Page 11 of Honeyfires

"You look different," said Stevens, our rookie, settling in beside me. He was twenty-three, all enthusiasm and gangly limbs, still operating on the assumption that the universe was fundamentally fair. "Like you slept."

"Revolutionary concept. You should try it."

"Nah, that's not it." He squinted at me in the dark. "You've got that post-date glow."

Small towns. The absolute curse of them.

I gave him a look that could have stripped paint from the engine door. "Eyes on the job, Stevens."

But as we raced through the empty streets of San Jacinto, lights streaking everything red and white, I couldn't quite shake the memory of standing in that parking lot, Vera's taillights rounding the corner, the desert stars overhead doing absolutely nothing to make me feel less completely unmoored.

I shook it off. One thing at a time. Fire, then feelings.

Three hours later, I was coordinating a rappel sequence into a cloud of smoke and ash, all thoughts of gentle librarians and strawberry-clasped bags burned away by the immediate demands of keeping a wildfire from jumping the canyon.

The fire had other plans.

What started as a contained lightning strike had found its legs. The wind shifted without warning. Not a gentle adjustment but a full reversal, a wall of superheated air that pushed the flames up the canyon wall like something had given the fire permission to run. I watched it from my position at the door of the helicopter, sixty feet above the ridge, and did the math in my head, the way I always did: fuel load, slope, wind speed, where our safety zone would have to be, whether we still had one.

"Gomez, we need to reposition. Fire's moving faster than the briefing had it. I need eyes on the west face before I send anyone down."

Gomez's voice came through my helmet comms, even and calm in the way only twenty years of fire flying produced. "Copy that, coming around."

The bird banked, and I leaned into the door, one hand on the frame, watching the terrain below reorganize itself. The canyon wall was running orange in three places where it shouldn't have been.

I keyed my radio. "Rodriguez, be advised: wind's shifted southwest, we've got spotting on the west face. Recommending we adjust insertion to the upper ridge and cut line back toward the canyon mouth instead of into it. Over."

Rodriguez's voice crackled back. "Copy, Alves. Your call on insertion. Keep me posted."

My call. It always came down to that, in the end.

I turned back to my crew. Stevens, Miller, Jackson, and two others, all clipped in and watching me from the cabin with the focused calm of people who had trained for exactly this and were choosing not to think about the drop. "Change of plan. We're going in at the upper ridge. New anchor point, better egress if the wind keeps shifting. When we're on the rope, I go first. Stevens, you're second—you establish the anchor point and do not move from it until the rest of the crew is down. Miller, I want that safety zone assessed and marked before we start cutting line. Questions?"

Nobody had questions. That was either good training or healthy fear. Usually both.

The rappel itself was textbook. I hit the ground and unclipped in one motion, read the ground, called it clear. Stevens came down controlled and steady, eyes alert, his usual grin traded in for a concentrated focus I'd always respected about him. I watched each crew member descend, tracked their radio check-ins, coordinated with Gomez on wind and positioning.

"Helitack on the ground," I radioed in. "Gomez, we're clear. Stand by for extraction call."

"Standing by," Gomez said. "Winds are picking up down here, Alves. I'm keeping a close eye on it."

"Copy. We'll move fast."

We did move fast.

The fire had other plans for that, too.

The safety zone shrank from a hundred yards to fifty to twenty, the roar of superheated air swallowing radio chatter, smoke so thick I was navigating by terrain memory and the sound of my crew's voices. I kept the check-ins constant, kept my voice even, kept doing the math.

"Rodriguez, we need to pull back." I said it flat and certain, no room for interpretation. "Wind's accelerating, we've got spotting ahead of our position. We pull back to the secondary zone now, or we won't be pulling back at all."

There was a pause on the radio that lasted the length of approximately one geological era.

"Copy that."

"Pulling back now." I turned to my crew. "Move. Secondary zone, stay together, stay moving. Stevens, you're in front of me. Go."

We moved.