Page 2

Her voice is low and even and completely insane, given the circumstances. The shelf six feet from her is fully involved. The air down here tastes like burning dust even through my filter, and she's asking me questions with bland hotel-desk courtesy.

“The east bay.” I throw my light back along the rack line, at everything burning between us and it. “And we're leaving. Right now.”

“The east side.” She says it like she's checking my math. Her gaze travels off me, tracing the rack line toward the loading dock, and then comes back and travels over me instead, slow, top to bottom, taking in my helmet, my mask, the sweat-soaked collar of my hood, the soot-streaked tattoos on the forearm I've got braced toward her. Something in her expression sharpens. Interested is the only word I have for it; it's the wrong word for a burning building, but my pulse does a stupid little stumble anyway.

Two rows over, a rack sheds a shelf of burning boxes onto the concrete, and the crash sends a column of sparks rolling along the ceiling. She watches it go with that same level attention before her eyes come back to me.

“Is the roof compromised?” she asks.

“Lady, the roof is coming down. That's what roofs do.” I'm reaching for her arm. “Grab on. We're going.”

She doesn't flinch from my glove. She studies my hand on her sleeve with mild attention, like I've handed her a business card, and the part of my brain that files things for investigators is screaming that nothing about this woman adds up, no coat, no bag, no soot on her except a smudge along one elegant wrist, no coughing, breathing this air like it's a spa.

The rest of my brain is busy with her face, and I hate it for the timing.

“You should be on the floor,” I tell her, hauling her up off the pallets. She comes easily, lighter than I braced for. “Smoke rises. Everybody knows smoke rises.”

“I know smoke,” she says.

There's no time to ask what that means. The fire picks that moment to find a new fuel load somewhere above us, and the roar steps up an octave, and the orange glow goes white at its center. I feel the change through my boots before I hear it, a deep structural groan, the sound a building makes when it stops arguing with gravity.

“Move!”

I don't guide her. I grab her, my arm clamped around her back, her body dragged hard against my chest plate, and I run us both down the rack line as the world above lets go.

The collapse doesn't sound like thunder. People always say thunder. It sounds like the ocean if the ocean hated you, a black wave of heat and debris shoving at our backs, and I feel her hands fist in the straps of my harness, finally a human reaction, finally her body doing what a body should do. And even then, even sprinting through smoke with a ceiling coming down behind me, I clock that her grip is strong and her face against my mask hose is turned toward the fire, not away from it.

She's watching it fall.

Embers chase us through the last rack row. The bay door is a gray rectangle, then a white one, and then we're through it into air that tastes like diesel and night, and four sets of hands are pulling at us, voices stacked on voices, Quinn yelling something at me that I'll pay for later.

I get her clear of the apron before my legs quit. They sit her on the bumper of Rescue 2 and I go down on one knee next to the rig like it's intentional, like I'm checking my gear and not just remembering how knees work. I rip my mask off. The night air hits my face, cold and sweet, and I drag it in like I'm the one who needed rescuing.

The warehouse exhales fire through the hole where its roof was. It's gorgeous and ruined. A column of sparks is climbing into the dark over Redwater like the city's putting up new stars.

“You're insane,” Quinn says, crouching in front of me, her face still printed with mask lines. “You know that? The captain's going to skin you, tan it, and wear you.”

“There was a victim.”

“Yeah.” She glances over his shoulder at the bumper of Rescue 2, and her voice changes. “Some victim.”

I follow her look.

The woman is sitting on the rig's bumper with a yellow emergency blanket draped around her shoulders, and she's wearing it like other women wear silk. A medic is trying to get a pulse ox on her finger and she's allowing it, watching the burning warehouse over his head with calm, unhurried attention, the lights of the engines washing her in red, then blue, then red.

As if she feels the weight of two firefighters staring, she turns her head.

She looks at Quinn for half a second.

She looks at me for a lot longer than that.

Her gaze moves over me again, slower now that nothing's on fire between us. My face first, and she takes her time there, and when her eyes drop to my mouth I feel it like a touch, a physical pressure, and heat crawls up the back of my neck that has nothing to do with the four hundred degrees I just walked out of. Then my throat. Then my arms, bare now where I've shed my coat, soot worked into the lines of the tattoos, and her head tilts a degree, like the lines are written in a language she's fluent in.

Nobody looks at firefighters like that at a scene. People look at us with terror or gratitude or the glassy nothing of shock. They cry on us. They ask about their cats.

She looks at me like the fire was the opening act.

“Ma'am, I need you to look straight ahead,” the medic says, lifting a penlight.