Page 32 of Light My Fire

I stand with the shampoo in my hand, and the old reflex wakes and runs the whole sequence in half a second, the same sequence it's always run. She's stopped walking. She's standing on the runner. People don't stand still in dark hallways unless they're reading. Get out, dry off, walk down the hall dripping if you have to, and put your eyes on what your ears can't verify.

And then, for the first time in eleven years, I override it.

She's a guest in a strange apartment at night. It's one board in a quiet hallway, and she's reading the spines of my six books, or watching the rain come down the bedroom window, or standing still because the storm is loud and the night was long. The runner is thick. The catch under the board needs a press at the seam, and a press at the seam needs knowledge and intention, and she has neither. She has a split lip I gave her and my name still in her mouth. I've spent a decade treating every creak in every room as a verdict, and tonight one woman in a vinyl booth held my hands while I shook, and I'm so tired of standing trial in my own home.

I tip my head back into the spray and rinse the night out of my hair, and I don't go look. I'm still afraid. The fear is right there where I left it, patient, certain it will be needed eventually. I wash my hair anyway. There's ten feet of hallway and one loose board between us, and for the first night of my adult life I choose, on purpose, with my eyes open, to trust her.

I shut off the water and reach for a towel.

17

DANI

The shower is still running when the floor moves under my foot.

I'm halfway down the hallway with a water bottle in my hand, bare feet on warm oak, going to find the towels she promised, and a board rocks. It's small, a quarter inch of give and a creak, and in any other building in this city I'd never break stride. But I've crawled floors for a living for twelve years, and this tower is two years old, poured concrete and engineered everything, and new buildings don't have loose boards. Loose boards get made.

I stand on the runner with the rain loud on the bedroom windows behind me and the shower hissing behind the door at the end of the hall, and I look down at my own feet, and the sensible version of me, outvoted at every meeting since the Saltbox, finally gets her vote.

I kneel and fold back the runner.

The board sits a hair proud of its neighbors. The seam at one end is too clean, cut and eased, the work of somebody patient, and when I press the end the board tips like a seesaw and comes up in my hand without a sound. The creak lives in the middle, not the seam. Underneath there's a steel case the size of a turnout duffel, set snug into a cavity beneath the boards, and the latches aren't even locked.

You can stop here, Serrano. You can put the board back and go drink your water and be a woman who doesn't know.

I set the water bottle down on the oak. My hands have gone calm, which is its own bad sign, because they only do that on a fireground, when the body has decided the situation outranks the feelings and the feelings can wait in the truck. Down the hall the shower keeps up its steady hiss. The rain keeps up its steady wash. Between the two of them the night sounds almost peaceful, and I kneel there in a stranger's hallway in nothing but my own bare skin, and I flip the latches.

I open the case.

Blueprints sit on top, rolled and banded, and I know the first one before it's half unrolled because I've carried its layout in my head since Tuesday, the Crestline's floor plan, fourteenth floor, the electrical access chases marked in pencil, four small circles in a hand so steady it could pass for type. Under the blueprints there are pages. Equations run down them in columns in the same handwriting, burn rates and load figures and chemistry I only know from arson seminars, margins annotated, one line worked and reworked four times like a problem that had to come out exact. Under the pages lie the photographs.

The photographs are what do it.

They aren't surveillance shots. They're after-shots. The top one is the Calloway's records suite, gutted, taken from the doorway in daylight with the tape still up. The next is a warehouse interior I'd know in my sleep, because I dragged her out of it. The last is a corridor, a long scorched corridor with a burn line across it as straight as a property boundary, the tidiest fire I've ever crawled, the one I stood in at three in the morning thinking somebody wrote this floor. The photo was taken standing where I stood. There are dates on the backs in neat pencil, and every date is a night I know by its tones, and the cold starts at the back of my neck and goes down my body like water finding a drain.

It isn't suspicion anymore. Suspicion was the booth, the web of names, you're not wrong about any of it, and even then, God help me, some sliver of me had kept one boring door open—consultant, obsessive, wronged sister, anything. There's no door now. The woman in that shower planned my fires on paper, in her own hand, and photographed what was left, and keeps it under her floor fourteen steps from where she sleeps. I'm kneeling on an arsonist's runner with her teeth marks in my shoulder and her case open on my knees, and down the hall the water drums on and on, and she's in there washing off what we did while I hold the math she used to burn my city.

And here's what the math doesn't show, kneeling there with the Crestline plate in my hands. It doesn't show three men on a twelfth-floor landing with the smoke coming up the stair behind them. It doesn't show Lena calling out in Spanish through her mask, or Quinn being sick behind the engine after, or the oldest one gripping my glove and thanking saints. Four circles in pencil, drawn by a hand that didn't know the men were in the building, and I even believe she didn't know, her fires have always stepped around people, watchmen clear, alarms honest, exits clean. It doesn't matter. I've spent twelve years learning the one lesson the job actually has, which is that fire doesn't read the plan. Fire eats whoever's home.

The shower cuts off.

The water dies in the pipes. When a ceiling starts talking, you move without thinking, and that's what I do, hands running the drill. I square the photographs and lay them back. The pages go on top of them, the blueprints on top of those, band straight, and I ease the latches down so they don't click. The board tips into its seam, and I press it flat and it takes its quarter inch of give like it never gave anything away in its life, and the runner folds back over it, and I'm standing with my water bottle by the bedroom window watching the rain when the bathroom door opens on a roll of steam.

My heart is going hard enough that I can feel it in my split lip.

“You found the water,” Zara says. “Not the towels.”

She's in the doorway light with a dark towel slung low on her hips and another working through her hair, the tail ends of the scratches I put down her back showing at her ribs, and she's beautiful, that's the obscenity of it, she's beautiful and loose and unguarded in a register I've never once seen on her, and an hour ago I'd have crossed the room. I make myself take a drink of water instead, and the bottle crackles in my grip, too loud.

“Got distracted by the view.” My voice comes out almost level. “Some storm.”

“Mm.” She crosses to me, bare feet quiet on the boards, and I track her over the last ten feet the whole while telling my face to be a face. She stops behind me, and her hands close over my shoulders, thumbs finding the muscle along my neck, and she's strong, and it's good, and my body starts to lean back into her before I overrule it. “You're carrying the whole night up here,” she says, against my ear. “Stay. I'll work it out of you.”

Her thumbs press, and the muscle jumps under them. In the window glass, her reflection watches my reflection, rain crawling down through both of us, and I think about pencil circles on a fourteenth-floor plate where three men were sleeping in a microwave glow, and I think about her fingers in my hair an hour ago, and both of those are true at the same time and my stomach rolls like a boat.

“I can't.” I step out of her hands and turn, and I find a smile somewhere and put it on. “I'm covering the back half of Quinn's midnight. I told her yes yesterday, before.” I let it hang, before you, before the booth, before everything, and it does the work a lie needs done. “I need to swing home for my gear.”

Her eyes flick once toward the windows and come back, too quick to read. She doesn't argue. She walks me back down the hallway, over the runner, over the board, her hand riding light at the small of my back, and I keep my eyes forward and my steps even and I step on the third board on purpose because not stepping on it would be a confession, and it creaks its small creak under my weight, and behind me her hand never changes.