Page 45 of Honeyfires

"Accurate things." He looked at her steadily for a moment, then nodded once. "Sit. Eat."

"And then can we visit the helicopter?" Vera asked.

Rodriguez looked at me. I shrugged. He looked back at Vera, and managed a smile with significant warmth underneath it. "And then you can visit the helicopter."

We settled around the long common room table, the scarred, utilitarian kind that had hosted a thousand shift meals. Vera passed out sandwiches like she organized things for a living, because she did, and then she unwrapped her own and looked around the table.

"Walk me through it," she said. "When a call comes in. What actually happens, in sequence."

"Alarm." Jackson pointed up. "Dispatch gives us location, acreage, conditions. We're geared up and rolling within five minutes for engine response, eight to ten if we're taking the bird."

"Because the helicopter takes longer to spin up?"

"Pre-flight checks. Rotor engagement. You can't rush it." I took a bite of my sandwich. "Our pilot, Gomez, runs through a twenty-point checklist every single time. No exceptions."

"What does the checklist cover?"

Stevens brightened. Stevens loved explaining things. This was because Stevens had recently learned things, and the interval between learning something and wanting to explain it to someone was approximately four seconds. He picked up his sub and began gesturing with it. "Engine temps, rotor RPM, hydraulics, flight controls, fuel load, cargo weight and balance. You have to balance a helicopter before you fly it—weight distribution affects everything. Radio checks, rappel system inspection—"

"The rappel system," Vera said. "Tell me about that."

This was the moment. The moment where civilian partners either went pale, went quiet, or spent the rest of the relationship quietly catastrophizing every departure. I watched her face. She was doing none of those things. She had the complete, unhurried attention she gave everything she'd decided to learn.

"The helicopter hovers. We clip in using our harnesses. Class III, full body, carabiners rated for way over body weight. Figure-eight descender controls descent rate. Rope goes down first, we go down the rope."

"One at a time?"

"One at a time. Forewoman goes first." Stevens looked at me. "She goes first."

Vera looked at me. Something moved behind her eyes and settled.

"I assess conditions on the ground before the rest of my people come down," I said.

"And if conditions are bad?"

"I radio up and we abort." I held her gaze. "It's happened. We don't press past safe."

She nodded slowly. Processing it. Not performing calm—actually finding it, which was a harder thing to do. Under the table, her knee found mine. She nudged against me and left it there, warm and steady, like she was holding something in place.

"Who does the rope inspection?" she asked.

"Crew boss. Me."

"So you inspect the ropes that your people rappel on."

"Every time."

She looked at me. Something crossed in her expression that I recognized. It was the same look she gave the crew chief's seat. Comprehension. The expression of someone who has understood the full weight of a thing and is deciding how to carry it.

"Okay," she said. Then she picked up her sandwich and took a bite and said, "What does the spike kit have in it?" and the table just moved with her.

She asked good questions. All of them good. Not the ones civilians usually asked, which were generally some variation of how hot does it get and have you ever almost died. Vera asked about weight distribution and inspection schedules and decision-making under incomplete information.

"Tell me what it feels like," she said, after a while. "Not the technical part. What it actually feels like."

The table went quiet in the firefighter way. Jackson spoke first. "Like driving into bad weather. You can see the edge of it—clean world on one side, and the other side is completely different."

"Like a door," Stevens said. "You choose to go through it."