Page 10 of Light My Fire

It hasn't failed; it's been starved. The head's intact, the pipe's intact, and when I trace the line back with my flashlight, the branch that feeds this section dead-ends at a valve behind an access panel, and the valve is closed, snugged down, no tag, no maintenance lock, no rust in the threads. I stand there with water from somebody else's line dripping off my helmet and a piece of burned renewal-fund letterhead stuck to my boot, and I feel the warehouse all over again, three seats, clean lines, a fire with a plan.

“Serrano.” Lena's in the doorway, mask hanging, hair stuck to her forehead. “You're doing the face.”

“Come look at this.”

She comes and looks. Lena's been riding a truck two years longer than me, and she's married to the sharpest set of eyes in the department, and I watch her trace the line the same way I did, and I watch her arrive where I arrived.

“Huh,” she says, which from Lena is a paragraph.

“Assembly side's wet. Ballroom, kitchen, all of it, heads popped where they should. Just this section and the floor above it.” My voice is doing fine. My stomach isn't. “Two systems, one building, and the fire happened to start in the dry one.”

Water ticks off the shelving around us. Somebody's flashlight crosses the ceiling out in the corridor, and the radio mutters about the roof, and the two of us stand in a burned records room full of wet black confetti that was somebody's paperwork three hours ago.

“Marshal's gonna camp here for a week.” She looks at me instead of the valve, brown eyes steady over the soot. “You okay? You've been weird since the warehouse.”

“I'm great,” I say, and that's a lie, and Lena tucks it away for later, with interest.

Because here's what I'm not saying inside my own head, where Lena can't hear it and Val can't either. The warehouse was set, whatever the marshal's leaning. The Meridian I'd have sworn was honest, a construction fire like a hundred construction fires. And now a charity gala full of the city's expensive people burns in exactly two sections, and both sections are dry, and the dry valve turns like somebody oiled it, and the woman from the warehouse stood at the Meridian tape last night and looked at me like she was deciding whether to keep me.

That makes three fires, and I haven't seen her tonight.

I want it to stay that way so bad my teeth hurt, and underneath that, lower and worse, I want the opposite.

Command releases us by inches, like always, and Engine 9 ends up staged on Halloran Street while the trucks finish opening the roof, and Warren sends us to rehab in twos. Quinn hands me an electrolyte drink that tastes like melted crayons, and I drink it sitting on the bumper with my coat open to the cold, steam coming up off my base layer, that post-fire hum in my arms like the building's still in them. Across the street, the last of the gala crowd is thinning out, gowns under fire blankets, men in dinner jackets giving statements, a city bus pulled up warm for the ones still waiting on rides.

That's when I see her.

She's sitting on the curb at the edge of the scene lights, away from the bus and the blankets and the statement-takers, knees together, ankles crossed in the gutter like it's a church pew. Her dress is dark, the color the harbor gets in deep winter. There's soot streaked along one bare forearm and a gray smudge of it on her jaw, her hair's come loose on one side, and the collar of her coat is open on a pale throat. She's watching the building burn down with an expression it takes me a second to place, and then I place it and my mouth dries up like that valve. It's how my mother used to watch me pitch, proud and invested.

The woman from the warehouse.

My feet take me off the bumper before my brain finishes voting, which is becoming the theme of my week. I tell Quinn I'm checking on an evacuee, which is even true, and I cross the wet street with my heart doing more work than it did on the third floor, and the closer I get the worse it is, because she doesn't startle, doesn't look away from the fire, lets me walk all the way into her light like I'm expected. Like I'm late.

“You're not on the bus,” I say.

“I don't like buses.” Her voice is the same as the warehouse, low, level, a voice with no smoke in it at all. “I like it here.”

Up close the soot on her jaw is one clean streak, neat as a brushstroke. I stand over her in my dripping gear and neither of us finds the silence strange, and that's its own data point.

“You were inside?”

“Mm.” She tips her head back and looks up at me then, and the scene lights turn her eyes unfair, palest blue going silver, and they come down my coat to my hands and back up to my mouth, slow, like she's reading my pressure gauge. “I got out a side door before it spread. A few minutes early. I've always had good timing.”

The warehouse, the Meridian, and this curb make three. Behind me, the building exhales steam through its broken windows, and the bus across the street closes its doors on the last of the gowns and pulls away, and neither of us watches it go.

“Yeah,” I say. “I've noticed.”

That gets the corner of her mouth moving, not a smile, the rough draft of one, and I should be on my radio. The sentence is sitting right there in my chest with its boots on. Chief, the warehouse survivor is on scene. Six words, and Val would be here in twelve minutes, and whatever this woman is would become a department problem instead of a Dani problem.

My radio stays on my strap, and my mouth says, “Anyone check you out? You're wearing some of the building.”

She looks down at the soot on her forearm like that’s news. “I'm not hurt.”

“People say that and then their airway swells shut in a parking lot.” I'm already kneeling on the asphalt in front of her, already pulling a glove off with my teeth, because this part I'm allowed, this part has a protocol, and protocol is what's keeping me honest tonight. “Look at me.”

She looks at me.

It's a mistake, asking for that. Her eyes hold still on mine and mine have to do the work—pupils equal, reactive, no smoke burns at the nostrils, no gray in her lips—and the assessment takes eight seconds and I make it last because her face up close is unreasonable. There's a fine scrape on her collarbone. Her breathing is slow and even and mine isn't, and under the burned-building smell, faint and warm where her coat collar has fallen open, she wears a thread of night jasmine, and the part of my brain that's supposed to be running an airway check keeps that smell and nothing else.