Page 15 of Igniting Her

She had tried lying on her back. She had tried lying on her side. She had counted Teak’s soft, medicated snores and the seven seconds between the foghorn’s call and its answer from farther down the coast. None of it had stopped her mind from returning to the cliff. Not the rockfall. Not Evan’s leg bent wrong on the ledge or the moment Teak’s line snapped tight.

“Good.” One word. Captain Everett had managed to make one ordinary word sound like something Ellie had spent years trying to earn. The worst part was that she had earned it: the rig had been right; the rescue had worked. Cassie had seen both without allowing the insubordination to disappear beneath the outcome. Balanced, professional, fair. Infuriating.

Ellie pushed back the blanket and found her shoes by feel.

The bunk room barely changed as she left it. Jamie turned once beneath her blanket. Priya slept on, one hand tucked under her cheek. Teak’s walking boot stood beside her bed like an ugly piece of modern sculpture. Ellie eased the door shut and went downstairs.

Most of Station 12 had gone dark. Moonlight silvered the apparatus bay through the upper windows, catching along the quint’s chrome and the brass face of the Calloway plaque. Ellie didn’t look at it for long. She had already collected enough things she couldn’t stop wondering about.

The gym door was open. Light lay across the corridor in a narrow bar. Ellie slowed, expecting Mo on the rowing machine during another episode of insomnia. Instead, Cassie stood at the weight rack with a dumbbell in each hand. Of course she did. She wore black training pants and a faded navy T-shirt, the burn scar on her left forearm fully visible. Her hair was still in its regulation twist, though several dark strands had worked loose at the nape of her neck. Without the uniform shirt and captain’s bars, she should have looked less formidable.

She did not.

Cassie watched Ellie appear in the mirror. Her arms remained loose at her sides, the weights motionless.

“Couldn’t sleep,” Ellie said.

The captain’s gaze moved once over her gym shorts and old academy shirt, then returned to her face. “Apparently.” It wasn’t clear which of them the answer described.

Ellie could leave. A sensible firefighter would recognize that finding her commanding officer alone in a small room after midnight, less than nine hours after one word from her had mattered far too much, was a situation best solved by retreat; however, Ellie had never built much of a reputation for retreat. She crossed to the rack and selected a pair of weights. Cassie shifted half a step to make room. No invitation. No dismissal.

Truce, then.

Ellie liked weights because they were difficult in honest ways. A hundred and thirty-five pounds stayed a hundred and thirty-five no matter what anyone had written in her file. Either she could lift it or she couldn’t. There was no committee afterward to decide whether the bar approved of her judgment.

Cassie made the room less honest, or at least much more complicated.

They negotiated the rack without speaking. When they reached for the same twenty-pound dumbbell, Cassie withdrew her hand. Ellie took it, finished one side of her set, and placed it within Cassie’s reach instead of back in its slot. Cassie accepted the accommodation with a slight inclination of her head. Later, when Ellie adjusted the bench, Cassie stepped close enough to press the loose locking pin fully into place. She didn’t mention it. Ellie didn’t mention that she had seen.

Each could have chosen another piece of equipment. Neither did.

Cassie finished her set, returned the dumbbells in descending order, and moved to the cable machine. Ellie took the bench. The room filled with small, useful sounds: the muted contact of rubber against rubber, the slide of the weight stack, breath controlled through effort. The ventilation fan rattled overhead.

Ellie loaded the bar and lay back. On her final repetition, the weight slowed six inches above her chest. She had it. She knew she had it. Even so, Cassie appeared at the head of the bench, palms beneath the bar without touching. Ellie locked out and returned it to the hooks. Cassie stepped away at once.

“I didn’t need a spot,” Ellie said.

“You didn’t receive one.”

“You were standing close enough to file paperwork on my forehead.”

“And yet I resisted.”

Ellie sat up. The corner of Cassie’s mouth had not moved, but something dry had passed through her eyes. It was the nearest they had come to peace. Peace, apparently, meant Cassie noticing a loose pin and Ellie declining to ask about the scar exposed along her forearm. It meant neither of them using what the other had noticed. For several quiet minutes they were simply two women awake when the rest of the station wasn’t.

That was probably why Ellie let the silence become comfortable.

Ellie had trained beside hundreds of firefighters. Bodies were ordinary in the job. They showered in adjacent stalls, changed between calls, slept a few feet apart, and saw one another at every stage between capable and wrecked. She knew how not to look. Knowing wasn’t helping in this case. Cassie moved with the same economy she brought to a fireground. Nothing swung. Nothing rushed. When the cable drew taut, the muscles in her shoulders gathered beneath the worn cotton, clean and contained. Sweat darkened the first inch of her hairline. Her face gave away no strain except a slight parting of her lips on the final repetition.

Ellie looked at the ceiling. The fan continued to rattle, unimpressed.

She set the dumbbells down and crossed to the rescue dummy on the far mat. It weighed a hundred and sixty-five pounds and wore the blank, vaguely reproachful look of someone accustomed to being dropped. Ellie rolled it onto its back, stepped behind its shoulders, and hooked her arms beneath its armpits. She lifted the torso and dragged it the length of the mat.

“Your base is too narrow,” Cassie observed, breaking the silence.

So much for the truce. Ellie let the dummy’s head settle onto the vinyl. “I moved him.”

“You pulled with your back.”