Page 7

“Serrano. Last night, the roof gave you, what, forty seconds of margin?”

I make myself keep toweling my hair like my pulse isn't audible. “About that.”

“Spend your margins better.” Then she's gone, and the locker room exhales, and so do I.

I don't get sleep. I get four hours of lying on top of my own bed at home with the blinds making prison stripes on the ceiling, thinking about pale eyes and that look of Val's in rotation. Come to me first. I've heard Val say a hundred quiet sentences, and maybe six of them in six years have been strange enough to notice, and I let every one of them go the way you note a draft in a solid house and go on living there, because the rent is your whole life. This one won't stay down. The chief of the department wants first call on a woman the marshal hasn't even identified, and the part of my brain that walks into burning buildings keeps standing up to look at that, and I keep sitting it back down.

I give up around five, eat eggs over the sink, and come back in for the night shift I traded into months ago. The kitchen smells like somebody's chili and the night crew's gossip is all warehouse, whether the marshal will kick it upstairs, and exactly one tactful question about my mystery blonde that I answer with my mouth full. The tones drop at 9:12 p.m.

Structure fire. Multiple calls. The Meridian, the new waterfront development where the cranes have been roosting all year, the one with the billboard of a couple drinking wine on a balcony that doesn't exist yet.

The kitchen empties in one motion, chairs shoved back, boots on stairs. I'm swinging up into Engine 9 with my coat half on and Quinn's already buckled, slapping the back of my helmet twice, our old stupid ritual, and the bay door rolls up on the city at night.

“Donor building,” Ramos says from the jump seat, scrolling his phone as we pull out. “Says here the Meridian's, quote, ‘a public-private partnership’. Mayor cut the ribbon on the parking garage.”

“Rich people's plywood burns the same as ours,” Quinn says.

It doesn't, though. It burns better. We come over the rise on Harbor Drive and the Meridian's east tower is wearing fire up one whole flank, three floors of unfinished units going like a torch, Tyvek wrap peeling off in burning sheets that sail out over the water. No occupants, the site's not done, but there's a night watchman unaccounted for and acetylene bottles somewhere on the third floor, and for the next ninety minutes I don't think about anything at all except water, angles, air, and the radio saying his name, Albert, sixty-one, last seen at the gatehouse.

Quinn and I take the ground search while the towers put water on the flank. The site is a maze of rebar bundles, porta-johns, and stacked windows wearing their stickers, everything throwing triple shadows in the scene lights, and we leapfrog the lanes calling his name into the spaces between. I find the dog first, a gray mutt barking itself inside out at a generator shed. Then I find Albert wedged behind the unit where he crawled when the smoke turned him around, conscious, gray-faced, swearing at me before I've even got the mask on him, which is a good sign, the swearing. We walk him out between us with the dog stuffed inside his coat like contraband, and the medics take all three of us in hand, and one of the tower guys yells something about Serrano collecting another one, and Quinn laughs through her mask, and my chest swells too big for the gear, like it only does on the good nights. The dog rides to the hospital in Albert's lap, both of them wrapped in the same blanket.

It's good work. It's a fire that reminds me why I do this, loud and physical and winnable.

And then I'm walking back toward the engine with my mask hanging off my neck, wrung out and steam coming off my shoulders into the cold, and I feel it before I find it, a pressure on the side of my face, the specific weight of being watched.

She's at the tape.

Across the apron, behind the police line, in the spill of the scene lights. Long dark coat this time, collar up, hair pinned, hands in her pockets, and she stands in the gawker crowd like a heron stands in ducks. Nobody around her knows what they're next to. The fire paints her face orange and gold, and she isn't watching the fire.

She's watching me.

Slow, like she did on the bumper. Down, then up. My soaked gear, my throat, my mouth, taking her time about it, so unhurried that my whole body goes hot inside the wet bunker gear, and when her eyes finally come back to mine she holds them there and doesn't smile, doesn't wave, doesn't pretend to be anything but exactly what she's doing, which is looking at me like the fire behind me is mine and she likes my work.

Twelve hours ago, I had her voice in my ear in the shower. She doesn't know that. She can't know that. Standing in the throw of the lights with my pulse going ragged, I'd swear on the engine that she knows it anyway.

Come to me first, Val said.

I should be on the radio. I should be walking a cop down the tape line right now, that's the survivor from the warehouse, one night, two fires, detain and identify. My feet don't move. The crowd shifts, somebody's phone flash goes off, and the firefighter in me decides I'll point her out to the incident commander, and whatever has been in charge of me since last night decides I'll walk over there first, alone, and ask her name.

A hose team crosses between us hauling a deflated line, four seconds, five. I'm already moving, peeling left around them, eyes fixed on the spot where the dark coat was, on the collar and the pinned hair, and a guy with a scanner app steps into my path asking if it's true about the dog, and I sidestep him without answering.

The space at the tape is empty.

I stand there with the steam coming off my own shoulders, staring at the gap where she was, the crowd knitting itself closed around it. My heart is going like the tones just dropped. There's nothing to radio in. A woman in a nice coat watched a fire and left, and the city is full of women in nice coats, and there's not one thing I could say to a cop or to Val or to anyone that wouldn't end with me explaining the part I'm not explaining.

She'll turn up again. I know it the same way I knew the warehouse was wrong, low in the gut, where the job lives.

What scares me, climbing up into the engine with my hands not quite steady, is the simple math of it. Two fires in this city in twenty-four hours, and she's been standing at both of them.

What scares me worse is that some sick, lit-up, wide-awake piece of me is already looking forward to the third.

4

ZARA

Vivian Carlisle took two years to grow, and tonight is the first time I've worn her in public.

She has a coat-check stub and a paddle number she'll never raise. The dress is the color of deep water and cost more than my first car, and the dead husband in commodities has an obituary I wrote myself and seeded in two archives nobody checks. Her accent is low and unplaceable, and she looks faintly bored, which in this room reads as breeding. The man at the door finds her name on his tablet and warms by ten degrees, and I walk into the Calloway's ballroom under three tons of chandelier, into a crowd of people who'd step over a burning child to reach a senator.