I clear my throat.
“Deploy what?”I ask, my voice still a weird, foggy whisper.
“Fire shelters,” Mike says.
We’re all just staring at the radio.
“Oh,” I say.No one answers.
“Deployed,” the voice says after a few more moments.“Cutting communication.”
Then the thing goes quiet.I look up at Mike, frantic, and he just shakes his head.
“When they deploy they turn their radios off as a courtesy,” he explains.
“Courtesy?”I ask, because my brain may as well be filled with sand right now.All I can think of is Hunter, face down on the ground, in a long tinfoil tube.Like a burrito.
“So whoever’s on the other end doesn’t have to listen,” Mike says gently.“Just in case.”
ThenI get it, all at once.
It’s so no one has to listen to a man possibly burn to death.
I don’t respond.I just turn around and walk blindly.I push open a door and walk into a hallway and I walk through another door and down a set of stairs.It’s dark at the bottom, the lights out, and when I get there I go under the stairs and slide down the wall until I’m sitting on the cold, dirty tile floor.
I’m coming back to you, I think.
Hunter and I on that tiny cot, the morning we left the lookout.
I’m coming back to you, once fire season is over.
I sit very, very still.I keep breathing, and I don’t move, because I feel like if I move the dark around me might shatter, and the thick, inky blackness is the only thing that’s keeping me from screaming.
You said you never loved me in the first place.
I didn’t mean it.
I inhale, I exhale.
Please come back to me,I think.Please.
ChapterThirty-Four
Hunter
“CASDEN!”Porter’s voice shouts, barely audible over the screaming roar of the fire.
I take a breath, my face crushed against the gravel, dirt between my teeth, and force myself not to cough.
“WHAT?”
“Who was your first grade teacher?”
My skin feels like it’s boiling off, every nerve ending pulsing with pure, seethingpain.It’s all I can do to stay still, because every last instinct I’ve got is screamingit hurts here, run!
I can feel Clementine’s rock in my pocket, though, a small hard uncomfortable lump between my thigh and the ground.It presses into my leg, and I think about her, lying on my chest in the lookout, pointing at Saturn, and I stay down.
“Mrs.Thomason,” I shout back.
