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focused.
    Each floor has nineteen stairs split up into two flights. The first flight has ten stairs. At the bottom is a landing with a 180-degree turn, then nine more stairs. Usually I don’t count stairs. It’s the dog’s job to pause and let me know when I get to the top of a set of stairs and when I get to the bottom. But this time I count for something to do.
    Not only am I counting stairs, I’m listening carefully. My adrenaline is pumping, and I feel very alert with all of my senses heightened. As I walk, I strain to hear and decode the smallest sounds from the building. It’s telling me a story, and I don’t want to miss what it has to say.
    Part of the story is what I am not hearing. I haven’t heard any more explosions. No fire alarms have sounded. No emergency announcements have crackled through the PA system. No emergency personnel have appeared to let us know what is happening. And no one can make phone calls. Cell phones are so ubiquitous that as a culture we are used to one-sided conversations surrounding us in almost any public place. But cell phones don’t work well in our steel-and-concrete cave. So as we descend, it’s mostly quiet.
    The lack of cell phone reception also means we aren’t getting any news from outside. It’s like we’re together in a bubble, isolated from whatever is going on above, below, and outside. Right now my world consists of stairs. Ten stairs, turn, nine stairs. Again. And again.
    Everything feels unreal. I can’t believe that just a few minutes ago I was preparing for seminars in the conference room. Now we are on the run. But whenever I become uneasy, I listen to Roselle. The tough pads of her feet cushion her steps and since we keep her nails trimmed short, her footsteps are silent. But I can hear her breathing. Although we’ve been walking down the stairs for just a few minutes, Roselle is beginning to pant. The temperature in the stairwell is comfortable, so she’s panting not from the heat but from the exertion of her intense focus on her work.
    Dogs have fewer sweat glands than people, who cool off as sweat evaporates from the surface of the skin. But canine sweat glands, located on the pads of the dog’s feet and on the ears, play a smaller role in cooling. Instead, dogs pant to cool off the blood circulating through the major blood vessels of the head, which surround the nose. The surface area of the tongue also provides cooling through the evaporation of moisture in the dog’s mouth. Roselle is not nervous, just warm. She’s at the top of her game, walking with confidence and a spring in her step.
    The fuel smell is strong on certain landings. When I first noticed it, the smell was just a hint, a whisper of danger. But now it feels heavier and fuller, a toxic stench beginning to sink into my throat and my lungs. I swallow and it feels like I’m drinking a shot of kerosene. My eyes are starting to burn too. Roselle pants a little harder. I know she can taste it too .
    There’s a reason we are inhaling the fumes of jet fuel in Stairwell B. We will learn later that when the Boeing 767 hit our building, it was carrying around ten thousand gallons of fuel, most of it in the wing tanks. The plane crashed into the north side of the building and obliterated several floors while spewing out jet fuel. The droplets atomized, forming a combustible mixture that exploded, ignited “by the enormous heat of friction, by sparks from pieces of steel, by hot engine parts, and most of all by short circuits in the wiring of the North Tower . . . The force of the explosion was so great that parts of the aircraft hurled out of the other side of the tower. After impact, bewildered passersby on a street near the World Trade Center stood around a huge cylinder of bent metal. It took a while before they realized they were looking at an aircraft engine.” 1
    Although the impact generated a tremendous explosion, not all of the jet fuel was consumed, and it shot out of the fuel