Page 12 of Honeyfires

The extraction felt like it took hours. I was last up on the hoist, which was the job, the forewoman's particular obligation to the crew she'd led in. I watched the orange reach the spot I'd been standing on approximately fifteen seconds after I left it, watched it with a clarity that only adrenaline produced, everything very bright and somehow also very far away.

My hands shook on the hoist cable.

They always did. That was the part they left out of the recruitment materials.

By the time we got a handle on it, the sun was setting behind a curtain of smoke. Twelve hours. Stevens had taken superheated air that left him coughing hard enough to alarm the medics. Three crew members needed IV fluids. I'd burned through my water supply by noon and spent the afternoon running on stubbornness and the adrenaline cocktail the human body produces when it decides survival is the only priority.

The ride back was quiet.

The shower at Station 19 was nothing special. Just industrial tile, lukewarm water, and soap that smelled like institutional-grade disinfectant. But after twelve hours of breathing smoke and tasting ash and doing the math on whether the person next to me was going to make it home, it felt like the best thing in the world.

I stood under the spray longer than I should have, hands pressed flat against the tile, waiting for the shaking to stop. It always did, eventually. The adrenaline metabolized. The body remembered it was safe, or decided to pretend well enough that it amounted to the same thing.

I told myself this every time. Sometimes it even worked.

This was the part they didn't put in the recruitment video, the crash that came after, when the body tallied everything it had survived and presented the bill. The hollow feeling. The way your hands kept trembling at things that no longer required them to. The way ordinary sensations like soap, lukewarm water, a solid wall to press your palms against suddenly felt like anchors to something real.

I pressed my forehead to the cool tile and thought about Vera. Pictured her in the library, the afternoon light catching the gold in her hair, placing the exact right book in exactly the right hands. She'd be in something floral. She'd be making her coworkers laugh without trying. She'd be completely, serenely unaware that less than sixty miles from where she stood, the ground had been on fire and I had been standing on it.

I thought about coming home to her, smelling of smoke and that quality of fear I never named out loud, and what it would mean to try to explain why my hands shook for hours after.

Whether she'd want to stay for it.

The water went cold. I turned it off.

Nowhere Else Important to Be

Chapter Four

I arrived home late, the moon a thin sliver of itself. My motorcycle helmet hung from one hand as I fumbled in the dark, the key meeting the lock at roughly forty percent accuracy, which was a personal low.

The night smelled of smoke and the whiskey I'd spent the last few hours drinking at a dive bar with half the crew. It was the kind of drinking that was really just a prolonged way of not being alone with your own head. We'd played pool and talked loudly about things that had nothing to do with the fire, which was the only kind of decompression I'd ever really learned.

I wasn't drunk. I was also not entirely sober, which I acknowledged privately and tried to immediately forget.

My keys hit the concrete.

"Damn it." A little too loud for this hour. I braced one hand against the door and waited for the hallway to agree on a single orientation.

"Need some help down there?"

I looked up.

Vera was standing in her doorway in Powerpuff Girls pajama shorts, a thin tank top, and a different pair of cat-eye glasses than she usually wore. Violet frames, slightly askew, coupled with the air of someone who'd been asleep and had not checked a mirror before stepping out. Her hair was up in a loose, messy knot. Her expression was somewhere between amused and assessing, with a small undercurrent of something mysterious beneath it. The door was ajar behind her, warm yellow light spilling out into the hallway around her.

She looked so beautiful it was almost painful.

I briefly forgot that I was a grown adult with combat experience, a decade of crisis training, and a helitack forewoman certification.

"Nice glasses," I managed.

"Nice landing." She nodded at my keys on the floor.

"That was intentional. I was checking the structural integrity of the concrete."

"And?"

"Solid. Very solid. You can sleep soundly."