Page 1 of Into the Fire

Chapter one

Boone

Shep stepped out of the tower with his eyes on the horizon. Then he looked down.

“Eyes up,” I said.

The harness caught him and the cable sang. He swung out over the sawdust pit thirty feet up, turning slowly, looking at me instead of the timbered ridge beyond the base.

“I counted.”

“You counted to two.”

“I counted to four fast.”

He’d looked down on his last jump. A man who looks down at the door lands wrong, and a man who lands wrong in timber breaks something. I wasn’t sending him out again until he stopped. I ran him down the cable to the platform. He hit and rolled, and his right arm came out to catch himself.

“Keep the arm in.”

Shep got up grinning and pushed sun-bleached hair out of his eyes. Twenty-five, third season, and nothing had ever gone wrong for him badly enough to dampen the smile. He trusted me.

“What did you eat?”

“I ate.”

“Ate what, Shep?”

“A bar. Two bars.”

“Go eat something with a plate under it.”

He left. Hollis watched him go from the bench, with a Pulaski across his knees. It was an axe on one side of the head and a hoe on the other. He was re-taping a handle he’d taped last week.

Hollis was thirty-nine, eleven seasons behind him, thick through the chest and going gray at the temples. In three years at Silvertip, he had never once asked me why I did anything. He always assumed I had a reason.

“He’s going to eat a third bar and tell you it was eggs,” he said.

“I know.”

Six in the morning, a Monday in August, and the base was waking around us. The Otter, our jump plane, sat on the ramp with its nose into the wind. Overnight cool still held in the shade beside the buildings. It wouldn’t last.

Dante Vega was due at ten. I’d signed the paperwork three weeks ago, in about four seconds, because I didn’t want to take the time to think about it.

Shep came back with toast in his hand and climbed the tower. I followed him up. From the top, I could see the base road dropping away toward the valley and a layer of fog sitting low against the mountains west of us.

I checked his rig before he got in the door: leg straps, chest strap, and the cable attachment. He glanced at the sun coming over the ridge east of the base, and I checked the cable attachment again.

“That’s twice,” he said. “Nash checked it last night. You checked it. Now you’ve checked it twice.”

“Then it’s fully checked.”

Shep laughed and thought that was the funniest thing he’d heard all week. Down on the bench, Hollis didn’t look up.

Shep stepped out. He counted to four and kept his eyes on the ridgeline.

“Good,” I said.

I left him with Hollis for another round and cut across the gravel to the loft.