Page 37 of Light My Fire

The two document boxes come out as they are. Those don't burn, those will never burn, they're not mine to burn. The maintenance log, the substitution memo, the sign-off with a golf course for an alibi, every page in there is Natalia's case, and if the marshals kicked this door tomorrow the worst those boxes could do is finish the men I've been finishing since the year she died. They go to Petra if I can manage a drop, to a locker and a mailed key if I can't. The work outlives the worker. I taught Cho that without ever telling her my name.

The shoebox I sit down with, on the floor, my back against the shelf, which I don't have time for and do anyway.

Inside are hair ties, a spelling test with a 96 and a teacher's star, and a drawing of a cat that came out orange because the crayon box had no better idea. I don't cry. I've never once cried in this room, that's what the room is for, holding it so I don't have to. I put the lid back on, and the shoebox goes into the go-bag between the cash and the passports, padded by a sweater, the heaviest half pound in the bag.

And while I pack the rest, I finally locate the anger, and it's shaped like her.

I want it to be clean fury and it won't come clean. She held my hands in a red booth while I shook apart over a twelve-year-old at a door, and then she drove to my bed, and then she knelt on my floor and read my handwriting, and then she let me kiss her at the door like it meant anything, and then she walked into a fire station and gave Val Mercer my name. I've been lied to by professionals. I've been sold out twice before, both times by men, both times for money, and both times it cost me a safe house and nothing else. This is the first time it's cost me anything I can't pack. And under the rage sits the worse half, which is that I understand her. She watched my city burn, and she knew the hand, and she loved the hand, and she's spent her whole adult life running toward the alarm, and I asked a firefighter to stand next to a fire and call it warmth. Of course she pulled it. That's the job. I'd have done the same in her turnouts.

I hate her, and the hate won't hold still, because under it is the morning I woke before her and didn't get up.

She slept attached, that's the only word for it, her head heavy on my shoulder and her arm across me and her fist closed in my shirt like the shirt was a handle on a moving truck. I lay there pinned and warm with my discipline yelling at me from a great distance, and I studied her face gone soft and young, the scar through her eyebrow, the calluses on the hand holding my shirt. A woman who hauls strangers down ladders was asleep in the home of an arsonist with both hands full of me, trusting, unarmed. Nobody had slept on me in eleven years. I remember thinking, before I got up to sweep the glass and square her boots by the island, that no protocol I owned covered her. I was right. There are two cars downstairs and a duffel of solvent by my door, and what I keep returning to, like a tongue to a broken tooth, is how heavy her head was.

By six, the apartment is staged and I can't stay in it, so I do the worst possible thing, which is apparently what I do now, when it matters most.

I go out through the service level, through the retail concourse and the loading corridor, out a door the watchers would need a third car and a floor plan to cover, and I take a cab paid in cash across the river. At dusk I'm standing at a bus shelter on the hill above Station 9 with my collar up, on foot, no sedan, no long lens, every rule I own reduced to a woman at a bus stop staring at a firehouse.

The bay doors glow. Her blue truck sits in the side lot, so she came in today, off shift, on a Saturday, which means interviews, marshals, Mercer, statements, the hunt I started and she fed. I wait through two buses I don't board, and the drivers stop slowing for me after the second one, and a little after seven she comes out the side door.

Even at this distance, even gray with exhaustion, her body is a fact to me now, the gear bag on the shoulder, the walk, shoulders first, like she's permanently coming off a ladder. She stops at her truck and stands with her hand flat on the driver's door, head down, not getting in, the same stalled pose as yesterday's shift change, a woman praying to a pickup. I stand forty yards uphill in the dark wanting, at full strength and all at once, three things: to walk down there and shake the lie out of her until the truth falls loose, to put my mouth on her one more time before whatever ends ends and taste her over the diesel and the rain. And the last want is the worst one, to board the next bus and ride it to the end of the line and start over as nobody, no fires, no Dani, no weight on my shoulder ever again.

She gets in. The truck coughs, catches, pulls out. Her headlights sweep the hill and pass over me the same as they pass over the shelter and the hydrant and the mailbox, and then she's a pair of taillights going down toward the river, and I stay where I am until my hands hurt and I find them fisted in my coat pockets.

If she had looked up, I don't know which of the three I'd have picked. That's what I am now. I used to know my own next move four moves out. Now I'm a coin somebody's flipping.

The cab back costs too much and I let it. I come home through the loading corridor, up the freight elevator with the night porter who knows not to chat, deadbolt, dark. I leave the lights off, the apartment all bags and angles in the glow off the rain, and the charcoal sedan is still down there on the far curb with fresh coffee on the dash. They changed shifts at eight. She runs a tight surveillance, Mercer. Under different circumstances we'd respect each other enormously.

I sit on the floor with my back against the island, in the spot where her jacket fell the night everything was still possible, and I take out the phone and look at Friday's message for a while, my own dinner invitation hanging there with its read receipt like a tag on a toe, and then I type.

I owe you the whole truth and I meant it. You'll have it. But here's my one question first, and I'll believe whatever you send back, that's the terrible part, I'll believe you. Was it you who sent them to my door?

I don't read it four times. There's no version of it that hurts less. I send it, and the word under it changes to delivered, and there the resemblance to Friday ends, because nothing else happens.

I put the word under surveillance, patience, method, my back against the island and my knees up, the rain coming and going on the glass. An hour passes and the word doesn't change. Her phone lives in her hand, firefighters sleep next to their tones, and the word sits at delivered and never turns to read. Somewhere across the river she's looking at my name on her screen and choosing not to open it, and I know that choice from the inside. I made it Wednesday, standing in the steam with her loose in my apartment, choosing not to go and look at what would end me.

Midnight comes and goes. The watchers change again. My legs have gone stiff and I stay where I am, on my kitchen floor next to a go-bag with a shoebox in it, waiting for two short buzzes like other people wait for verdicts, and I catch myself bargaining with a god I've never once spoken to. Let her say no. Let there be some other road to my door, a camera I missed, a print, a clerk, Cho, anyone. Let her open the message and send me a lie if she has to. I'll audit it tomorrow. Tonight I'd believe her.

The screen dims, and I tap it awake, and nothing has changed.

21

DANI

The message has been sitting on my lock screen since eleven last night, and at six on Sunday morning I stop pretending I'm going to sleep and open it.

I owe you the whole truth and I meant it. You'll have it. But here's my one question first, and I'll believe whatever you send back, that's the terrible part, I'll believe you. Was it you who sent them to my door?

I read it at the kitchen table with the heat off and the gray coming up over the river, and the sentence that guts me isn't the question. It's the middle one. I'll believe you. She's telling me I could lie to her and get away with it, that after everything she'd take my word over her own eyes, and she's telling me that because she already knows the answer and she's begging me for a better one.

And the word them does the rest of the damage. They're already at her door.

Though Val had the name, I confirmed it at dawn on Saturday with smoke still in my hair, and by Saturday night there were people parked on her building, because that's what Val is, a woman who closes distance while everyone else is still deciding whether to move. I knew that when I opened my mouth at the command truck. I told myself I was choosing between losing her and scraping her off a sidewalk, and that's even true, and it doesn't change the arithmetic of what I did, which is that I took the woman I love and handed her to the fastest hunter I've ever met.

I don't answer. I can't lie to her and I can't type the truth at six in the morning with my hands like this, so I do the coward's third option, which is nothing, and I carry the phone around my apartment all morning like a live round.

The follow-up interview is at noon, so at least I have somewhere to put my body.

Station 9 on a Sunday usually runs at half volume, church-quiet, somebody's pancakes on the griddle, but I feel it from the parking lot today. There are three sedans in the visitor slots that nobody visiting owns, government plates on one, and inside, the watch room has been colonized. Marshals' people I don't know are coming and going with banker's boxes, a borrowed corkboard has gone up where our duty roster usually hangs, and Deputy Chief Max Hale is camped at the long table as Val's department liaison with a laptop and a stack of printouts four inches deep, pulling building records, by the headers I can see, permits and ownership filings, a paper net being woven around somebody whose handwriting I've held in my hands.