Page 38 of Light My Fire

Max looks up when I pass and gives me the tight nod of a command officer who already knows how bad this is. My statement takes forty minutes in Warren's office with two investigators and a recorder, and Val isn't in the building, which tells me more than the questions do. Val is wherever the front of this thing is. I answer what they ask and not one syllable more, dates and tones and burn patterns, and the whole time the question I'm not being asked sits on my phone in my pocket. Was it you who sent them to my door? Yes, it was. Ask me the next one.

Lena catches me at the bottom of the hose tower afterward, where the spare line is racked and the cameras aren't.

She's been polishing the same coupling for a while, by the shine of it, which means she was waiting for me, and when I come through the door she sets it down and she doesn't take up her usual position. For a month, Lena has run every one of these conversations facing the bay doors, shoulder to shoulder, mercy by way of not looking at me. This time she turns around and faces me square, arms loose, chin level, and I understand before she says a word that the not-asking has stopped working, exactly like she told me it would back when this was small enough to not-ask about.

“Mercer pulled two unmarkeds out of the motor pool Saturday morning,” she says. “Max has been living at that table since yesterday. There's a name on the borrowed corkboard with brown paper taped over it, which is the silliest thing I've ever seen, because you don't tape paper over a name unless the name is the whole case.” She watches my face do whatever it does. “Talk to me, Dani.”

There's no version of standing here lying to Lena Cruz. She's hauled me out of two buildings. She not-asked her way through my entire disaster, patient as a saint on overtime, and she's the only person in this station who has watched the whole arc of me since November and kept my secrets without knowing what they were.

So I give her part of it, which is all I can afford, and even the part is enormous out loud.

“The woman from the warehouse,” I say. “The one in my phone, the one I've been lit up over since the first night. She's who Mercer wants.” Lena doesn't blink, which is how I learn she'd assembled most of that herself. “I gave Val her name Saturday morning, after Castellan. And last night she texted me asking if I was the one who sent them, and I haven't answered, because the answer is yes, and I don't know how to send a yes to a woman I'd still walk into fire for.”

The hose tower is cold and smells of rubber and old water, and somewhere above us a pigeon shuffles on a ledge, and Lena takes all of it in with her jaw working slow, like she's chewing the gristle off each fact before she swallows it.

“You love her.” It isn't a question, so it doesn't get a question's answer. Lena leans back against the racked spare line and studies me the length of one slow breath. “The arsonist. The one who's been burning her way through every dirty developer in this city. You love her, and you turned her in, and now you're standing in my hose tower looking like a woman about to do a third stupid thing.”

“Because here's what I know that you know,” she says, stepping closer, voice dropping the register it drops on a fireground when the order matters. “Val Mercer is the best officer I've ever served under, and she has exactly one religion, and it's this house. Anyone who threatens this station, this city, these people, Val will run them down off the clock, on her own dime, for years if she has to. You've seen her case board. She had it before there was a case. Once Val decides somebody is a danger to her people, she does not stop. She doesn't get tired, and she doesn't miss twice.” Lena's eyes hold mine, brown and steady and scared for me, which is the worst part. “Your woman is now that somebody. So whatever you're thinking of doing with that unanswered text, hermana, think about whether you want to be standing between Val Mercer and her religion when they meet.”

“I can't let her go.” It comes out of me plain and ruined, the first time I've said it to a living soul, standing under forty feet of dead hose. “I've tried. I can't.”

Lena looks at me a long time, and then she does the thing that breaks me worse than any lecture, she reaches out and squeezes the back of my neck once, hard, the grip you use on a probie who's going to jump anyway.

“Then go in eyes open,” she says. “And come back. Whatever else you do. You come back.”

I drive home with my hands at ten and two like a student driver, and I sit in my truck outside my own building for twenty minutes, and then I answer the text, because Lena's right, I am absolutely about to do the third stupid thing.

I don't answer the question. That's its own answer and we both know it. If I were innocent, I'd have sent the no before my heart finished breaking, and instead it's been eighteen hours, and a woman who reads rooms for a living can read a screen.

Tonight. One time, face to face, before this gets any worse. The place we met. Eleven. Come alone and so will I, and you'll get your whole truth and I'll get mine.

The reply comes back in under a minute, like she's been sitting with the phone in her hand since last night, which she has, I'd bet my pension on it. Both of us holding our phones across the river from each other like two halves of the same idiot.

I'll be there.

She sends nothing else, and no question about which place, because there's only ever been one place.

The warehouse takes up its block like a burned-out lantern, fence scabbed with condemnation notices, and at eleven on a Sunday night the river district is nothing but my own footsteps and the water working at the pilings. I parked six blocks out and walked, doubling back twice, watching mirrors and corners with tradecraft I learned from my chief without her ever meaning to teach me, and nobody followed me here. I'd put money on it. Not my pension, though. I've already bet that tonight.

There's a gap in the fence on the river side that wasn't cut by the city, and I slip through it and stand inside the building where my whole life turned over.

A month does nothing to a burned building except settle it. The smell is exactly the same, wet char, rust, river—the smell I breathed through a mask the night I came through that wall of smoke and found a woman standing still in the middle of it, unhurried, lit by the fire like it had been arranged for her. The roof is open in three places now, and the rain has stopped but the city glow comes down through the holes in long soft columns, and the floor is a museum of that night, hose-furrows still in the ash, half a pallet skeleton, the scorch shadow of stock that burned so hot it photographed itself onto the concrete.

She steps out from behind the old loading office, and my body knows before my eyes finish the work.

Zara, in dark clothes with her hair down, no towel-soft apartment version, no consultant in a good coat. This is the original, the woman from the smoke, and she stops ten feet away in one of the columns of glow with her hands loose at her sides where I can see them, which is a courtesy and a wound at the same time.

“You came,” she says.

The cold is coming up through my boots from the concrete, and I keep my hands in my jacket pockets, because I don't trust them.

“I said I would.”

“You say a lot of things.”

Her voice is level and her eyes aren't. Even in this light I can see the night she's had, the two nights, the same two nights I've had.

“You didn't answer my question.”