Page 13 of Jethro

“Good. I left my misdemeanor gloves at home.”

Aurora pointed toward the hydrant at the corner, then toward the alley.

“Rocco, secure water. Eloise, with him. Jethro, Kai, pull the two-and-a-half to the Bravo side. Sonny, Wilder, recon from the street only. Nobody goes beneath that roof, nobody gets close to those walls, and if the building so much as sighs, you back out.”

For a brief moment Jethro stared at her smiling, proud of her command of the situation. Then he heard it. Somewhere inside, timber boomed. The west wall shed a curtain of sparks.

Wilder stared at the upper windows, black squares rimmed in fire, and whispered over his comms.

“I think it just sighed.”

“Then consider yourself warned,” Aurora replied.

Hoses came off the engine in hard, heavy folds. Jethro and Kai dragged the attack line past broken pallets and a chain-link fence furred with dead vines, their boots slipping on gravel. Heat shoved at them from the loading dock.

Above it, flames rolled under the sagging eaves, searching for fresh air. Jethro opened the nozzle from the alley mouth. The stream punched a dark hole through the fire and struck the interior with a sound like gravel thrown against sheet metal. For half a breath the flames folded. Then they curled around the water and returned larger.

“That went well,” Kai said on the crew channel.

“I think we made it angry.”

“It was abandoned,” Jethro said. “Probably lonely.”

A section of gutter dropped twenty feet and hit the pavement where they would have been standing if Aurora had let them advance. Molten tar scattered in black beads. Kai looked at it, then at Jethro.

“It likes you.”

“Get in line.”

On the street, Rocco spun the hydrant wrench and the stem resisted. Eloise planted a boot against the barrel and leaned into the wrench beside him. The hydrant broke open with a rusty groan, water hammering through the supply line. It swelled, jumped, and settled.

“Water established,” Eloise transmitted. “Pressure’s poor.”

“Of course it is,” Aurora said. “Rocco, nurse it. Eloise, bring the deck gun online.”

Sonny and Wilder moved along the Delta side at the limit of the floodlights. Plywood covered most of the doors, but one had been torn away, leaving a low black opening beneath a corrugated awning. Smoke breathed out of it in rhythmic pushes.

Sonny raised the thermal imager from a distance. The screen bloomed almost entirely white. He angled it toward the ground and saw narrow rivers of heat extending from the doorway, irregular and branching.

“Command, we have multiple hot trails outside Delta. Looks like pour patterns.” The radio fell quiet for a fraction too long.

“Copy,” Aurora said. “No entry. Mark the location mentally; evidence won’t matter if the wall buries you.”

Wilder swept his light along the dirt and found two plastic fuel cans collapsed inward from heat. One cap lay several yards away.

“There are containers back here.”

“Copy.”

Sonny’s attempt at lightness came rough at the edges.

“So, the dumpster didn’t spontaneously develop ambition.”

The second alarm had not yet arrived when the first major collapse came. It began with a ripple along the roof, so slight that Jethro thought the heat had distorted his vision. Then the cupola tilted. Its bell-shaped vent folded sideways, dragging rafters with it.

The roof sank into the center of the building and exhaled a storm of sparks through every broken window.

“Collapse! Collapse! Hold your positions!” Aurora shouted, though everyone was already moving backward.