Page 3 of Light My Fire

She does, finally, and lets me go. I'm kneeling on wet pavement with my mouth slightly open, my heart going like I'm still inside the building, every nerve in my body lit up and reporting for duty. Quinn is watching me watch her, and I make myself look at the truck, the hose lines, anything.

“Three seats of fire,” I say, because facts are a handhold and I need one. “At least three. Burn lines were clean. That place was cooked, Quinn. On purpose.”

“You can tell the marshal all about it.” She hauls me up by the harness. “After Warren eats you.”

Warren does eat me. It takes nine minutes by the clock on Engine 9's dash, and it covers freelancing, radio discipline, the roof, my history, my future, and my funeral, which she describes in detail, including who from my family she'll have to console. I stand there dripping and say yes ma’am in the right places and mean about half of them. Afterward the PIO trades me to a news crew for thirty seconds, and I give them nothing worth airing and hand the credit to Quinn and the crew, where it lives. I should be ashamed of how little of my head is in any of it. I keep drifting sideways to a stack of pallets and a crossed leg and a low voice asking which way I came in.

She knew the building was rigged to come down. The thought arrives without permission as Warren's winding down. Nobody asks if the roof is compromised. Civilians ask if they're going to die, if their stuff is gone, if somebody saw their dog. She asked about my entry route and the structural integrity like she was grading the fire's work.

I tell myself she's in shock. Shock comes out strange in some people, formal, too calm. I've seen it before.

I've never once believed myself less.

By the time I get released to rehab and a bottle of water, the crowd beyond the tape has thinned to the diehards filming the collapse on their phones. Steam rises off the wreckage where the lines are still working it over, and the whole street smells like a drowned campfire. My ears ring in the new quiet. Rescue 2's bumper is empty, and the yellow blanket is gone with her. Survivors keep them all the time, shock does that. I stand there anyway, feeling oddly burgled.

I walk the line of the tape anyway, scanning faces in the red wash of the lights. Old man in a robe. Kids. A guy in a delivery uniform. No pale blue eyes. No dark blond hair coming loose from its tie in the wind off the fire.

The medic says she declined transport. Gave her thanks, gave no name, walked off the scene somewhere between the pulse ox and the paperwork like smoke finding a gap.

“You good?” Quinn asks, slinging her coat into the rig. “You look like somebody stole your wallet.”

“I'm good.”

It's the first lie. It comes out easy, the size of a seed, and I have no idea yet what grows out of it. I rack my mask, stow my coat, and ride back to Station 9 with my forehead against the cool of the window, watching the column of smoke shrink in the side mirror.

The fire was set by somebody who knew exactly what they were doing. I'd put my badge on it. And the only person inside it was a woman who sat in the heart of the thing like it belonged to her, and asked me good questions while looking at my mouth.

My hands won't settle. I flex them on my knees, feeling the night go strange and bright at the edges, the adrenaline refusing to stand down, and I tell myself it's the fire. It's always the fire.

That's the second lie.

Somewhere out in Redwater City, a woman with light-eating eyes is walking dry and calm through the dark, and I don't even know her name, and I already know, like you know a floor is about to give, that I'm going to see her again.

I catch myself hoping for it.

The engine rolls into the bay at 3:40 a.m. The streets are wet and shining, neon smeared in the puddles, the sirens somewhere else now, someone else's problem. I rack my gear and hang my coat in my locker, and then I sit on the bench in front of it with the smoke still in my hair, because standing back up feels like a project. My hands have finally quit buzzing. The rest of me hasn't.

I lie on my bunk in the dark of the dorm, listening to the building tick and somebody's white-noise app through the wall, and I do the math I shouldn't be doing. Three seats of fire with clean lines, and a calm woman sitting in the middle of it all, asking about my entry route. Tomorrow the marshal will walk the scene and find what I found, and Val will want to know everything, because the only fires that ever seem to scare Val are the ones she can't explain. I've spent six years not asking why that is. I'll give my statement like a good firefighter.

All of it. Almost all of it.

Redwater is about to start burning, and the worst part, the part I will never tell Warren or Quinn or Lena or God, is that when I close my eyes, it isn't the collapsing roof I see.

It's her eyes on my mouth, and the fire reflected in them, steady as a lit fuse.

2

ZARA

The fire looks better on television than it did in person.

I stand at the window wall of my apartment with a cup of black coffee going cold in my hand, and Redwater glitters below me, forty floors of other people's ordinary lives between my feet and the street. On the screen behind me, a news anchor is using the word inferno with real enthusiasm. I don't need to watch. The footage is on a loop, and the loop is in my head anyway; I was there.

I turn back to the screen because discipline means knowing what the city knows.

The warehouse burns in night-vision orange. The reporter says the cause is under investigation. She says the building was slated for demolition, owned by a holding company, no injuries reported, and one civilian rescued from inside the structure in a dramatic moment captured by a bystander.

Then the phone video plays, and I stop drinking my coffee.