Page 166 of The Fire Line

The rest of the night passed without anything new going wrong, which felt close enough to mercy. Jay slept in short stretches and woke coughing. Harris roused him, gave him water sparingly, and tried the radio until static became more exhausting than hopeful. At some point Jay’s head ended up in Harris’s lap, and Harris rested one hand in his hair while telling himself the position helped his breathing. There was nobody around to call him on the lie.

Harris must have slept eventually, though he would have sworn he had not. One moment he was watching dull orange light move through the timber below them; the next, gray morning filled the old burn and Jay was no longer lying against him.

He came awake violently, his burned hand closing around empty fabric and sending pain through his wrist before he found Jay sitting less than two feet away.

“What are you doing?”

Jay turned slowly. “Had to move.”

“Why didn’t you wake me?”

“You were asleep.”

“Should’ve woken me.”

Jay looked at him for a long moment, too tired to argue properly. “I’m here.”

The words stopped Harris more effectively than anything else could have.

He looked away toward the ridge.

Morning showed what darkness had hidden. Whole stretches of timber stood black above smoking ground, while other sections remained almost untouched—green trees beside charred ones, living brush beside gray ash, with no pattern Harris could identify from where he sat. The old burn had saved them by giving the new fire less to consume, but even there the landscape had changed overnight.

The route below was gone.

Harris knew every drainage and shoulder of rock on this side of the mountain. He knew where the stock trail crossed the timber, where the slope eased before the Forest Service road, which gullies held water after late-summer storms and which became treacherous when deadfall collected in them. None of that knowledge matched what stood in front of him now.

The fire had dropped timber over trails, opened views that had never existed, and erased others. Harris had spent most of his life believing that knowing the land meant he could protect the people moving across it.

The mountain had corrected him in a single night.

They gathered what remained: the radio, first-aid pouch, flashlight, two lead ropes, and the empty bottle Harris had held onto without knowing why. Before they moved, Harris made Jay follow his finger with his eyes, tell him where they were, and drink the last small mouthful of water.

Jay tolerated the examination without protest, which made Harris more suspicious of his condition.

They started east across the exposed ground, avoiding smoking pockets and trees too damaged to trust. Jay managed better than Harris expected for the first half hour, though every incline made his breathing rougher. When he stumbled, Harris caught his arm before he could go down.

Jay steadied himself against him. “I’m okay.”

“You sure?”

A pause.

“I dunno.”

Harris looked at him.

Jay’s mouth shifted faintly. “Better answer?”

“Yeah.”

That was the first real trace of himself Harris had seen since the night before, and relief moved through Harris hard enough to make his ribs ache.

They kept going.

Harris’s own injuries became harder to hide as the morning warmed. His right hand had swollen beneath the dressing, bending his fingers sent pain through his forearm, and the left side of his chest had tightened overnight until every deep breath pulled sharply beneath the ribs before ending in a cough.

Jay noticed when Harris stopped near a slab of exposed granite and braced himself against it.