Page 160 of The Fire Line

He tucked it inside his jacket and crawled out first.

Heat struck him immediately—not the violent blast from before, but enough to tighten the skin along his face. Smoke crossed the slope in broken sheets, and pieces of bark drifted past with their edges still glowing. Harris got to his feet, and the mountain tipped beneath him hard enough that he reached instinctively for the granite.

Pain tore through his right palm.

For the first time, he properly looked at the hand he had used to knock the ember off Jay’s shoulder. Angry red skin extended from the center of his palm along the inside of his wrist, with blisters lifting near the base of his thumb. He flexed his fingers once. They worked, more or less, which would have to qualify as good enough.

Behind him, Jay had made it onto his hands and knees.

“Wait.”

“I’m coming.”

“Jay.”

Harris crouched and caught him beneath both arms. The burn flared so sharply his vision narrowed.

“Harris, your hand.”

“Later.”

“You keep—”

The rest disappeared into a cough.

Harris pulled him upright. For several seconds Jay stood with both hands gripping the front of his jacket, his forehead nearly against Harris’s shoulder, and then his knees folded.

Harris caught him around the waist. “Arm around me.”

Jay obeyed without argument, which frightened Harris more than the fall had.

They started uphill. The trail had disappeared beneath ash deep enough to conceal loose rock, burned roots, and holes where brush had collapsed inward. Harris kept himself on the downhill side, one arm locked around Jay’s waist while Jay leaned more heavily against him with every yard. His flashlight cut a weak cone through the smoke, and beyond it the mountain seemed to stop existing altogether.

Jay stumbled twice in the first twenty yards. Each time his full weight sagged against Harris, and each time the same ugly thought arrived before Harris could stop it: how little it might take for Jay to disappear if Harris lost his grip for even a second.

A trunk split somewhere to their left.

Harris heard the crack before he saw movement through the smoke. He dragged Jay against him and dropped behind a shoulder of rock just as a tree came apart across the slope.

Something heavy struck Harris along the left side.

Pain detonated beneath his ribs so completely that for several seconds he could not get air. Then Jay moved beneath him, and the inability to breathe became secondary.

Harris forced himself upright, coughing hard enough that the pain sharpened with every pull of air. “You hit?”

Jay shook his head.

Harris ran one hand over his shoulder and back anyway, checking for heat or blood until Jay caught his wrist.

“Not hit.” His eyes were half-lidded, but the look in them was clear enough. “I’m still here.”

The words should have helped. Instead they landed somewhere Harris did not want to examine, because still implied a condition that could change.

He got them both upright again. Every deep breath now dragged something sharp across his left side—bruised ribs, maybe cracked—and he filed the possibility beside the burned hand and the cough building lower in his chest. None of it changed what Jay needed.

The old burn was less than two hundred yards away, and Jay was not going to make it there on his feet.

Harris set down the first-aid pouch and radio long enough to shift Jay’s arm from around his shoulders.