Page 5 of Light My Fire

They're not terrible. The older one walks the collapse line instead of the perimeter, which is correct, and he finds the second seat inside an hour, which is respectable. But he accepts the second seat as fire spread along the squatters' bedding, because the bedding is where I put it, and he photographs my soft accelerant profile and rubs his neck in a contented sort of way, and I can read the report he's already writing from across the street, transient activity, demolition-grade structure, undetermined and leaning accidental.

He never looks up. The char pattern on the standing east wall alligators in two different scales, which means two different burn temperatures, which means his accidental fire was burning in two moods at once, and it's written ten feet over his head in letters the size of dinner plates. The younger one stands almost on top of my third seat for five minutes, drinking from a thermos, and reads nothing under her own boots.

Nine days, I think, sipping my cart coffee. The city will forget faster than that if this is the standard.

A handful of onlookers drift along the tape with me, phones out, and a woman jogs past with a stroller, and somewhere behind me a school bus downshifts at the corner, brakes singing, and a girl's voice yells something happy out one of its windows.

I don't turn around. My hand turns the coffee cup a full revolution before I notice it's doing it, and the scene in front of me goes flat and far away, and for three or four seconds I'm not standing on this street. There's another street, eleven years ago, a different cordon of yellow tape, and a smell I will not describe even to myself, and a pair of small sneakers by a door that never got opened in time.

The bus pulls away. The street comes back. The cup is dented where my fingers are, and the uniform on the corner is looking at me, bored, seeing a woman who drank her coffee too fast. I give him a commuter's nod and check my watch like a person with somewhere to be, which I am. I'm always exactly that.

And then I remember, unhelpfully, the standard that isn't this. A voice through a mask said three seats, clean lines, on purpose, to another firefighter, on a bumper, while a medic counted my pulse. She wasn't even investigating. She was kneeling on wet pavement with her mask ripped off, breathing like a sprinter, furious at her captain and at the roof and possibly at me, and she'd already read in one pass under fire conditions what this man can't read in the daylight with a camera and a thermos and a federal course certificate.

Dani Serrano would find me. Give her a scene I'd actually rushed, give her one mistake and one quiet afternoon to stand in the ash, and she'd walk the line straight to my door, and there it is again—the hum, the anticipation, completely uninvited. The most dangerous person in this city to me, apart from her chief, is a firefighter who hands her own heroism away on camera, and what my body does with that information is warm up.

She'd hate me, I think, watching the investigator photograph the wrong things. She rescues people, and the arm around me was nothing like procedure. If she knew what I am, she'd look at me like a fire to put out.

The thought should file her under unusable.

I finish the coffee. I fold the cup once, in half, and trash it, and I jog home the long way along the river where the light comes off the water in flat silver panels, and I think about Natalia for one block exactly, which is the ration. She had muddy shoes she could never keep clean, and the building that should have kept her safe didn't, on purpose, because safe costs money. Then the block is over and I put it away. What I do instead of grieving has a schedule.

Tomorrow night there's a gala at the Calloway, black tie, eight hundred dollars a plate, proceeds to a downtown renewal fund that exists to make rezoning feel like charity. The developer will be there with his vote-buying smile, working the room he thinks is his. There's a courier envelope on my kitchen counter with an invitation in it, under a name I grew for two years like an orchid, and a dress in the closet the color of deep water. The timing devices are wrapped in acid-free paper in a climbing bag, because the Calloway has a service corridor with a fire-rated door nobody alarmed, and by the morning after, the renewal fund will need a new venue and the developer will need a new lawyer.

I stand in my bright legal kitchen with the marble cold under my palms, sweat cooling at the small of my back, the city humming forty floors down, and I allow myself one unprofessional minute.

In it, a firefighter pulls her helmet off on the morning news and looks past every camera in Redwater, straight through the screen, at me, eleven words and soot on her jaw and hands that haul.

Then the minute is over, and I open the envelope, and I confirm my seat at a table full of men whose buildings I'm going to burn.

If the city does its job, I never see Dani Serrano again.

I hope the city fails.

3

DANI

By the end of shift, I've given my statement twice, eaten somebody's leftover lasagna standing up at the counter, and successfully not thought about the woman from the warehouse for as long as fourteen minutes at a stretch.

The marshal's people came by at six with their clipboards and their thermos coffee, and I told them what I saw, three seats, clean lines, char that didn't agree with itself. The older one wrote it down like I was describing a UFO. Quinn caught my eye across the kitchen while I said it and didn't say anything, which is Quinn for “you're right and it won't matter.”

Now the day crew is rolling in loud, and the coffee's burned, and I smell like the inside of a chimney. I grab my towel and kit and take the far shower stall, the good one, the one where the pressure could strip paint.

The water goes gray at my feet before it goes clear.

I stand in it with my eyes closed and my forehead against the tile, and I run the night back without meaning to, the roar of the racking, the radio in my ear, the pallets, the firelight moving on her like it was auditioning for her attention, and those pale blue eyes coming up to mine through the smoke with no fear in them at all.

Nobody looks at firefighters like that. People look at the gear, the helmet, the job. She looked through all of it like the gear was a coat over a woman she was already sure of, down my throat and over my arms like she was taking inventory, and then outside, on the bumper, with the lights washing her red and blue, she'd done it again, slow and unhurried, my mouth, my bare forearms, like a woman cataloging exactly what she planned to come back for.

Heat that has nothing to do with the water moves up through me, low and rolling, and I let out a breath against the tile.

This is embarrassing. I want that on the record, wherever the record is kept. She's a stranger. She's a stranger I dragged out of a burning building that I'm pretty sure somebody lit on purpose, she sat in that building like it was a box seat, and every instinct I've sharpened over six years is ringing one long bell about her. And under the bell, lower and louder, there's this. My nipples have gone tight and it isn't the water temperature, and the ache between my legs has been building since the bumper of Rescue 2 and has officially stopped pretending to be adrenaline.

I picture her hands. That's how it starts, just her hands, manicured and calm, the smudge of soot on one elegant wrist, and I picture them on my forearms, tracing the tattoos through the soot the way her eyes did. Following the lines up. Her thumb crossing the inside of my elbow. Her voice, low and even, asking her strange, flat questions against my ear—which way did you come in?—I hear it filthy now, the way it absolutely wasn't said, and my hand is already moving down my stomach.

I should stop. The stall has a curtain and the day crew is twenty feet away banging lockers, and I'm a senior firefighter with a reputation for being the sensible one.

I slide my fingers between my legs. I'm so wet the water is irrelevant.