4. Beck
FOUR
BECK
I was out of the bunk and into my gear before the dispatcher finished.
Muscle memory. Feet in boots, pull up bunkers, suspenders, jacket, helmet, gloves.
Fourteen seconds. I used to race Jake. He always beat me by one second, and I always told him the extra second was going to kill him someday, and the universe has a sick sense of humor because it wasn't a second that killed him. It was a floor.
The engine bay was controlled chaos. Cole had the engine running.
Ty and Sadie climbed on. Lila was beside me in the medic unit, silent for once, her face set in the focused expression I'd started recognizing over the past two weeks.
All the sunshine gone. In its place, something harder and more useful.
Birchwood Lane was a residential street on the north side of town.
The house was a two-story colonial, white clapboard, black shutters, the kind of house that belonged on a Christmas card.
Except the second-floor windows were glowing orange from the inside, and smoke was pushing through the eaves in thick, dark rolls that told me this fire had been burning longer than anyone knew.
The homeowner met us on the lawn. A man in boxers and a T-shirt, barefoot, his face carved with panic. "My daughter, Mia, she's upstairs. Her bedroom's on the left, second floor. I couldn't... the smoke, I couldn't get up the stairs."
"How old?" I was already on the radio, calling command assignments.
"Seven. She's seven."
Ty and I went in. The first floor was thick with smoke but navigable.
The fire was concentrated upstairs, feeding on something in the master bedroom.
I could feel it through the ceiling, the heat pressing down like a hand.
We took the stairs fast, staying low, and the second floor was a different world.
Visibility near zero, temperature climbing, the sound of fire eating wood behind the closed master bedroom door.
The girl's room was on the left. I hit the door, found it warm but not hot. Good sign. Ty forced it and we went in.
She was under the bed.
Of course she was. They always go under the bed. Seven years old and terrified and doing the thing every kid thinks will protect them, tucking themselves into the smallest space they can find while the world outside goes wrong.
"Mia? Mia, my name is Beck. I'm a firefighter. I'm going to get you out of here."
A whimper. Two eyes reflecting the beam of my flashlight from under the bed frame. She'd pulled her blanket with her, pink, covered in horses.
"Ty, get the window. I need ventilation."
Ty moved to the window, broke it out. Cool air rushed in, but with it the fire got angrier. I heard the master bedroom door crack behind us, the growl of oxygen meeting heat.
"Mia, I need you to crawl to me. Can you do that? I'm right here."
"I'm scared." Her voice was a thread.
The radio crackled on my chest. "Medic 7 to interior team, is the patient accessible? I have medical standing by." Lila's voice, and it was the calm kind, the kind she'd used on Debra Hoffman in the SUV, the voice that sounded like a hand outstretched in the dark.
I keyed the radio. "Affirmative. Conscious, alert, minor smoke exposure. We're coming out."
But Mia wasn't moving. The fire was getting louder, a sound people don't expect, the way a house fire roars like a living thing, like something breathing and hungry. I could feel the heat on my neck through my hood.
"Mia." I kept my voice even. Lowered myself to the floor so she could see my face through the SCBA mask.
"I know you're scared. That's okay. Being scared means you're paying attention.
But I need you to be brave for about thirty seconds.
That's all. Thirty seconds, and then you're going to see your dad. "
She looked at me. Sniffled. Then she crawled out, clutching the horse blanket, and I scooped her up against my chest and we moved.
Down the stairs. Ty ahead of me, clearing the path. The front door. Then outside, into air that tasted like the sweetest thing I'd ever breathed, and the father was there, reaching, and Mia was crying and he was crying and I transferred her into his arms and stepped back.
Lila was there. She intercepted with the calm efficiency I'd grudgingly gotten used to, guiding Mia to the ambulance, checking oxygen saturation, auscultating lungs, talking to the girl in that voice, the one that made even a seven-year-old in shock stop crying long enough to take a deep breath.
"Hey, Mia. Can I listen to your lungs? I'm going to put this on your finger, it's like a little nightlight, see? And this mask is going to give you some really good air. Better than regular air. Fancy air."
Mia almost smiled. Through smoke-streaked tears and a blanket covered in horses, she almost smiled.
Something loosened in my chest. Not the grief, I knew that one intimately, the sharp, specific pain of loss.
This was different. This was the feeling of something thawing.
Watching Lila work, her hands steady, her voice warm, her entire being oriented toward making a frightened child feel safe, I felt something I hadn't felt in two years.
The terrifying, unwanted, undeniable recognition that I was standing next to someone extraordinary, and that every day I spent pretending she was just a competent colleague was a lie my body no longer believed.
I pulled off my helmet. Wiped my face. The adrenaline was still there, a chemical tide that wouldn't recede for hours, but underneath it something else was moving, the thing I always felt after a save.
Relief, yes. But also the echo of every time it hadn't gone this way.
The what-if that lived in the gap between the seconds.
My hands were shaking. Not from cold, not from exertion, from the other thing.
The thing that happened after every call involving a kid, when the adrenaline receded and left behind the sediment of every scenario that could have gone differently.
If the fire had been faster. If the stairs had given way.
If Mia had been in the room next to the master bedroom instead of across the hall, and the heat had gotten to her before we did.
The what-ifs were a maze I could get lost in for hours, and the only exit was the work.
Clean the gear, restock the rig, write the report.
Keep the hands moving so the mind couldn't wander.
The house was a loss. The crew worked the fire for another two hours, knocking it down, protecting exposures, doing the patient, methodical work of ensuring it didn't spread.
The family would need somewhere to stay.
The Red Cross chapter in Asheville would help.
The neighbors were already offering spare rooms.
Back at the station, the clock read 5:15 AM.
The sky was going gray-pink over the mountains.
Everyone was wired and wrung out in that particular post-call way, too tired to sleep, too buzzed to sit still.
Ty was in the kitchen making eggs. Sadie had her boots off and her feet on the coffee table, staring at the ceiling.
Cole was already on the phone with his ex, checking on Lily, the way he always did after a bad call.
I was in the bay. Cleaning gear. The methodical work of it, hose, scrub, rinse, dry, was the closest thing I had to meditation. The smell of smoke was in my hair, my skin. It would be there for days.
Lila came through the bay door. She'd changed out of her soiled uniform into a station T-shirt and joggers, her braid half undone, loose strands of auburn sticking to her neck. She was carrying two mugs.
"Coffee," she said, and set one on the bumper of the medic unit near me.
I looked at it. Then at her. "Thanks."
She leaned against the rig and sipped from her own mug. For a moment, neither of us spoke. The bay was quiet except for the drip of water from the hose I'd been using and the distant clatter of Ty's eggs.
"She was brave," Lila said. "Mia."
"She was scared."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive." She paused. "You were good with her. The way you talked her out, that wasn't standard protocol. That was instinct."
I didn't know what to do with the compliment, so I wrung out the rag I was holding and draped it over the mirror to dry. My hands wanted to keep moving. If they stopped, they might shake.
"You were good too," I said, and the words came out before I could stop them. Quiet. Almost grudging. But true.
Lila's eyebrows went up. Not dramatically, just a small lift, a flicker of surprise she didn't try to hide. "Was that a compliment, Lieutenant?"
"It was an observation."
"I'm going to take it as a compliment."
"Take it however you want."
A ghost of a smile. She drank her coffee.
I drank mine. The silence between us was different than it had been, not the absence of words but the space where words weren't needed.
The bay smelled like wet concrete, diesel, and the lingering ghost of smoke, and the coffee was too hot and too strong, and Lila Webber was standing four feet away from me with her hair half down and her feet bare on the cold floor, and I. ..
I almost said something real. I could feel it pressing against the inside of my teeth, something about Jake, about the warehouse, about what it felt like to hear child trapped on the radio and have two years of nightmares crash into the present tense.
The words were right there. In my mouth, on the edge of my tongue, pressing against the back of my teeth like something alive.
I wanted to tell her about the warehouse on Birch Street.
About the sound a floor makes when it's about to give way, not a crack but a groan, low and almost organic, like the building is exhaling its last breath.
About how I'd turned and Jake was behind me and then Jake wasn't behind me, and there was a hole where he'd been, and the sound of falling debris, and then nothing.
Just the fire, still burning, indifferent to what it had taken.
Instead I finished my coffee, set the mug down, and said, "The rig needs restocking before shift change."
The almost-something in the air dissolved. Lila nodded, set her mug beside mine, and went to the supply closet.
I stood there for a moment. The two empty mugs sat side by side on the bumper, hers with a faint lip print of tinted balm, mine plain.
Something was shifting. I could feel it the way you feel the weather change before the clouds move, a barometric drop, a charge in the air. I didn't want it. I wasn't ready for it. But the ground was moving under me regardless.
I picked up both mugs and took them to the kitchen. Washed them. Dried them. Put them away in the cabinet. And tried not to think about the freckle I'd noticed below her left ear, or the way her voice sounded when she said fancy air to a scared kid under a blanket of horses.
I failed at the not-thinking. I failed at it for the rest of the shift, and the one after that, and the one after that.
But nobody needed to know that.