Page 42 of Igniting Her

“You had a door beginning to fail and reserve air before the child reached the sill.”

The bedroom door flexed again in Ellie’s memory, the nozzle bucking in Jamie’s hands. She kept her voice level. “Which was why waiting for the interior route to improve would have been the worse choice.”

“Your choices were not immediate removal or abandonment. Search was twenty seconds behind you.”

“Search was holding the hall so we could get her out,” Ellie said.

“Because you had already committed them to the tactic.”

Ellie made herself unclench her jaw. Heat still seemed to press across her shoulders, though the office had gone cool. “I reported the victim, the conditions, and the exit. You authorized the ladder.”

“After you announced the removal.”

“Would you have told me not to?”

Cassie’s face tightened.

“That’s what I thought,” Ellie said.

“Do not turn a successful outcome into permission to erase the risk,” Cassie replied.

The line belonged to Pier Four. Once it would have made Ellie push harder simply because Cassie expected her to. Now she heard the difference. Cassie was not dismantling her tactics. She was circling the same seven seconds: the low-air alarm, the dead radio, the time between the girl disappearing below the sill and Jamie’s exterior report.

“The girl is alive,” Ellie said.

“That is not the only life I was tracking.” The sentence escaped before Cassie could flatten it. Her hand was braced on the desk, fingers spread. Two of them trembled against the laminate before she locked them still.

Ellie’s anger changed shape. She had been shouted at by better captains and worse ones. She knew accusation, humiliation, and the particular fury of a supervisor forced to admit the outcome had embarrassed their judgment. This was none of those. Cassie’s face had lost color beneath the soot. The low voice was not cold. It was the last lid on something violent underneath.

Fear.

Not command’s abstract fear for a member of the crew. Naked, personal fear. The kind that had started planning an ending while Ellie was still inside. Ellie looked at the strain whitening Cassie’s hand against the desk and understood why every argument they had ever had seemed to contain another room.

“Whose funeral did I just make you plan?”

Cassie went white. The office changed around the silence. For one bare second, Ellie saw not anger but impact, as if the question had struck somewhere already broken. Then the captain returned with terrifying speed. “Get out.”

“Cassie—”

“Out, Ridge.”

Ellie opened the door.

Mo stood at the pump panel with a rag in one hand. Teak was carrying the same coupling from one compartment to another for no defensible reason. Priya and Jamie had arranged themselves around the hose bed with the solemn concentration of an honor guard.

Nobody looked at Ellie.

It was almost kind.

Twenty-five hours remained in the shift. Cassie and Ellie spoke when the job required it. Apparatus assignments. A medical call for a dislocated shoulder. Dinner cleanup. The weather report for the canyon district. Every exchange was correct enough to enter into evidence. The crew heroically pretended not to notice.

Mo kept Ellie in the kitchen longer than chopping onions required. Teak told a dinner story with enough unnecessary side roads that nobody had to risk a pause. Priya put her chair between Ellie and the captain during the medical debrief and appeared surprised to find it there.

Cassie ate half her food and returned to the office.

At eleven, Ellie left the last equipment log outside the closed office door. At two, she heard the chair roll across the floor below the bunk room. At five, light still cut a yellow line beneath the door. By shift change, Cassie looked immaculate. Ellie looked rested. Neither was true. Secrets were supposed to disappear when both people behaved. She and Cassie had become flawless at hiding what passed between them.

The station was beginning to recognize the shape of what they left out.