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“No,” she said. “You reported what you saw. It makes it something you survived long enough to understand later.” Across the street, Jethro sat on the engine’s step while Rocco swapped his cylinder. Kai stood beside them, soot turning the seams of his face into hard lines. Sonny approached with his helmet tucked under one arm.
“Wilder thinks there was someone inside,” he said. Rocco tightened a coupling and did not look up.
“Could anyone live through that?”
“Not where he saw it,” Jethro said. The answer came too quickly. Sonny studied the ruined doorway.
“Excellent. We’ve reached the part of the night where optimism puts on a fake mustache.” Kai drank half a bottle at once.
“You’re saying optimism has been here the whole time?”
“No. That was stupidity. Similar height, different weight.” Jethro smiled because they expected him to, but fear had changed shape inside him.
During the peak of the fire, it had been immediate—walls, roof, heat, the next three seconds. Now it was dread, patient and cold, waiting beneath the wreckage. Aurora called them back to the command post.
“We’re transitioning to overhaul only after the arson crew signs off. Nobody freelances. We search from stable zones, with shoring where possible. The arson investigator is here.” Her gaze moved across each of them. “And we prepare for the possibility this is not an empty building.”
Dawn began as a paler shade of smoke. The river beyond the cannery emerged by degrees, flat and metallic under the morning sky. With the largest flames knocked down, the ruin seemed more dangerous, not less.
Darkness had hidden its details; daylight showed beams hanging by nails, masonry cracked from corner to corner, sheet metal curled overhead like sprung traps. Small fires whispered under the debris.
They spotted Tailor, Alec, Max, Cade, and Bodhi pushing one of the walls, forcing it to fall toward the outer perimeter. Jethro shook his head, grinning.
“Bastards are at least twice our age and stronger than a team of oxen. I hope that’s me in forty years,” he grinned. Kai looked at him.
“It is you. Now.”
Crews worked from the perimeter with pike poles, exposing pockets and flooding them, while the collapse specialist marked safe approaches in bright paint. The arson investigator, a compact woman named Naomi, crouched outside the Delta doorway and photographed the melted fuel cans without crossing the line.
“Distinct pour patterns in the yard,” she told Aurora. “Likely multiple ignition points. I’ll need samples once it cools.”
“You’ll get them when the building stops trying to kill people,” Aurora said.
“Does it ever?”
“Not in my experience.”
A rescue team advanced through what had been the north loading bay, tethered and watched from three directions. Jethro, Kai, and Eloise followed only after shoring was set, stepping over drowned timbers into a space stripped of its roof.
Their lights moved across old conveyor belts and buckled vats. Water dripped from everything. Each footstep stirred white ash. The air inside their masks was loud with breathing and radio traffic.
“Sound off every thirty seconds,” Aurora ordered. “Jethro?”
“Moving.”
“Kai?”
“Regretting every career-day presentation I ever attended.”
“Eloise?”
“Advancing, east side.”
Jethro swept the thermal imager across the debris. Most of the screen had cooled to mottled gray, but isolated pockets glowed beneath fallen boards. They opened each from a distance, soaked it, waited for steam to clear.
Near the Delta entrance, the conveyor had collapsed at an angle, leaving a narrow triangular void beneath it. Wilder’s dark shape, Jethro thought. A fixed object, partly shielded from direct flame. He raised one fist. The team stopped.
Something pale showed beneath a layer of wet insulation. Not wood. Not metal. Eloise saw it at the same moment and turned her light away, then forced it back. Jethro’s mouth went dry behind his facepiece.
