Page 4 of Light My Fire

There we are. A firefighter comes through the smoke at the bay door with a woman clamped against her chest plate, and the ceiling lets go behind them in a rolling gout of orange, and the crowd noise on the clip spikes into screaming. The firefighter doesn't stumble. She runs us both clear with her body curled around mine like the shield she's decided to be, and the woman in her arms is hidden, a pale smudge, a swing of loose hair.

I rewind it. I watch it again. I'm not assessing exposure the second time, and I make myself admit it, because self-deception is how people like me get caught.

The third time, I watch only her.

Serrano, the chyron says, when they cut to the after-interview she clearly didn't want to give. FIREFIGHTER DANIELA “DANI” SERRANO, STATION 9. She's pulled her helmet off. Her braid is coming apart and there's a line of soot down her jaw she doesn't know about, and she answers three questions in eleven words while looking past the camera at the building like it owes her something. Her face is strong, her warm eyes gone flat with adrenaline. The reporter thanks her for her heroism, and she says other people's names instead, her crew, handing the praise away as fast as it lands on her.

She's an interesting woman.

I shut the television off and the apartment goes quiet, which suits me, and the skyline takes over the dark, which also suits me. My reflection floats over the city in the window glass, robe, bare feet, hair down for the night that's nearly over. There's a faint scrape on my wrist where I came down the access ladder too fast. The blanket they gave me is folded in a square on a chair I don't sit in. It's a souvenir. Or it's evidence. I should have left it, but I didn't want to, and I haven't examined why.

The work answers questions. I go back to the work.

Behind the second door of the walk-in closet, past the season-sorted silk nobody else has ever looked at, my real apartment begins, a desk and a corkboard and a laptop that's never touched my name. The men of Redwater City look out from the board in printer grayscale, golf tans rendered gray, smiles rendered gray, all of them photographed at galas and ribbon cuttings with their wives' hands tucked under their arms like ballast.

Bechtold, who owned the warehouse through two shells and used it for eleven years to store what his inspectors were paid not to find. He's done now or starting to be. Fire makes paperwork visible. Insurance investigators will open his shells faster than any journalist ever could, and they'll do it for money, which makes them reliable.

Above Bechtold, the others wait their turn. The developer has a gift for buying city votes. The retired fire commissioner owns a lake house no pension explains. The financier moved the money, still moves it, and his name sat in the file I wasn't supposed to survive reading. Six men hang there in gray, and the seventh photo at the top corner isn't gray and isn't a man. I keep it where I have to look at it on purpose, a girl with pigtails and freckles and shoes she could never keep clean.

I don't look at it on purpose tonight. Tonight is for assessment.

It took two years to build the woman who can stand in this closet. A consulting license, real, earned, because the credential had to survive a background check. Three published case reviews under my own name, dry as toast, cited twice. A reputation for being expensive and unsociable, which buys me the right to appear at fire scenes and be unmemorable at parties. The men on my corkboard hired investigators like me for decades to make their accidents official. There's a symmetry in that I'd enjoy more if I had anyone to tell.

The burn went to plan. Three ignition points, staggered, the accelerant profile soft enough to read as squatter accident to a tired marshal, the structural failure timed to gut the storage mezzanine before the first company could get water on it. Everything Bechtold kept above that mezzanine is ash and subpoena bait. By Friday, men who trusted him will be calling lawyers. The plan worked. The plan worked except for one variable I introduced myself, because I cut my exit margin to watch the mezzanine come down, and a firefighter with a braid and a forearm full of tattoos came out of the smoke ahead of her own orders and put her glove on my sleeve.

I sit down at the desk. I open the laptop. I do not think about the glove.

Fine…the glove, then, since I'm apparently lying to myself anyway. She hauled me off the pallets with one arm like I was a hose line, and her body was nothing but flat hard purpose under all that gear, and when the ceiling went she didn't flinch toward safety, she flinched around me. She covered me with herself and ran me out of my own fire with her heart slamming against my shoulder blade hard enough that I could feel it through a chest plate, through bunker gear, through everything she had on, and I've spent four hours failing to stop wondering what she feels like with everything off.

My coffee is cold. I drink it anyway, as punishment.

It doesn't help. I sit in my dark expensive closet office with the skyline leaking in behind me, and I think about callused hands and a braid coming apart, about what her shoulders must be under the coat, what her voice is when it isn't shouting over a fire, whether she's lying awake across the city right now replaying the same thirty seconds I am. The wondering sits low in my belly and stays warm, and I let it, for exactly as long as it takes to finish the cold coffee.

This is a physical event, that's all. Adrenaline is glue. Every disaster manual says so. Survivors imprint on rescuers, hostages imprint on negotiators, the body files terror and gratitude in the same drawer and mislabels both as want. I know the mechanism. I could draw the diagram.

The diagram doesn't explain why I'm typing her name.

Daniela Serrano gives me very little, which I respect. No public socials worth the term. A department page photo, unsmiling, braid pinned for the camera. A half-marathon time from three years ago, mid-pack. A quote in a two-year-old article about a rowhouse fire, where the reporter wanted tragedy and Dani gave her load-bearing walls. An older clipping with a photo, Dani on one knee in the street wrapping a burned dog in her own jacket while the house behind her smokes, and the comments under it are two hundred strangers proposing marriage, and I read forty of them with an expression I can feel becoming a problem.

Then a group photo from a city commendation ceremony, Station 9 in dress uniform, and I stop scrolling, because standing at the end of the row with her hands folded behind her back is a face from my own corkboard's margins.

Chief Valentina Mercer.

I know the name the way I know every name adjacent to the network, which is to say I know what's printed and I know what's missing. First female chief. Rebuilt Station 9 in her own image. Politically untouchable in a city where untouchable is a purchased condition, and yet I've never found the purchase. Her name comes up beside the commissioners and the developers like a guest at all the right funerals, and every thread that runs toward her goes clean two steps out. Nobody's record is that clean unless someone is cleaning it.

And Daniela Serrano works directly under her.

I sit back. The screen lights my hands and leaves the rest of the room to the skyline. There it is, then, the actual shape of the problem, and it would be funny if it were happening to someone else. The first person in this city to look at my work up close, the one who walked through it and put her hands on me, answers to the one person in Redwater I've never been able to read. If Mercer is what I think she might be, her station is the immune system of everything I'm burning down. And I've just been carried out of a crime scene, on camera, in the arms of her firefighter.

The smart move is written in every file on this laptop. Don't go back. Don't make contact. Be the woman from the warehouse for exactly as long as it takes the city to forget her, which is nine days, and then be nobody.

I look at the folded blanket on the chair.

The sky's gone the color of dishwater in the east. I shower, and I dress in running clothes, gray on gray, hair under a cap, the version of me that no doorman remembers, and lacing my shoes I catch a low hum under my sternum that has no business being there. It's anticipation. I haven't felt it in years over anything but a target, and there's no target this morning. There's only a burned building, and the slim chance of learning how good Redwater's investigators are, and the slimmer chance, which I'm not acting on, which is incidental, that Station 9's engine might roll past its own crime scene on the way home from a call.

The warehouse smells of cold, wet char from two blocks out.

By the time I jog the perimeter, the sun is up and the scene is staffed, two marshal's office SUVs inside the tape, a uniform at the corner keeping the phone-camera people honest. I stretch against a lamppost across the street with my coffee from a cart, one more gentrifier annoyed about her detour, and I watch two investigators work my building.