Chapter 7
Isolde
We have seventy-two hours.
That's the number Hex gives us at the briefing the day after Conrad mobilizes the compound — seventy-two hours until the thermal inversion settles in over Bone Hollow and the easterly wind sets up the run conditions Creed has been waiting for.
Three days. Two and a half nights. The math of it sits on my chest like a hand.
I have done four wildfire defenses in my career and the shortest preparation window I have ever had was a hundred and twenty hours, and that was a defense that I lost.
I refuse to lose this one.
I set up the medical triage with Jo at the southern evacuation point.
Jo is a small woman with a graying braid and eyes that don't waste effort on anything they aren't currently looking at, and she is, I learn within the first half hour of working with her, a former Army medic who came up with the club through her husband twenty years ago and who has never once been in a situation she couldn't handle.
I tell her what I need. She tells me what she has.
We negotiate the gap. Within four hours we have a tent, two cots, a portable oxygen kit, burn dressings, IV setup, and a clean stretch of road that an ambulance can reach if we have to call one in.
Della handles the families. Della is wider through the shoulders than I am and has a daughter who, the third time I see her in the dining hall, walks up to me with a serious six-year-old face and asks me what my favorite color is, because she'd like to know before I leave.
I tell her green. She nods and walks away, satisfied.
Della watches the exchange and says, she's making her list. Of the people who matter.
I am, apparently, on the list.
I don't have time to think about what that means.
I run drills with the brothers. I show them how to lay a burn-back.
I show them how to read fire weather. I drill them on the order of operations — chainsaws to clear, brush hogs to follow, dozers to widen, burn crews to scorch the inside line, water teams to wet the trees that border the cut.
The brothers listen. Spite, who has called me captain with various levels of irony since the third day I've been in the compound, drops the irony by the second day of drills and starts asking me actual questions about smoke direction and fuel load.
By the third day he's calling me ma'am and the brothers under him are calling me commander and I'm too tired to correct any of it.
Ezra is in the mountains.
He left at dawn of the first day with Casket and Spite and a sweep team, hunting Creed's staging positions.
They come back twice a day to report. The first ignition point they find is at twenty hours into the seventy-two-hour window — a cached drum of accelerant on the eastern flank of the basin, with a detonation timer wired into a fuse line running into the brush.
Ezra disarms it personally. He takes the timer apart and sets the accelerant aside for me to test. The second ignition point they find is at forty hours in — northern flank, similar setup, slightly more sophisticated trigger. Disarmed.
The third doesn't come.
Casket and Spite sweep ridge after ridge. Ezra runs the western flank in wolf form, where the terrain is too steep for the others to cover quickly, and comes back to me at fifty hours with singed pawprints and an expression like a man holding something heavy.
"Nothing," he says. "We've covered every probable site. The third has to be there, but we can't find it. He's hidden it under something the scent doesn't read clean — maybe metal, maybe water. Maybe deeper than we'd expect."
"Keep looking."
"I am."
On the night before — call it the fifty-fifth hour, the cold deep middle of the second night, with sixteen hours left on Hex's clock — Ezra comes back down from the western ridge for what we both know might be the last time before this all goes hot.
He's filthy. He's been in wolf form for most of the day.
His hair is full of pine and his hands are stained with something I don't ask about and he smells like burned moss.
He doesn't come to the workshop. He comes to find me on the firebreak we cut along the eastern ridge — the closest break to the most likely ignition path, the one I've been walking the length of three times tonight with the thermal camera because I can't sit still.
He finds me at the high point of the break, where it crests the ridge and you can see the whole basin laid out below.
The compound is lit in the windows of the cabins where families are sleeping, where they shouldn't still be sleeping but where there's nowhere else for them to be until we know which way the fire's going to come.
The mountains are dark all around. Stars are out.
The wind is from the southwest at four knots and shouldn't shift for fourteen hours yet.
He sits down on a flat slab of granite at the edge of the break. He pats the stone beside him.
I sit.
We don't say anything for a while.
He doesn't reach for me. He hasn't been reaching for me much in the seventy-two-hour window.
I think it's discipline — he's been holding everything down, holding the wolf in the work, holding the man in the leadership of the sweep teams. He has not let himself be a man in love during work hours.
I respect it. I have been doing the same thing.
But now, sitting on the stone in the dark, his shoulder is close enough to mine that I can feel the heat of him through both our clothes, and his hand is loose on his knee, and after a minute, without speaking, his pinky finger brushes against the outside of my thigh and stays there.
The smallest possible touch. Confirmation that I'm here. Confirmation that he's here.
I cover his hand with mine.
"Tell me about them," he says.
"About who."
"Your crew."
I don't answer for a long beat. The wind moves through the pines.
"All six?"
"All six."
I take a breath.
"Captain Holt," I say. "Lewis Holt. Forty-eight years old.
Twenty-three years on the job. He sang country songs on long shifts.
Old country, the kind from before I was born.
He sang the same six songs in rotation and the joke on the crew was that if you'd been on the truck for more than a year you could lip-sync along with him.
He had a wife named Margie and two grown daughters and three grandkids and he was going to retire in fourteen months.
He used to say it like it was a number he was counting down.
Fourteen months. Thirteen. He died at twelve. "
Ezra is silent.
"Rodriguez," I say. "Hector Rodriguez. The one I got out.
Thirty-three years old. The worst cook I have ever met in my life.
He once burned scrambled eggs so badly the smoke alarm went off in the firehouse and we never let him live it down.
He had a degree in mechanical engineering and was on the job because he wanted to and not because he had to.
He had a son who was four when the fire happened.
The son's six now. I don't know if he still asks where his dad's left hand went. "
The night air is cool. My voice is steady. I didn't expect it to be.
"Kim. Ji-Soo Kim. Twenty-three. The youngest. She'd been on the truck for sixteen months.
She was a marathon runner — qualified for Boston the spring before, never got to run it.
She laughed louder than anyone I have ever known.
She was the one on the radio at the end.
She figured out it was set before anyone else did.
She figured out it was wrong and she said it out loud. She was twenty-three years old."
Ezra's hand tightens around mine.
"Diaz. Marco Diaz. Twenty-nine. Two daughters under five.
He used to bring them to the firehouse on Sundays when his wife was on shift at the hospital.
The girls called us all Uncle. I haven't seen them in two years.
His wife stopped letting me come around because she said I looked at the girls the wrong way.
She didn't mean it as an insult. She meant I looked at them with something she didn't want them to absorb. "
"Whitlock," I say. "Aaron Whitlock. Thirty-six.
Hadn't been on the job long — third year.
Quiet man. Used to do the New York Times crossword in pen on his breaks.
We made fun of him for it. He shrugged and kept doing it.
His mother sent a card to the firehouse on the one-year anniversary and asked me to keep an eye on his grave site because she'd moved to Florida and couldn't get up there anymore.
I drive out twice a year to put flowers on it. I haven't been since April."
"Park. Esther Park. Thirty-one. We started on the same crew the same year.
She was the only other woman on Holt's truck.
She had a sister in San Francisco who was getting married a month after the fire.
She was the maid of honor. I wore the dress to the funeral.
It was peach. She would have hated that I wore it. She would have laughed."
I stop. There's only one left.
"Trent. Owen Trent. Thirty-nine. The oldest of us after Holt.
He'd been a firefighter in three different cities and settled in Stillwater because his wife wanted to be near her mother.
He had a baby. Six months old. The baby was named after his grandfather, who'd been a fire captain in Pittsburgh.
The baby's two and a half now. Owen never saw him crawl. "
I stop. I don't have any more.
The names are out of me. They've been sitting in my chest for two years and I have said them in my head every morning when I wake up but I have never said them out loud, all six, to another human being, until now.
I look down at my hand under Ezra's hand on his knee.
I'm crying. I didn't notice. The tears are coming down quietly without any noise, which is how I cry now, two years deep into this — silently, like I'm afraid the sound will draw attention to something I haven't earned.
Ezra raises his free hand. He puts it on the back of my neck. He does it carefully, the way he does everything when his palm is going to make contact with me — slow enough that I could stop him, with the full weight of his attention behind it.
The heat of his hand on the back of my neck is the warmest thing I've felt in three days.
He pulls me toward him. I let him. I lay my face against the side of his neck on the unburned half, and I press my mouth to the place where the scar line crosses his collarbone and disappears under his shirt, and I let him hold me there on the granite stone in the dark with the seventy-two-hour clock running down and the wind starting to whisper in a way I do not like.
He doesn't say anything for a long time.
When he speaks, his voice is rougher than I've heard it.
"They would have wanted you to make it through tomorrow," he says.
"I know."
"And they would have liked it here."
"I know that too."
"And if it goes bad—"
"It won't."
He almost laughs. The sound is small. It surprises us both.
"That's my line."
"Take it. I'm not going to need it tonight."
He holds me. The wind is at four knots. The mountains are dark.
The compound below us has settled into the kind of waiting silence that families do before something.
I let myself stay against the side of his neck for a long count of breaths.
The unburned skin under my mouth is normal-temperature.
The scarred skin half an inch to the right of my mouth is hotter.
The two of them, side by side, are the whole man.
I sit up.
I wipe my face.
I pick up the thermal camera and I scan the eastern ridge.
Nothing. Still nothing. The thermal feed is flat.
The night is cold and quiet and there's a fire somewhere on the western ridge that is the campfire of a man with a prosthetic hand who is waiting for the wind to shift, and I cannot find his fire because he's smarter than me about hiding fires.
"You should sleep," Ezra says.
"I won't."
"Try."
"Two hours, maybe."
"Two hours is enough."
We walk down the ridge together. He takes my hand. His hand is hot. My hand is cold. The contrast is the same one I've been holding for two days now, the warm-and-cold of us, the proof that I'm here in my body and so is he. I let myself feel it.
We don't sleep in his cabin. We sleep in the workshop on the cot he keeps there for late-night work, with the door locked and the radio on low and the thermal monitors running on the desk where I can see them if I open my eyes.
He pulls a blanket over both of us. He puts his arm around me.
I lay my head on his chest, on the unburned half, with my left hand on his ribs the way I always end up doing now.
His heart beats steadily against my ear. His skin runs warm.
"Two hours," he murmurs.
"Two hours."
I close my eyes.
I'm asleep, somehow, in seconds.
When I open them again, the wind has shifted, and the sky outside the workshop window is the gray of pre-dawn six hours earlier than it should be, and somewhere on the eastern ridge — not the western, the eastern, which means Creed has just played his hand and we have minutes instead of hours and everything is about to be different — I can feel, the way I always feel it, the air starting to taste like tinder.
I sit up.
I shake Ezra awake.
"It's now," I say.
He's awake instantly. The amber eyes open.
"East?"
"East."
"Then I'm going."
We move.
Outside the workshop, the wind is dry and steady and bad in every direction, and the fire is coming.
This time, I'm not running from it.
This time, I'm running toward it.
And so is he.