Page 149 of The Fire Line

The Forest Service road was only a few miles beyond the ridge. If it remained open, they would be descending before dark. There was no reason to load the horses for a longer trip, and no useful way to prepare for every route closing around them. Harris’s reasoning had no room for what happened if the road was gone because there was nothing they could do with that possibility except ride toward it.

He handed Jay a flashlight. “Pocket.”

Jay put it away and checked his phone. No service. His final message to Priya remained unsent beneath the warning symbol.

Road blocked. Going east. We’re okay.

Jay stared at the warning symbol. “Romy is going to murder me when she hears about this.”

Harris looked over. “She the one who hates my windows?”

Jay looked at him. “You remember that?”

“She the one?”

“Romy has interests beyond destroying other people’s satisfaction with their homes.”

“Wouldn’t know it.”

Jay almost smiled. For half a second, the exchange felt almost ordinary.

But they were here. They were not okay. They were still capable of doing something, which was not the same condition at all.

Jay reached automatically for the smallest camera: four pounds, weather-sealed, enough battery for two hours. The ranch under smoke. Harris riding away from everything he knew without knowing what would remain when he returned. There might never be footage like it again.

Harris looked at the camera and then at him. “You serious?”

“It weighs four pounds.”

“So does more water.”

“We don’t have more water.”

“Then it weighs more than nothing.”

Jay stood there, offended by the fact that this remained an objectively excellent point. “This is upsetting on several levels.”

“Navarro.”

“Fine.”

He placed the camera on the truck seat. For once, leaving it behind was not an ethical decision. There was nobody present to exploit and no crew member whose safety had to come before the shot. This was survival measured in weight, balance, speed, and the use of both hands. The camera was not useful, and usefulness was the only standard left.

By the time they mounted, smoke had begun erasing the ranch. The lodge and barns were dull shapes beneath a stained sky, and the truck and trailer stood abandoned beside the barn because the roads no longer permitted their use.

Harris sat on Rain without moving. His attention traveled across the yard: the house beyond the lodge, the barns, his cabin behind the cottonwoods, Nell’s handwriting still inside an office, four generations of work distributed across roofs and fences nobody could defend now. Jay could not know exactly what Harris saw, but the hand holding the reins had tightened.

He did not ask Harris to explain the look. There was no answer that would improve the next few minutes.

Finally, Harris turned Rain toward the north trail. “You ready?”

Jay adjusted his grip on Red’s reins and looked at the ridge rising through the smoke. “No.”

Harris glanced back.

Jay drew one breath as deeply as the air allowed. “Go.”

They rode north.