Page 103 of Until We Come Home

“I’m right here,” I shout back, pressing my weight harder against his side so he knows he’s not alone.

The heat peaks. The orange glow in the foil turns blinding. My hands burn inside my leather gloves where I’m pinning the edges down, but I don’t loosen my grip for a fraction of a second. For one strange, quiet moment inside the noise, my head goes still. I picture Mia on the porch in the morning light, a blanket over her legs, asking me if I’m a hundred percent sure about us.

I gave her my word I’d come back.

And then, the way brush fires do, the front burns through its fuel and passes. The roar recedes up the slope, rolling away over the ridge like distant thunder. The glow above my face fades, then dies back to shadow. The heat eases. The shelter stops fighting my grip.

I wait. Ten seconds. Thirty seconds. Then I lift the front edge of the foil an inch and look out.

The landscape is charred black. The brush that stood ten feet tall a few minutes ago is gone, burnt down to smoking nubs and a sea of red embers. The trees edging the pad stand like torches in the dark. The steel wall of the tank is scorched black on the windward side. Everything that could burn has burned, and the fire is already moving off up the mountain looking for fresh fuel.

We’re in the black.

“Ollie,” I say, pushing the foil off and crawling to him, the rock hot through my pants. “It’s over. Come on out.”

I peel his shelter back. He’s still face-down in the gravel exactly the way I set him, covered in soot, his goggles cracked across one lens. He rolls onto his side and looks up at me, then out at the smoking wasteland, then back at me.

I key my radio, my voice rough and dry from the smoke. “Strike Team 7, Navarro. The front has passed over our position. Both firefighters are clear of their shelters at the water tank. One injury, possible broken ankle. We need transport.”

The channel is silent for a second. Then Barnes comes back.

“Copy, Navarro,” he says, breathing hard into the mic. “Copy that. Thank fucking God. Rebecca’s coming up the track right now. Stay put.”

It takes them fifteen minutes to reach us. I spend every second of it in the hot gravel beside Ollie with his leg across my lap, splinting his ankle with a strip of foil and a charred piece of wood, making him take slow sips from my canteen, keeping him talking about Lainey and the station and anything else that keeps his mind off the pain.

Then headlights break through the haze at the far side of the pad, and Engine 7 crawls up the access track, lights flashing through the smoke. Rebecca is out of the cab before the rig stops, Callum and James right behind her.

“Navarro,” Rebecca rasps, dropping to her knees in front of me and grabbing my face in both gloved hands, turning my head into her headlamp beam. “You absolute, stubborn idiot. Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine,” I tell her, and I mostly mean it. “Ollie’s got a broken ankle. Stump hole on the run up.”

“Jesus Christ, that got bad fast,” she says, sitting back on her heels. “I couldn’t believe it when the wind shifted. Never seen anything like it.”

“Yeah, well, guess my luck held, right?” I say, smiling up at her.

She laughs, a shaky, worn-out sound, and squeezes my arm hard before turning to Ollie. “Kid, how are you holding up?”

He gives her a pained grimace and a wobbly thumbs-up from the gravel, and she laughs again, patting his shoulder.

James and Callum drop down beside us, James kneeling to look at Ollie’s leg while Callum jogs back to the rig for the medical bag. Before he gets to work, James gives me a long look, and I nod back. After the tree came down across the road this summer, we both know exactly how close this one was, and neither of us needs to say it.

Callum hands over the bag, and James frowns down at Ollie’s ankle, digging out a proper splint.

“Who did this splint?” he asks, glancing up at me with half a grin. “Is this a fence board?”

“It’s what I had,” I say, laughing now.

“It’s beautiful, man,” James says as he starts cutting it free. “Truly. A work of art.”

Callum stands there a while, staring at the blackened tank, the burnt-out slope, the two crumpled shelters lying in the rock, and then he looks down at me.

“You know,” he says, “when Barnes said to keep an eye on the kid, I don’t think he meant drag him through a literal firestorm. I mean, come on, Navarro. Even for you, that’s a lot.”

“He didn’t explicitly rule it out, though. And you know how I like to dodge the rules,” I answer.

Callum laughs, then reaches down, grabs the back of my neck, and pulls my head against his shoulder for a hard second before stepping back and clearing his throat.

They load Ollie onto a backboard, James and Callum carrying him up into the crew cab while he winces and curses at every bump. I climb up after them, and Rebecca eases the rig back down the track through the smoldering landscape.