Regina Blanchard is accustomed to fear, to the punch of adrenaline that makes fingers cold and shaky, that flushes her cheeks and makes cuts and bruises throb with heat. It's a feeling she experiences more often than she likes to admit, when her husband is in a not-so-rare mood and comes at her with raised voices and clenched fists.

She's accustomed to fear, but this is something else entirely.

If she was thinking, if she was capable of thought, she might call it terror, but right now thought has been abandoned for the sheer focus of flight. There's an airliner countless stories above them, flames eating their way through the upper floors. She tries not to think about it now, her spike-heeled pumps clapping down another flight of cement stairs (thirty-two down, seven to go), drowned out by the steady pound of feet above and below her, and all she can focus on is down and out and the back of Robin's neck in front of her. His shirt is white, stark against the red flush of his neck. He has a tiny freckle just below his hairline.

At every landing he calls her name, Regina and she answers back Yes and they keep going.

Six flights to go.

Regina?

Yes.

Five flights to go.

Regina?

Yes.

There's a freckle on the back of his neck, his skin is flushed, that little speck of brown is the last thing she sees before the building shudders, a sound she cannot even describe ripping through the air around them.

And then the lights go out.