I glanced toward the memorial wall withoutmeaning to. The brass plaques mounted there, names of everyone we'd lost over the years. Mateo's was the newest, though three years had taken some of the shine off. Mateo Reyes. His dates. The words "Gone but not forgotten" underneath, which had always seemed inadequate to me. Like a bumper sticker for grief.
I looked away before anyone noticed.
"Alright," I said, and my voice came out steady, the captain voice, the one that didn't betray anything. "Shift meeting in ten. Murphy, you're on breakfast. Try not to poison us this time."
"One time," Liam protested. "I undercooked the eggs one time."
"We had three guys out sick."
"Correlation is not causation."
"Tell that to their stomachs."
The normalcy of it settled over me like armor. This I could do. The routine, the banter, the rhythm of shift life. As long as I kept moving, kept busy, kept my hands and my mind occupied, the clock in my head faded to background noise.
Most of the time.
The tones dropped at 11:47 AM.
That sound never got easier, no matter how many years you'd been doing this. The alert cutting through whatever you were doing, your body responding before your brain caught up. I was out ofmy chair and moving before the dispatcher finished the address, feet finding the floor of the engine bay, hands reaching for my gear.
"Structure fire, 2847 Industrial Road. Warehouse district. Multiple calls reporting flames visible."
Warehouse.
The word hit me like a fist to the chest, but I didn't let it show. Couldn't let it show. I was already stepping into my boots, pulling up my bunker pants, shrugging into my coat. Around me, my crew moved in perfect sync, a choreography we'd practiced a thousand times.
"Engine 7, Ladder 7, Rescue 7, responding," I called into the radio, and my voice didn't shake.
The engine roared to life. I took my seat, ran through the mental checklist, forced my breathing to stay even. It was just a call. Just another call. Warehouses burned all the time. This one had nothing to do with that one, three years and two months and six days ago.
We pulled out of the station, sirens wailing, and I watched the streets blur past and told myself I was fine.
The warehouse came into view two minutes later. Old brick building, three stories, flames already licking out of the second-floor windows. Smoke pouring from the roof in thick black columns. I sized it up automatically: construction type, access points, exposure risks. The training taking over, the part of my brain that knew how to do this without feeling anything.
Then the wind shifted, and the smell hit me.
Burning plastic. Hot metal. That acrid combination that meant an industrial fire, the kind with chemicals and accelerants and a hundred ways to kill you that you couldn't see coming.
For half a second, I wasn't here. I was back at the Morrison warehouse, three years ago, smoke so thick I couldn't see my hand in front of my face. I was pulling the kid out first because that was the job, that was always the job, get the civilians clear before anything else. I was going back in for Mateo because he'd radioed that he was trapped, that the east wall was coming down, that he needed help.
I was finding him in the rubble. I was watching his eyes, the way he looked at me, the way he already knew.
Take care of Lucy.His voice, barely a whisper, blood on his lips.Promise me.
"Cap?"
Liam's voice snapped me back. I blinked. The warehouse in front of me was not the Morrison warehouse. Different building. Different fire. Different day.
My crew was looking at me, waiting for orders.
"Defensive attack," I said, and my voice came out calm and steady, like it was supposed to. "This thing's too far gone for interior. Murphy, get me a water supply established. Mitchell, ladder to the roof for ventilation. Santos, check the exposures—clear the B and D sides, make sure nobody's trapped in the adjacent structures."
They moved. I moved with them.
The fire was hungry, eating through the building faster than we could knock it down. But we contained it, kept it from spreading to the buildings on either side, held the line until the flames exhausted themselves.
No victims. No casualties. No one inside when it started, according to the owner who showed up looking shell-shocked and kept saying something about faulty wiring.
