Page 15 of Jethro

Sonny raised the thermal imager again. Heat whited out the doorway, but near the bottom of the screen a darker shape appeared, vanished behind steam, then appeared again. Too fixed to be a person, he told himself. Too regular.

“Command, Delta recon. Possible object near the entrance. Cannot confirm victim.” Aurora answered immediately.

“Do not enter. Repeat, do not enter. Mark the location and maintain the collapse zone.” Wilder swallowed.

“If somebody’s in there—”

“If somebody is in there,” Aurora said, her calm now edged like broken glass, “this structure is not survivable. We do not add names to the count.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

The words settled over the channel while water thundered into flame. Jethro knew they were true. He also knew truth did not stop the mind from building a person out of every shifting shadow, especially in a fire at night. The cannery’s history made it worse.

Though officially empty, it had sheltered people in winter. Crews had chased teenagers out in summer. A padlock on an abandoned building was often only proof that someone had once tried to keep it closed.

He glanced toward Aurora. She was standing near the command board, speaking to dispatch and the battalion chief at once, but her face revealed the same calculation: time since ignition, fire volume, collapse, survivable space.

Each factor led to the same conclusion, and none of them made it bearable. The aerial opened above the roof and swept a heavy stream through the collapsed center. Steam billowed outward, swallowing the upper walls. The fire retreated room by room, revealing black rafters and tilted equipment, then surged whenever water shifted away. Kai adjusted his grip at Jethro’s shoulder.

“You ever think about accounting?” he asked.

“Constantly. But I chose the Marines instead. Much safer.”

“Nice office. Little plant. Nobody hands you a hose or weapons and says, ‘Argue with that building’ or ‘Go get that bad guy’. Just fix that spreadsheet.” Jethro leaned into the nozzle as pressure rose.

“I know you. You’d steal the plant.”

“I’d water it with professional consistency.” Sonny cut in from Delta.

“Kai, you’d kill a cactus.”

“Cactus knows what it did and why I’m coming for it. Don’t blame me for getting even.”

A violent crack interrupted them. The north wall bulged outward, boards separating enough to show lines of fire between them. Aurora’s evacuation tones sounded across every radio, three shrill bursts that cut through the engines and water.

“Emergency traffic. North wall failure imminent. All teams withdraw to secondary collapse line.”

Crews backed away dragging hose, no one turning until they had doubled the wall’s height in distance. For a moment it held, swollen and trembling. Then the top half tipped outward as one ragged slab. It struck the earth and shattered, throwing sparks and burning planks across the yard. The line Jethro and Kai had occupied minutes earlier disappeared beneath it. Wilder bent forward with both hands on his knees.

Sonny stood beside him, close but not touching.

“Still think you saw movement?” he asked quietly on their private channel. Wilder looked at the wreckage and spoke again, trying to make sense of what he’d seen, or thought he saw.

“I don’t know what I saw.”

Nearly an hour passed before the black column thinned to gray. The building, no longer presented as a building so much as a burning outline: three partial walls, a collapsed roof, and heaps of machinery that steamed under the master streams. The brittle lumber had failed in layers.

Some timbers stood upright with their centers eaten away, red at the edges, while others lay across voids like bridges no one could trust. Water sheeted through the loading bays and carried ash into the gutter. The street became a shallow black river.

Aurora rotated crews, forced them to drink, checked air and exhaustion. Nobody wanted to step away. The smell of accelerant diminished under wet charcoal, but it never vanished. At the rehab tarp, team members from Belle Fleur were manning the area. Wilder peeled off his hood with hands that trembled from more than exertion. Eloise passed him a bottle of water.

“Cold?” she asked. He shook his head.

“I keep thinking about the door.” Eloise did not tell him he imagined it.

“You reported what you saw. You followed the order.”

“That doesn’t make it nothing. What if someone was in there? What if it was something?”