Page 7 of Into the Fire

“That explains a lot,” Hollis said.

Nothing burned, and nobody jumped. I’d spent the afternoon finding out how badly I wanted to.

Marty stepped up to me and handed me a plotted map. “Here.”

It was a single sheet, showing our district and the next. A scatter of red dots crowded the far side of our boundary, as if they’d been told to stay off our lawn. “Twenty-eight strikes,” he said. “Zero fires. Something up there’s cooked, but we dodged it this time.”

“You marked the timing.”

“I always mark it.” He pushed his glasses up to his forehead. “You remember the Dry Gulch bust? Total mobilization. You’d have been—what, second season?”

“First. Sixty strikes in a single afternoon.”

“Sixty-one,” he tapped the map. “More than twice as many as today. I still have it. I keep all of them, which nobody appreciates until they need one.”

Before turning back to Operations, Marty clapped me on the shoulder. “It’s good you’re back,” he said. “Place got quiet.”

I folded the map and slipped it into my pocket.

Dinner was chili because it was Monday.

“I’ve surfed,” Shep was saying when I sat down.

Ramirez looked across the table at him. “You stood on a surfboard.”

“In Huntington Beach.”

“For four seconds.”

“Four seconds in the Pacific Ocean,” Shep said. “That’s surfing.”

“You fell off before the wave got there.”

Shep pointed his spoon at him. “There was definitely a wave.”

“I was on the beach watching you.”

“Then you saw it.”

The room had a hole in it. Dutch used to sit at the end of the table nearest the kitchen. Hollis was sitting there now.

I’d been on the base nearly all day, and no one had said his name out loud. Shep had gotten close, but he stopped.

When I finished my chili, I walked out into the fading light. Across the yard, a window glowed. It was Boone’s office.

I was trying to decide whether to walk over to the building when Boone opened the door, carrying a thermos in one hand. He saw me. We met in the middle of the gravel drive.

“Vega.”

“You’re working late.”

“It’s the job,” he said. “You settling in?”

“Most hasn’t changed. The locker still has the dent.”

“Fellhauer,” he said.

“Are you going to watch me carry forty-five pounds up a hill, Hatcher?”