Page 186 of Slashed Bonds

Not far. Not deep. The kind of doze where you’re still in the truck and still hearing the tires, where the day plays on the inside of your eyelids in no particular order. A spin on one blade. Twenty-two red grins. A kid in a marker jersey screaming without sound.

Sirens.

They come into the doze from a distance, the way a siren does, rising and falling, more than one, and I pout against his shoulder without opening my eyes.

Police. Somewhere. Someone’s night going badly. Not mine. Not tonight.

Then Nikolai swears.

Under his breath. In Russian, the short hard word he uses for a puck he should’ve had, and it’s the tone that opens my eye. One eye. Then the other.

And in the distance, over the trees, where the road bends toward Omega land, the sky’s the wrong color.

Orange.

No.

I’m sitting up before I’ve decided to. Both hands on the dash. Looking at the glow over the treeline and then at Nikolai, whose face has gone from relief to something carved, the brows down, the jaw locked, and he doesn’t look at me. He reaches for the gearshift and knocks it sideways into the setting Cassian uses for nothing, the sport one, and the truck drops a gear and roars.

We’re going too fast.

The trail to the shack isn’t a road. It’s two ruts with grass between, and the truck’s taking it at fifty with the trees whipping past and the branches hitting the mirrors, and I’ve got one hand on the handle over the door and I don’t tell him to slow down.

Flames. That’s flames. That’s not a brush fire, that’s a building, that’s my⁠—

We come out of the trees.

And the shack is burning.

Not catching. Not smoking. Burning, all of it, the roof already gone and the walls going, fire standing up out of the shape of my house twenty feet into the air, bright enough to turn the night into a wrong kind of day. Three trucks around it. Red and white lights spinning across the grass. Men in yellow coats with hoses, and the hoses are on it, and it doesn’t matter. You can see that it doesn’t matter. The water goes in and the fire eats it.

Nikolai stops the truck sideways in the grass.

I’m out before it’s finished rocking.

“Ma’am. Ma’am, stand back, please.”

A firefighter. Big, soot on his face, one arm out across my path like a gate. I stop at the arm. I can feel the heat from here, from forty feet, on my face and my bare shoulder where the sweater’s slipped.

“This is…” I don’t finish it. I try again. “This is my place.”

He looks at me. At the sweater, the wet hair, the lipstick I haven’t taken off. Then at the fire. Then back, and something in his face shifts from procedure to pity, and I hate it, and I don’t look away.

“I’m sorry.” He means it. “Had to be kids. Place like this, out here, they figure it’s abandoned, they get a lighter and a can of something and think it’s a laugh. We’ve had two this year on the land.” He sighs through his nose. “Stick here, all right? We’re doing what we can, but I’ll be honest with you. I don’t think there’ll be anything left. Unless you had a fireproof safe.”

I frown.

I didn’t. I don’t keep anything in there that matters. That’s a thing I learned at eighteen when a house on Alder Row went up with a family’s whole life in it, every document, every photograph, the box of my mother’s letters, and I stood in a hospital bed and understood that paper burns.

The passport. The birth certificate. The deed to this. The lawyer’s letters. Two photographs a year of a girl and a boy under a name I’m not told. All of it in a steel box in a bank in a city two hours away that’s been open since before the war, that isn’t going under, ever.

So nothing’s lost. Nothing that can’t be replaced.

And it hurts.

I stand at the firefighter’s arm and I watch it go, and it hurts in a place I didn’t know I still had, because this was the one space on earth that was mine. Not a pack’s. Not a facility’s. Not a room a man paid for. A shack on Omega land with four deadbolts and a chair, where I’d put myself back together one bone at a time, where I’d learned to sleep again and eat again and walk four kilometers in the dark to a boxing ring because I needed somewhere to put my hands.

Five years. The cot. The hot plate. The nail by the door where Knox’s first leash hung. The place on the floor where I sat the night he found me. All of it going up like it was nothing. Like it was kindling.