We’re moving before the last word lands. Boots. Coats. Masks. Straps. The station becomes a chaotic hive.
Savannah appears from nowhere, crisp and composed. We fall into position without talking about it—she hits the ambulance with Torres at her shoulder, I pull the engine with the Captain. The doors roll up and winter wind slaps us. The siren lifts its wail and the town opens in front of us, making room for our speed and hoping we have enough time.
Juniper Road twists along the base of the low hills east of town, past pasture and pale fence lines, past a stand of gold grass that looks soft until it meets a spark. We crest the last bend and the sky is already wrong—too much yellow in it, too much black, a column of smoke punching up. Flame tongues through the slats of a barn the color of old blood. The farmhouse beyond throws light in all its windows.
“Jesus,” Captain says under his breath. “That’s moving.”
“Wind at its back,” I answer, scanning. “We’ve got thirty seconds to stop it from taking the rest of the property.”
We stage on the gravel. Heat blasts our faces before we’re off the truck. Noise—crackle, roar, splinter—eats the rest. A man inwork pants and no coat is shouting near the door, voice already ragged from smoke. A woman clutches his arm.
“He went back for the mare!” she yells, and I don’t need the rest. I’ve heard variations of this sentence my entire career. Love drags people in. We drag them back out.
“Water!” I bark. Captain is already spinning the gate; the line grows a muscle in my hands. “Savannah, we’ve got one inside. You’re on triage as soon as we spit them out.”
She gives a tight nod and bolts for where the gravel meets the doorway, dragging a trauma bag like it’s an extension of her. She’s steady. She’s ice and heat in perfect ratio. She does not look at me and I can feel her everywhere.
The barn door leans one hinge off center, flames playing greedy in the gap. Heat hammers my gear. My mask fogs and clears, fogs and clears. I can smell the sweet rot of hay burning and the sharp chemical of old oil that’s about to make our day worse.
“Ready?” Captain asks at my shoulder, voice chopped by the regulator.
“Go.”
We drive into the heat like we always do, like a fact. Vision turns to cutouts—beam, shadow, a tossed saddle bursting into phantom shapes in the smoke. The water makes a path that hisses and vanishes and I push through. Up above, the loft sags and screams. Somewhere, animals panic with a pitch that slices your spine. I aim the stream wide to make a hallway.
“Left,” Captain points with the nozzle. I pivot. The mare’s eyes flash wild in the dark, white rolling, lead rope tangled around a beam that’s already shedding embers. The man—farmer, dumb hero, soon-to-be patient—has his hands on the knot and no plan for the beam that’s going to give.
“No,” I shout, useless under the mask and the roar, and throw a shoulder into him anyway, wedging my body between him and the next bad thing.
“Ramirez!” Cole barks, hauling the line to cover the mare’s flank as it shivers and stamps.
“Get the rope,” I snap, already palming a pocket knife, sawing through the old hemp like it’s a fuse and we’re out of time. The rope parts. The mare lunges, bowling me sideways; I ride the impact, roll, hit a stack of feed sacks that flare and choke out. The man coughs himself almost blind and I hook an arm around his middle, yank him up, push him toward the door with a shove that is not gentle.
“Move!”
The loft groans again. That sound lives in my teeth. We’ve got seconds or we’ve got a burial. Captain yanks the line to corral the mare, drives her toward daylight with a ribbon of water and curses. I push the farmer after them and pivot back to check the stall line in case anyone else got clever.
The ceiling above the center aisle ripples like a drop cloth in a wind. My brain does the math without asking my permission. I step, two, three, faster, and the world drops a rib.
“Axel!” Savannah’s voice slices the noise clean in half.
I turn toward it before the rational part of me can bench the instinct. Her voice hits some animal in me that learned her name before it learned my own. I find her through the smoke at the barn’s mouth, mask on, eyes enormous behind the lens, one hand out like she could catch me from here. That hand—open, sure—burns brighter than the fire.
The loft beam lets go, trailing sparks and splinters. I dive—forward, not back, because that’s where the hall is—and the beam clips my air bottle shoulder hard enough to ring everything in me. The hit spins me, skids me on my knees acrossgrit. My head smacks something and my world narrows to heat, wild light, the hiss-scream of water hitting fresh flame.
“Axel!” Her voice again, closer, unspooling with enough terror to put real weight behind my name. The barn tries to take her sound and fails. I push up, tuck and roll, find my feet. Captain’s on the line, wide eyes calculating my odds. He leans into the stream and buys me a corridor through falling sparks.
“I’m good,” I bark into the radio, which might be a lie for my legs and the truth for my ribs. I charge the last stretch of hallway and out into air that feels like cutting ice after the inferno.
Savannah is there in the doorway when gravity picks me again. She doesn’t wait, she slams into me chest-first, hands fisting gear at my shoulders, breath sawing loud in the space between us. For half a second my knees consider folding. I plant my boots and take her weight like it’s what I was built to do.
“I’m okay,” I tell her, voice shredded by the mask. “I’m okay.”
She drags her own mask up just far enough for me to see her mouth. It’s white-edged and furious and wet at the same time. She doesn’t kiss me. She says the thing she couldn’t say in the kitchen, all of it, out loud, where the world can hear.
“Don’t you ever not turn toward me,” she spits, and then the spit melts into a sob, and then the sob turns back into steel. “I thought—God, Axel—I thought I was going to watch you?—”
I wrench my mask up and the cold air hits my lungs like punishment. “Not today.”
