble.
“Saoirse!”
Her head comes up. “Emre!”
I reach her, but she barely seems to notice. She is staring at something on the floor beside her, and when I follow her eyes, the relief disappears as quickly as it came.
A man lies beneath part of a fallen beam.
There is blood under him. Too much.
“No.”
I drop beside him and reach for his neck, shifting my fingers when I find nothing the first time. Still nothing.
“He was breathing a minute ago,” Saoirse says.
I place both hands against his chest and start compressions. “Come on.”
Another section of ceiling crashes somewhere behind us. Saoirse catches my arm and tells me we have to leave, but I pull free and keep going.
“He’s not dead.”
“Emre—”
“He’s not.”
I press down again and again, harder now, as though enough force can bring him back. My hands are shaking, the floor is moving beneath my knees and dust keeps falling around us, but none of it matters.
“Come on. Please.”
Nothing.
I stare at his face, at the blood beneath him, at a body that should not be this still, and something inside me tears open.
“NOOOOOOOOO!”
I wake with the scream still in my throat.
For a moment I sit there gripping the sheets, breathing too fast, unable to make sense of the darkness around me. Then the room slowly returns: my bedroom, the rain tapping against the Edinburgh windows, yesterday’s shirt hanging over the chair near my desk.
The clock beside the bed reads 3:27 a.m.
No smoke. No broken glass. No blood.
I stay there until my breathing begins to settle.
It was a dream.
A horrible one, but still a dream.
I finish the water beside my bed and lie down again. Sleep takes its time coming back, but eventually exhaustion wins and I drift off.
This time, peacefully.
By seven, my alarm is ringing and the day has begun. I shower, dress and make coffee while checking the emails that came in overnight. One is from a contractor insisting that the measurements on a drawing I approved are wrong. The next is from the same contractor asking if we can discuss it before nine.
Coffee comes first.
By eight-fifteen, I am outside with my laptop bag over one shoulder and my first proper meeting of the day already occupying most of my thoughts. I have enough time to stop at the Royal Mile site before heading to the office, although Daniel almost ruins that plan the moment he sees me.
“Emre! You have five minutes?”
“No.”
“Perfect. Come and look at this.”
He is already smiling because he knows I am coming over anyway.
Inside, he hands me a hard hat and leads me towards the rear section of the ground floor. “The client wants this moved.”
I stare at the wall in front of us. “This wall?”
“Yes.”
“The wall we agreed was staying exactly where it is?”
“That one.”
“The one carrying half the services on this floor?”
Daniel nods solemnly. “The very same.”
“Why?”
“He wants more light.”
I glance at the four large windows less than three metres away and take a slow drink of coffee. “Of course he does.”
Daniel laughs.
Twenty minutes later, the wall is staying exactly where it is and I am later than I planned to be. Edinburgh has properly woken up by the time I step back onto the street. Tourists fill the pavement, delivery vans squeeze through spaces they have no business fitting into, and the morning rain has reduced itself to the kind of mist nobody here bothers acknowledging.
I am checking a message from the office when someone steps into my path and I nearly walk into her.
“Sorry,” she says, moving aside.
“No problem.”
I pass her, but a few seconds later I hear my name.
“Emre?”
I stop.
The woman is still standing where I left her, except now she looks almost as surprised as I feel.
“Did you just call me?”
“Yes.”
“Have we met?”
“No.”
There is no hesitation in the answer, which somehow makes it stranger.
“Then how do you know my name?”
Her expression shifts. “I don’t know.”
Something about her voice catches inside me. I have heard it before, though there is no reasonable place I could have.
Her phone rings. She silences it without looking away from me.
“I’m Saoirse.”
The street seems to disappear for half a second.
Blood above her eyebrow. Smoke behind her. Her hand gripping my arm.
“Saoirse what?”
“Adeyemi-Walsh.”
The Adeyemi pulls me back into the moment. “Nigerian?”
“My father.”
“My mother too.”
A small smile reaches her face. “Small world.”
Before I can answer, I notice what she is holding.
A cream envelope.
My full name is written across the front.
EMRE OSEI-KAYA.
The smile leaves her face when she sees me staring at it.
“Where did you get that?”
“The Scholar Council asked me to find you.”
I haven’t heard that name in years.
For a moment I can only look from the envelope to Saoirse—the same woman I watched kneeling in blood less than five hours ago.
“Emre?”
And just like that, my Monday becomes something else.