Page 69 of Igniting Her

Cassie lowered her voice. “Engineer.”

Mo planted both boots. His eyes did not leave hers. “Not you. Not again.”

The wind drove a burst of embers across the open doorway. Neither of them moved.

No one on the crew had ever spoken of Jules to Cassie. They had preserved her silence without approving it. Mo had been at Station 12 long enough to know what another unanswered radio had done, and what Cassie would do if command became one more thing she could sacrifice.

“You leave this post,” he said, “and every person out there loses the captain who can bring them home.”

At two minutes, fifty-eight seconds, Cassie returned to the table.

“Mirador Command to all companies,” she said. “Maintain assignments. Truck 6, keep the ladder in place. Rescue 12, prepare to receive two patients.”

She did not know there would be two.

The order made room for the possibility without spending another firefighter to prove it.

At three minutes, the fire reached the attic over the Alpha side. Truck 6 reported a bow in the roofline. Cassie widened the collapse zone again and moved Engine 12’s line behind the stone gatepost. Jamie complied while keeping her helmet turned toward the upper door.

Three minutes, twelve seconds.

“Ridge, Command. Give me anything.”

Static.

In the other fire, Cassie had called a unit number until the incident commander took the radio from her hand. She remembered the pressure of his fingers more clearly than his face. She remembered trying to take it back. She remembered somebody saying her name as if that could be a reason to stop.

She did not remember what she had said.

At three minutes, twenty-nine seconds, Priya returned at a run. She stopped outside the garage, breath hard from the hill.

“We have a missing seven-year-old from the Delta exposure. Her mother thought she was with a neighbor downhill. Sofia saw the other family’s dog run up the exterior service stairs and followed before anyone caught her. That was after our primary.”

The voice had been real.

Ellie had been right.

Cassie wrote CHILD, 7 beneath Ridge’s name on the board. Her pen did not shake until she lifted it.

“Notify dispatch we have a confirmed civilian inside,” she said. “Have the mother brought to Rescue 12 and kept there. Nobody tells her we have contact until we do.”

At three minutes, fifty-seven seconds, part of the front porch roof collapsed across the upper entrance. Burning timber struck the stone landing and blocked the direct path to the driveway. The hose crews flinched forward. Cassie held them with one word.

“Stay.”

They stayed.

At four minutes, the fireground noise changed. The porch collapse had opened a new path for air. Flame drew inward at the doorway, then rolled from the attic vents in a horizontal sheet. Cassie ordered the Alpha line moved ten feet left and the Delta exposure evacuated. A deputy shouted for civilians to get behind the next wall. A news camera at the end of the road turned toward the house.

Cassie continued to count.

Four minutes, twenty-two seconds.

Four minutes, thirty-one.

At four minutes, forty-six seconds, Truck 6 reported movement behind the upper Delta glass. The thermal imager could not separate a body from the heat.

“Do not climb,” Cassie said. “Hold the ladder and protect the balcony.”