“He was hiding,” I said. “He was scared of all the people?—”
“He goes to the closet,” she said. “The narrow one beside the bed. Every time there are people he doesn’t know. Eleven years.” She looked at the door. At the fire. At me. “He goes to the closet.”
I knew that. I had seen it. I had been in that Airstream enough times to know exactly where Gerald went when the world became too much.
“Go to the road,” I said. “Go with everyone. I’ll get him.”
“Becca—”
“Go, Aggie! Now! Don’t make me worry about you, too.”
The look on my face made it clear I was going in. She didn’t argue.
“Becca! Oh god!”
I heard Aggie shout my name. I heard the sharp edge of her voice as I put my shoulder to the door and went in.
My eyes stung immediately. The smoke was still thin enough to see through, but it had a weight to it, a presence, sitting in my chest with the first breath in a way that made something primal in me want to turn around. I didn’t turn around. I dropped low and crawled toward the bedroom, pulse loud in my ears, the floor warm under my palms in a way that floors shouldn’t be.
The heat found me before the flames did—skin-tightening, airless, the kind that pulls the moisture right out of your mouth. The trailer had caught. Flames came through the open window and licked up the far wall, catching the curtains, moving with a speed that didn’t seem real, racing along the thin paneling, feeding on the dry interior like it had been waiting for exactly this. Like the whole summer had been building toward this one moment in this one trailer.
My throat tightened. Not just from the smoke.
Gerald. Closet. Go.
The closet door was cracked open. I yanked it wide.
Gerald was curled in the narrow space, eyes wide with terror, fur standing on end, body rigid and trembling. The sight of him—so small, so frightened, so completely certain that the closet would save him—did something to my chest that the smoke hadn’t managed yet.
I reached in and scooped him up in both arms, tucked him tight against me. He hissed once, claws digging hard into my hoodie, piercing through to skin, but he didn’t fight me. I held him secure, one hand cradling his head, the other under his bottom, and I turned back toward the front of the trailer.
It was worse. The smoke had thickened in the time it had taken me to find him, pouring under the doorframe in rolling black waves. Flames had reached the kitchenette, leaping across the small counter, heat flashing in pulses that I felt on myface, my arms, the back of my hands. Something popped—glass shattering somewhere to my left—and I flinched hard, heart lurching into my throat, and made myself keep moving.
Don’t stop. Don’t stop. Don’t stop.
Gerald’s heart was hammering against my ribs, fast and frantic, his whole body vibrating with it, and I focused on that—on the small desperate presence of him pressed against me—and kept my legs moving. The roar was louder than I’d expected. Fire wasn’t quiet. I hadn’t known that.
The front door was a rectangle of orange-black smoke. My lungs were burning now, a deep raw ache that was going to be worse tomorrow, and I had one clear thought—Aggie, she’s waiting, get out—and shoved forward with everything I had, pushed through the doorway just as the fire surged behind me, a wall of heat at my back like a hand between my shoulder blades, pushing me out into the cold dark air and the sound of voices and the smell of grass and river and smoke and someone shouting my name.
Chapter 33
Levi
The tones dropped at nine forty-seven.
I was in the common room finishing a cup of coffee that had gone cold twenty minutes earlier, half listening to Jude explain to the third-shift probie why you never, under any circumstances, touched the good mugs on the second shelf, when the alert cut through everything.
Riverside Pines Campground. Structure fire. Active involvement. Occupants reported.
The address slammed into me like a fist to the sternum. I didn’t remember crossing the bay floor. I remembered gear—the cold snap of turnout pants, the familiar weight of the jacket settling onto my shoulders, boots already laced because I laced them at the start of every shift and never unlaced them until it was over, helmet, gloves, the practiced sequence that lived in muscle memory rather than thought. I ran it while some part of my brain was doing math I did not want to do. Nine forty-seven. The meeting had started at nine. She was there. She was in that Airstream with the whole campground around her, which meant she was at that address, which meant?—
“Levi.”
Jude was at the truck beside me, not looking at me, checking connections with the focused efficiency of a man who understood that the seconds before a call were not the time for anything except readiness.
I got on the truck.
Four minutes and twelve seconds.
