Page 11

“Swallow,” I say. “Any pain?”

“No.” She swallows again, slower, watching me watch her throat.

I take my fingers off the pulse point under her jaw before the count finishes, because her pulse is climbing and so is mine, and a curb at a fire scene is no place for whatever number we'd get to together. The cold has soaked through the knees of my pants. I stay kneeling anyway.

“You're fine,” I say, hoarse.

“You're thorough,” she says.

“How'd it start?” The question comes out of me sideways, cop-flat, and I watch for the flinch and don't get one. “You were in there. What'd you see?”

Across the street, the aerial repositions and its floodlights sweep us both white for a second, and she doesn't blink.

“A lot of insurance liability in evening wear.” She wraps her arms loose around her knees, and the fire paints her amber down one side. “You'd know better than I would. How fast does a fire like that move? In a building that age, with those ceilings?”

“Depends what it finds to eat.”

“And what did it find tonight?” She asks it like small talk, like weather, but her eyes have come all the way back to mine and stopped pretending to be casual. “It looked from out here like it knew where it was going. Is that a stupid question from a civilian?”

The honest answer is yes and also no. It's the smartest sentence anyone's said on this street all night, and a guest who ran out a side door has no business knowing the fire had a route, and every alarm I own is going off in a building I can't evacuate. And I stay kneeling on the wet asphalt anyway, close enough to share warmth, while the two of us discuss fire behavior in the glow of a fire I'm later going to swear in a report that I don't understand.

“Fire's not smart,” I say. “But it's honest. It goes where it's fed, it climbs when it can, and it never lies about where it's been. People lie about fires. Fires don't.”

Her face moves at that, one quick tick under the calm, and I think, there. I don't know what it is, only that it exists, a whole dark lake of it under all that stillness, and God help me, finding it doesn't make me want to back away. It makes me want to drop a line.

“You got out a few minutes early,” I say quietly. “That's the second time you've told me a version of that.”

“You counted.” She says it with no surprise at all.

“I count everything. It's the job.” My mouth keeps going without clearance. “Lies especially.”

We look at each other. Behind me a saw winds down and somebody on the truck laughs at a joke I can't hear, normal fireground noise, another world. She could get up and walk into the dark right now, and half of me is begging her to do it, do us both the favor, and instead she pulls her coat collar closed against the cold, one-handed, and keeps sitting on my curb like she's got nowhere better in the whole burning city to be.

“Quinn's going to start a rumor,” I say, mostly to myself, and then, before whatever's left of my pension can object, I'm holding out my bare hand. “Give me the coat check.”

She doesn't ask what I mean. That's the detail I'll keep coming back to at four in the morning. She slides two fingers into her coat pocket and puts the little stamped stub in my palm, number 114, and I borrow the pen off my chest strap and write my number across the back of it, digits going crooked because my hand has opinions about her watching.

“I'm Dani,” I say, handing it back.

“I know. You were on the news.” Her fingers close over the stub without touching me, which does more to me than touching me would have. “Zara.”

The name sits warm in my mouth, two syllables, no surname offered and none asked for, because I've apparently decided I'd rather have her on my phone than her name run through a database, and that decision is going to cost me. I can feel the bill being written somewhere uptown already.

“Next time you're at one of my fires, Zara, stand somewhere I can see you.”

“I always do,” she says.

The engine honks once, Warren's patience expiring, and I stand up too fast and my knees report both fires of the last three days, and I leave her on the curb with my number in her pocket and her eyes on my back the whole way across the street, a weight between my shoulder blades as real as a hand.

In the cab, Quinn looks at me, looks across at the curb, looks back at me, and says nothing with enormous volume.

“Evacuee,” I say. “Checked her airway.”

“Uh-huh. How's her airway?”

“Shut up, Quinn.”

We roll back through the wet streets with the windows cracked to dump the smoke smell, and the city slides by all neon and steam. I lean my head on the glass and run it like a hose evolution, step by step, because that's how I keep things from getting away from me. A warehouse with three seats. A waterfront fire she turned up to grade like a critic. A gala with closed valves, burning on a schedule, and a woman in deep-water silk sitting calm as Sunday in front of it, asking me how fast fire moves, getting out a few minutes early, always, with her good timing.