Through the floor, the dog breathes, and I listen to an animal trust the dark the way I used to. My friend Becca texted this morning. An emoji, the one with the worried face, which is her way of asking without asking if I’m okay.
I didn’t answer.
Chapter 5
Grady
The ceiling at Station 7 is plywood. I’ve been studying it for forty minutes.
The bunk across from mine belongs to Navarro, who hit some internal light switch and dropped immediately into unconsciousness. I have never envied anything as much as I envy this skill. Navarro sleeps like a person who hasn’t made a habit of lying awake listening to the inside of his own head.
The inside of my head has a lot of opinions tonight.
Not just about Danny—that’s the usual 3 a.m. loop. Tonight is different. Tonight, the quiet has something else in it.
A vet clinic. Every other day appointments. A dog who chooses her side of every exam table without fail. The crew calls him Smoky. I haven’t agreed to that yet. And a woman who gives me the professional version every single time: calm, competent, warm exactly as far as the equipment and not one inch farther. The dog gets the other version. I’ve heard the other version. It sounds like a door left open in a house you thought was empty. I keep walking past it going I’m not going in there, and then I’m already in the hallway, and what exactly is my plan here, Sullivan?—
The tones go off.
Dispatch at Station 7 has its own music. Not the way hotshot base camp does it, where the radio pops and you’re running before the address clears, but close enough that my body responds the same way: up before I’ve decided to get up, boots before the tone’s finished, brain clicking from plywood-and-insomnia into something cleaner. Something that knows what it’s doing.
“Brush fire, east quadrant,” the radio says. “Wind out of the northwest, nine knots and climbing. Structure risk confirmed. One barn, animal exposure. Clearwater crew, stage at Station 7 for coordinated response.”
Diaz is already at the door.
“Let’s go,” I say.
He nods once. Diaz doesn’t waste syllables. It’s one of his more functional qualities.
The fire is visible before we reach it: a glow along the ridge east of town, orange-edged and wrong against the predawn sky. Not big yet. But growing. The kind of fire that hasn’t committed yet, still working out whether it wants to sit on this hillside and smolder or run for the tree line.
Fire always knows. You just have to read it before it decides.
I’m out of the truck before it stops moving.
The ranch is a working spread: cattle operation, horses, a place that doesn’t have time to be pretty. The barn is too close to the line, a fact the rancher already knows because he’s standing in front of it, watching his options narrow in real time. Behind him, horses moving inside, whites of eyes visible through the planks. Cattle in the south pasture, scattered, moving wrong.
And there is something white near the fence line.
Stationary.
“What is that?” Navarro asks.
“Llama,” I say.
“Why isn’t it moving?”
“Because it’s a llama.”
The rancher catches me looking. “That’s Louie,” he says, in a tone that conveys Louie is a known situation.
“Is he always?—”
“Stubborn? Pretty much.” He pushes his hat back. “Louie’s made his peace.”
Louie has not made his peace. Louie is staring at the approaching fire with the thousand-yard resolve of an animal that has arrived at a spiritual position most humans spend decades trying to reach: complete and total refusal.
“Clearwater crew on me,” I say.
