Page 10 of Honeyfires

"Your flames match your jacket," she said, nodding at the bike.

I looked. The painted flames on the tank. The red embroidery on my jacket. "Miller is going to be so insufferable when I tell him that."

"Tell him I said he has an eye for it."

"Absolutely not. He'll embroider your name on something."

She considered this. "I could think of worse things." The moonlight caught the edge of her smile, the way it caught the gold in her hair, making luminous everything it touched. "Goodnight, Petra."

"Goodnight, Vera."

She turned toward Daisy. Turned back, once, the way she had in the hallway. I was starting to suspect she knew exactly what she was doing when she did that.

"One more question," she said.

"Yeah?"

"The duct tape boot. Did you wear it on purpose tonight, or did you forget?"

I looked down. Silver duct tape, gleaming faithfully in the moonlight, performing its duty without complaint or recognition.

"I forgot," I admitted.

She nodded gravely. "I figured." She opened Daisy's door. "It was very chaotic sincere of you."

I watched her drive away, Daisy's taillights rounding the corner and vanishing into the dark, and stood in the empty parking lot for a long time after. The desert spread out around San Jacinto in every direction, vast and indifferent and utterly unchanged by the night I'd just had, the way it had always been, the way it always would be, long after everything else changed.

But something had shifted in the middle of it. Something small and warm and completely unprecedented, like a single lit match in a cavernous, dark room.

I looked down at my boot.

Chaotic sincere.

I was absolutely, completely screwed.

And for the first time in my adult life, the thought felt a lot like something I'd started thinking I wouldn't feel again when I'd come home from war eight years ago.

It felt like relief.

One Thing at a Time: Fire, Then Feelings

Chapter Three

The alarm roared through Station 19 at four-thirty in the morning, jolting me awake from dreams of sunlit libraries and golden hair almost instantly. I rolled out of my bunk, muscle memory taking over as I pulled on my gear in the dark. Around me, the rest of the crew was doing the same, a choreographed dance we'd performed hundreds of times.

"What do we got, Cap?" I called out, lacing my boots.

Captain Rodriguez's voice cut through the pre-dawn chaos. "Lightning strike, Painted Rock area. Winds picking up from the southwest. Could be a runner."

My stomach dropped. Painted Rock was fifteen miles of rough terrain, all dried chaparral and steep canyon walls. If a fire got going there with wind behind it, it could eat through thousands of acres before we could get a line around it.

"We going in by air?" I asked, grabbing my pack.

"On standby. Engines first, see what we're dealing with. If the terrain shuts them down, I'm calling the bird and you're taking your crew in."

I nodded and ran my gear check: harness, carabiners, descent device, gloves, rope bag, Pulaski, radio, first aid kit, emergency shelter. The automatic inventory of someone who'd learned a long time ago that rushing the list was how people died.

I climbed into the passenger seat of Engine 19, my mind already on insertion points and anchor systems and the way canyon fires behaved differently from ridge fires—the way they breathed with the terrain, drew air up the walls, turned on you without a word of warning.