And then, after what feels like an eternity, sirens. I have never in my life been this glad to hear the thing I’m usually the one turning on.
They pour out fast, no wasted motion. Hollis is already stripping the line off the truck, and Dale’s at the pump panel bringing the water up from the truck.
“It started in the bottling line, center bay,” I tell him. “Somebody used accelerant. The south door’s been propped open, so it’s getting air, watch which way it pulls. East end’s where it wants to run. West is the cold storage, ten feet off, I’ve been keeping the wall wet.”
He looks at me a half-second longer than the words need. “Good size-up. Gear’s on the truck. Get dressed, you’re with me.”
After that it’s all heat and weight and the hiss of the line, Hollis’ fist steering me by the collar, my whole body running the drill it spent years learning.
By the time the sky starts thinking about rain, it’s over. And I walk what’s left of the barn with a flashlight.
East end first. The press sits in its corner, gone black with soot. A hundred and some years and it might wipe clean. The photographs by the door are curled at the corners, the glass crazed on a couple, but, miraculously, all of them still there.
I put my hand flat on the workbench Dad built. It’s warm but not burned.
Then I make myself turn and look at the middle.
The bottling line is gone. The steel’s slumped, the belts are a black puddle, the control box is a hole in the air. Slag. The thing we needed to fill the last hundred and sixty bottles is a stain on the slab.
Bram’s crouched at the south door with his phone out, taking pictures. I come stand over him. A red plastic gas can lies on itsside just inside the door, which is propped wide with a cinder block.
“Don’t touch it,” he says.
“I know what it is,” I say, clenching my teeth.
“I know you know.” He stands, and his jaw’s doing the thing. “I have to call this in as what it is now. Arson.” He pauses. “Pretty sure we already know who did it.”
Derek.
I clench my fists.
***
Hollis finds me by the fire truck engine. He grips the back of my neck, and for a second neither of us says anything.
“What the hell are we gonna do about the deadline,” I say, my voice trembling.
“I don’t know, brother.” His hand tightens. “But me and the boys’ll be here for you, you hear? Whatever it takes. In the meantime you’re getting those lungs checked tonight, and that one’s not a suggestion.”
“Yeah.” My throat’s raw from more than smoke. “Appreciate it, man. I mean it.”
He thumps my shoulder once and lets go.
Then the engine rolls out, and the boys go the way they came, until there’s nobody left at all but my brothers, Luna—standing small at the edge of the gravel with her arms wrapped tight around herself, staring at the smoking skeleton of the building—and a wet, black barn.
I desperately want to say something, to crack a joke just to bring my pack’s shoulders down.
But nothing comes.
“The bottles are fine,” I say instead. Flat. “They’re in the cold storage. The wall never got warm enough to touch them, I checked. The product’s good.”
Bram looks up.
“But we can’t bottle the last hundred and sixty without a line,” I keep going. “And you don’t buy and install a new one in the days we’ve got left, not with the time those bottles still need for fermentation before they ship. So as of right now the Holt contract is a hundred and sixty bottles short of two million dollars.”
Ash makes a sound. I look over.
He’s down on the cinder block by the door, elbows on his knees, head hanging, both hands laced over the back of his neck, his shoulders going.
