By full dark, the four of us are collapsed on the couch back in the cottage, surrounded by dirty dishes and with nobody willing to be the first one to get up.
Bram’s got his laptop open on the arm of the couch, doing the books or the camera feeds or both. Ash is half asleep against my side. Reed’s on the floor with his back against my shins, working the remote. The fire we lit ticks and pops in the corner.
I’m warm in a way that goes all the way down. I could stay right here, in this exact arrangement of limbs and firelight, for the rest of my natural life.
BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.
Bram’s laptop chimes with the ping of my camera program. Our heads come up and Bram tips the screen toward us. A little red box is blinking in the corner of a grid of gray camera squares.
“Motion,” he says, and taps it. The grid shrinks to one feed. “Barn cam.”
We all lean in. It doesn’t help. The barn sits there on the screen, dark, the cold storage a darker block beside it. Nothing I can see is moving.
“Deer,” Ash says, not opening his eyes. “It’s always a deer. Or Reed’s raccoon.”
“That raccoon has a name and a heart of gold.” Reed’s already sitting up, though, reaching for the laptop. “Pull the clip from when it pinged. Let’s see what set it off.”
Bram scrolls back for the recording. I get up to refill my water while they squint at gray footage. The window over the sink looks straight across the yard at the barn, so I glance out as I run the tap and—
“Holy shit, guys—”
47
Reed
The barn’s on fire.
Behind me, Ash and Bram are already at the door, and the bond lights up with three other people’s fear all at once. I have to wall it off just to keep my own head.
“Nobody runs in there,” I shout. “Hear me? Nobody runs in there. Luna. Call nine-one-one. Tell them structure fire, cider barn, possible accelerant, then the address. Don’t forget ‘accelerant’, it makes them come faster. Don’t hang up until they tell you to.”
Then I’m out the door and across the yard, and the heat finds my face before I’m halfway. The sound is the part nobody warns you about. A low freight-train breathing, the fire dragging air in through a door that’s standing open.
Bram and Ash are half a step behind me, and I look back at them.
Did one of them leave a door open?
Later for that. Move.
The main disconnect is in a gray box on the barn’s south wall. I pull down the lever and the yard lights die. Good. Now, whenwater goes on this thing, it won’t risk dropping us all where we stand.
Ash is going for the closed door next to me, his hand almost on the handle.
“ASH.” I sprint and manage to reach him. I grab him by the waist and take us both two steps back. “I said nobody runs in there! You open that, you die. Feel it.” I press his own palm to the wood for half a second and rip it off again. “It’s breathing. Give it air from the wrong side and it comes out the door to meet you. The cider is not worth your life. Look at me. It’s not.”
Something in his face goes loose, something I have never once seen on Ash. “But the deadline,” he says. His eyes are bright and wet. “Reed.”
“I know, man.” I get my forehead against his, my hand behind his head, and my own eyes are stinging too. Bram closes in and puts a hand on each of our backs. “I know.”
I give it one second, letting myself feel the loss, the fear... Then I breathe out and put it down, getting my head back in the moment.
Because here’s the math: the fire seems to be in the center bay, and it wants to travel. Two ways it can go. East, into the old timber and the press and a hundred years of my family nailed up on a wall. West, ten feet of open air and then the cold storage, where eight hundred and forty bottles of the only thing standing between us and bankruptcy are sitting in the dark.
I can’t save the line. The line’s already a memory. But might be able to keep the fire from eating everything else.
The barn’s got a hose bib and fifty feet of garden hose, which isn’t much but... “Bram. Cold storage, west wall, anything on it that’ll catch, get it off.” He moves. I drag the hose to the gap between the buildings and put water on the cold-storage wall, on the dirt, on the heat already shivering across those ten feet toward two million dollars of contract.
Keep it wet. Keep it wet. Buy the minutes.
