Page 128 of Honeyfires

I shook her hand. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet." But there was something in her expression that wasn't quite a smile and wasn't quite not one. "Get some sleep. Eat something. You're going to need to be sharp."

Vera shook her hand too, and Diana held it for a moment. "She's lucky to have you here," she said quietly.

"Other way around," Vera corrected.

We took the elevator down in silence, walked to Daisy in the parking structure, and sat for a moment without starting the engine. Phoenix hummed around us, indifferent and enormous.

"Well," Vera said.

"Well," I said.

"She's good."

"She's terrifying."

"Those are compatible." She started the car. "She said you made the right call."

"She said the evidence supports that I made the right call."

"Petra."

"I heard her."

Vera pulled out of the parking structure, into the white Phoenix noon. "How do you feel?"

I thought about it honestly. "Like there's a process now. Like it's not just me waiting in our apartment watching it happen to me." I looked out the window at the city going past. "Like someone who knows the system is on our side."

"That's enough for today," Vera said.

"Yeah," I said. "It is."

She reached across the console and found my hand, and I held on, and we drove back toward San Jacinto with the desert spreading out flat and gold and enormous around us, the way it always had, patient and indifferent, long before the fire and long after.

Rogue

Chapter Twenty-Four

I woke up one morning to find my face on CNN.

Not local news anymore. Not just the Arizona stations that had been running the story on loop for a week. National news. My worst day, my most controversial decision, my face with its intimidating angles and visible tattoos—all of it broadcast to millions of people over their morning coffee.

Vera was already awake, sitting at the kitchen table with her laptop open and her expression carefully blank. The kind of blank that meant she was working very hard not to show what she was feeling. When she saw me standing in the doorway, she closed the laptop quickly, but not quickly enough.

"Don't," I said quietly, moving toward her. "Don't hide it from me."

"Diana said not to read—"

"I don't care what Diana said. Let me see, please."

She hesitated, then reopened it. The CNN homepage filled the screen, and there I was, right below a story about congressional budget negotiations and above a piece on the latest celebrity scandal.

"Rogue Firefighter Disobeys Orders, Six Homes Destroyed"

The headline hit like a gut punch. Rogue. Not "embattled" or "controversial" or even "suspended." Rogue. Like I was some kind of vigilante, some loose cannon who'd gone off script and burned the world down for fun.

"It's a slow news week nationally," Vera said, her voice tight. "They needed something to fill airtime."