Page 112 of The Flame Game

“Spicy!” I pranced in place, bobbing my head.

“The capsaicin is a legitimate ingredient, but we were told cindercorns appreciate when the capsaicin comes in hot sauce format. This blend uses capsaicin as a catalyst ingredient. We’ll pump a tanker of the napalm into the zone, and then we’ll layer capsaicin onto it. Within sixty seconds, the batch is ready, and it’ll last for three hours before it begins to degrade and lose general potency. The ignition point is three thousand degrees.”

“F or C?”

“F.”

I turned my head and snorted blue flame. “I can do that.”

“And we haven’t even gassed you up yet. That’s impressive, Chief Quinn.”

“Mr. Chief Quinn’s fault. Him and his tiny terrors. Tiny terrors make me run very hot. Very hot. So hot.” To prove how hot, I rolled into the nearest snowbank I could find and burrowed into it. My coat steamed, and I surged back to my hooves and snorted more blue flame for them to admire.

“Really?” my husband asked. “It’s my fault, Mrs. Chief Quinn, who conspired with my relatives to make sure we had twins? I promise you, I would not have asked for twins. I would have gone for healthy, personally. You’re the one who wanted twins for Christmas.”

I dove towards my husband, thumped onto the ground, and slid his way, wiggling across the ground before coming to a halt on my back nearby, pawing at him with a hoof, taking care to keep from hurting him. “I in-no-cent cindercorn.”

“You had one little snack earlier. That is not an excuse to be waving your hooves in the air. If you want to wave your hooves in the air, go eat your treat.”

Whinnying my laughter, I got up and went to the bucket, taking a tentative bite to test it.

It burned in the best ways possible, and I abandoned my manners to get the sparkling gel into my stomach. I licked the bucket clean. Before I had a chance to whine over my treat being gone, the tech grabbed it, refilled it, and dumped another large-sized bottle of hot sauce into the mixture before stirring.

He made me wait a full minute before giving it to me, and I almost choked in my hurry to eat it before it got taken away from me.

“They’re not going to take your treat away, my beautiful. It makes no sense for them to stop gassing up the only real cindercorn present when they need you to light fires for them. Take your time,” my husband chided. “While you do that, I’m going to go give our new wolf a neutralizer bath and see about feeding him some more.”

Alan pointed at one of the vans parked nearby. “They can help you with that. I’ll keep an eye on her and make sure she’s running hot enough to light the napalm. We’re on a timer with this blend, and I’d rather not lose two tankers of capsaicin along with our napalm. The snow will help, though. We’re going to use it to replicate the napalm, and we’ll use lake water as needed to make sure we have full coverage.”

“This very big fire.”

“Our active burn zone will be approximately seventy thousand acres. Some zones are wider than others. We’re trying to limit it to the areas with complete loss of wildlife.” The tech went to the tanker and returned with a map, which he showed me. It featured Long Lake in the middle with the burn zone colored red while the neutralizer zone was colored blue. The blue zone went beyond my expectations from Professor Yale’s descriptions of what would burn and what would be salvaged.

“Bigger than thought?”

“We’ve had as many personnel checking around the area as we can, and we’re redrawing the burn and neutralizer zones accordingly. The burn zone has grown substantially, and I expect we’ll be adding another five thousand acres along the northern shore, which was hit particularly hard,” the tech explained. “You’re going to have your work cut out for you, and we’re prepared to make a gap in the shield if you need more fuel to keep lighting the napalm. You’ll need to encourage the burn spread, so you’ll have to do a pattern from barrier to barrier to make sure everything gets lit. We think once you get a quarter of it lit, firestorms will begin igniting and help your efforts. We have a few practitioners on hand who will be attempting to encourage the development of fire twisters within the shield.”

“Oh. That cool. Sad we must burn so much, but very cool. Hot. Very hot. Yes, much hot.”

The tech chuckled. “This won’t be too bad. After you’re done and we’ve extinguished the burn zone, we have a bunch of trainee firefighters who’ll get in some practice, and once they’re done practicing, the novice practitioners will get to do cleanup. They’ll start mass replanting in the spring, and within a year, nobody’ll know this place was reduced to ash.”

“Much cool!”

Yale checked my bucket, which I’d emptied of napalm again. “Drunk yet?”

I thought about it before shaking my head. “Hot. Run much. Make barrier, eat while pumping. Make super drunk, super hot cindercorn!”

“Oh boy,” Yale muttered. “May somebody forgive me this, but give the cindercorn what she wants. Get the tone going. Maybe the sound will scare the little surviving wildlife away. Have fun, Bailey, but try not to have too much fun.”

“I have all the fun. You have the magic orange medicine.” I trotted to the rental to check on my pets, who played in the back seat. Somehow, the ocelot battled wolf and husky and managed to stay on top, ruling over her furry friends with an iron paw. “Make sure rental safe. No burn rental or puppers or kitten.”

“Your pets will be safe,” Yale promised.

I consumed so much napalm I wanted to die, but the blessed bender never came. I wanted to wade into the lake and mourn for my non-existent bender, but the barrier blocked me from reaching the water. Whining over my foul luck won me exactly nothing, and I plodded along the shoreline in search of anything living, but I found nothing.

I could only hope the bone-deep thrumming tone warning of mass destruction scared the living animals away.

The CDC brought in aerial tankers to help spread napalm faster, and the pink, sparkly, and spicy gel rained down, splattering onto the snow-laden trees and shimmering in the air. Had I not known its purpose, I would have thought it was beautiful.