One Thing at a Time Fire, Then Feelings
Chapter Three
"What do we got, Cap?" I called out, lacing my boots.
Captain Rodriguez's voice cut through the pre-dawn chaos. "Lightning strike, Painted Rock area. Winds picking up from the southwest. Could be a runner."
My stomach dropped. Painted Rock was fifteen miles of rough terrain, all dried chaparral and steep canyon walls. If a fire got going there with wind behind it, it could eat through thousands of acres before we could get a line around it.
"We going in by air?" I asked, grabbing my pack.
"On standby. Engines first, see what we're dealing with. If the terrain shuts them down, I'm calling the bird and you're taking your crew in."
I nodded and ran my gear check: harness, carabiners, descent device, gloves, rope bag, Pulaski, radio, first aid kit, emergency shelter. The automatic inventory of someone who'd learned a long time ago that rushing the list was how people died.
I climbed into the passenger seat of Engine 19, my mind already on insertion points and anchor systems and the way canyon fires behaved differently from ridge fires—the way they breathed with the terrain, drew air up the walls, turned on you without a word of warning.
"You look different," said Stevens, our rookie, settling in beside me. He was twenty-three, all enthusiasm and gangly limbs, still operating on the assumption that the universe was fundamentally fair. "Like you slept."
"Revolutionary concept. You should try it."
"Nah, that's not it." He squinted at me in the dark. "You've got that post-date glow."
Small towns. The absolute curse of them.
I gave him a look that could have stripped paint from the engine door. "Eyes on the job, Stevens."
But as we raced through the empty streets of San Jacinto, lights streaking everything red and white, I couldn't quite shake the memory of standing in that parking lot, Vera's taillights rounding the corner, the desert stars overhead doing absolutely nothing to make me feel less completely unmoored.
I shook it off. One thing at a time. Fire, then feelings.
Three hours later, I was coordinating a rappel sequence into a cloud of smoke and ash, all thoughts of gentle librarians and strawberry-clasped bags burned away by the immediate demands of keeping a wildfire from jumping the canyon.
The fire had other plans.
What started as a contained lightning strike had found its legs.
The wind shifted without warning. Not a gentle adjustment but a full reversal, a wall of superheated air that pushed the flames up the canyon wall like something had given the fire permission to run.
I watched it from my position at the door of the helicopter, sixty feet above the ridge, and did the math in my head, the way I always did: fuel load, slope, wind speed, where our safety zone would have to be, whether we still had one.
"Gomez, we need to reposition. Fire's moving faster than the briefing had it. I need eyes on the west face before I send anyone down."
Gomez's voice came through my helmet comms, even and calm in the way only twenty years of fire flying produced. "Copy that, coming around."
The bird banked, and I leaned into the door, one hand on the frame, watching the terrain below reorganize itself. The canyon wall was running orange in three places where it shouldn't have been.
I keyed my radio. "Rodriguez, be advised: wind's shifted southwest, we've got spotting on the west face. Recommending we adjust insertion to the upper ridge and cut line back toward the canyon mouth instead of into it. Over."
Rodriguez's voice crackled back. "Copy, Alves. Your call on insertion. Keep me posted."
My call. It always came down to that, in the end.
I turned back to my crew. Stevens, Miller, Jackson, and two others, all clipped in and watching me from the cabin with the focused calm of people who had trained for exactly this and were choosing not to think about the drop.
"Change of plan. We're going in at the upper ridge.
New anchor point, better egress if the wind keeps shifting.
When we're on the rope, I go first. Stevens, you're second—you establish the anchor point and do not move from it until the rest of the crew is down.
Miller, I want that safety zone assessed and marked before we start cutting line. Questions?"
Nobody had questions. That was either good training or healthy fear. Usually both.
The rappel itself was textbook. I hit the ground and unclipped in one motion, read the ground, called it clear.
Stevens came down controlled and steady, eyes alert, his usual grin traded in for a concentrated focus I'd always respected about him.
I watched each crew member descend, tracked their radio check-ins, coordinated with Gomez on wind and positioning.
"Helitack on the ground," I radioed in. "Gomez, we're clear. Stand by for extraction call."
"Standing by," Gomez said. "Winds are picking up down here, Alves. I'm keeping a close eye on it."
"Copy. We'll move fast."
We did move fast.
The fire had other plans for that, too.
The safety zone shrank from a hundred yards to fifty to twenty, the roar of superheated air swallowing radio chatter, smoke so thick I was navigating by terrain memory and the sound of my crew's voices. I kept the check-ins constant, kept my voice even, kept doing the math.
"Rodriguez, we need to pull back." I said it flat and certain, no room for interpretation. "Wind's accelerating, we've got spotting ahead of our position. We pull back to the secondary zone now, or we won't be pulling back at all."
There was a pause on the radio that lasted the length of approximately one geological era.
"Copy that."
"Pulling back now." I turned to my crew. "Move. Secondary zone, stay together, stay moving. Stevens, you're in front of me. Go."
We moved.
The extraction felt like it took hours. I was last up on the hoist, which was the job, the forewoman's particular obligation to the crew she'd led in.
I watched the orange reach the spot I'd been standing on approximately fifteen seconds after I left it, watched it with a clarity that only adrenaline produced, everything very bright and somehow also very far away.
My hands shook on the hoist cable.
They always did. That was the part they left out of the recruitment materials.
By the time we got a handle on it, the sun was setting behind a curtain of smoke.
Twelve hours. Stevens had taken superheated air that left him coughing hard enough to alarm the medics.
Three crew members needed IV fluids. I'd burned through my water supply by noon and spent the afternoon running on stubbornness and the adrenaline cocktail the human body produces when it decides survival is the only priority.
The ride back was quiet.
The shower at Station 19 was nothing special.
Just industrial tile, lukewarm water, and soap that smelled like institutional-grade disinfectant.
But after twelve hours of breathing smoke and tasting ash and doing the math on whether the person next to me was going to make it home, it felt like the best thing in the world.
I stood under the spray longer than I should have, hands pressed flat against the tile, waiting for the shaking to stop. It always did, eventually. The adrenaline metabolized. The body remembered it was safe, or decided to pretend well enough that it amounted to the same thing.
I told myself this every time. Sometimes it even worked.
This was the part they didn't put in the recruitment video, the crash that came after, when the body tallied everything it had survived and presented the bill.
The hollow feeling. The way your hands kept trembling at things that no longer required them to.
The way ordinary sensations like soap, lukewarm water, a solid wall to press your palms against suddenly felt like anchors to something real.
I pressed my forehead to the cool tile and thought about Vera.
Pictured her in the library, the afternoon light catching the gold in her hair, placing the exact right book in exactly the right hands.
She'd be in something floral. She'd be making her coworkers laugh without trying.
She'd be completely, serenely unaware that less than sixty miles from where she stood, the ground had been on fire and I had been standing on it.
I thought about coming home to her, smelling of smoke and that quality of fear I never named out loud, and what it would mean to try to explain why my hands shook for hours after.
Whether she'd want to stay for it.
The water went cold. I turned it off.