Page 67 of Christmas with Three Firemen

She walks out. The door doesn’t slam. It clicks, quiet and final, and her footsteps go down the hall, even and controlled, and then they stop.

They just stop.

I cross my office and stand at the door I can’t seem to do anything useful with tonight, and through the gap I can see her, halfway down the half-lit hall, folder against her chest, standing dead still between my door and the stairs. Going neither direction.

The mezzanine lights blink their colors over the rail below her, and the furnace hums somewhere down in the building’s chest, and she stands there so long I stop breathing.

Say something. Go after her. Knock, for once in your life, on anything.

I don’t move.

After a long moment she walks on, and the stairwell door swallows her, and the hallway is just a hallway.

I go back to my desk. The injury report is still open on the screen, Rico’s name at the top, my signature at the bottom, the cursor still blinking in the last empty field like it’s been waiting for me the whole time.

Narrative of event.

I close the laptop and sit in my office in the dark, and downstairs the house I keep goes on humming without me, rigs fueled, roster covered, doors locked, everything accounted for except the words I can’t log out of service and the woman standing somewhere above me who didn’t answer them.

She didn’t say no.

That’s the part I’ll be awake with.

She didn’t say no.

Chapter twenty

Chapter Twenty: Noelle

At nine twenty, the bay is humming its ordinary evening hum, and then the whole world shuts off at once: the overheads, the radio, the refrigerator’s drone, the streetlights outside, everything, one clean cut from noise to nothing.

For a moment the darkness is total in a way city darkness never is.

Then the generators catch somewhere below the floor, a deep cough and climb, and the essential circuits come back, one strip of light down the center of the bay, the radio console, the bay door controls. Everything else stays dark.

“Grid’s gone,” Danny says from the kitchen doorway, unbothered, and reaching into the cabinet above the refrigerator. “Whole feed, sounds like.”

Danny comes out with two flashlights, and Callum is lifting glass jars down from a shelf I assumed held preserves, and within ten minutes there are small flames going up along the apparatus bay windowsills, jar after jar. The bay fills with moving gold light, and the trucks throw long shadows.

I stand at the window and scrape a circle in the frost with my thumbnail.

Outside, the neighborhood has gone dark, block after block, but not black. Through the frost the brownstones glow, string lights running on their battery packs, stoop after stoop, window after window, small stubborn constellations refusing the outage. No streetlights, no signs, no towers. Just that. The city reduced to its most essential light.

Somewhere behind me, at the far end of the bay, Grant is checking the generator readouts. We have not spoken since his office.

We’ve been orbiting each other at maximum distance, polite in doorways, and the question he asked me is still sitting where he left it, unanswered, because I still don’t have the answer.

The candles waver. The radio crackles.

At nine fifty-one, dispatch tones drop into the quiet like stones.

Structure collapse, partial, occupied. Four blocks south. A construction scaffold has come down in the dark, taken part of a facade with it, workers unaccounted for.

The bay does its fast-ordered thunder, gear and boots, and engine turnover, and this time I don’t watch from a window.

I stand at the radio console with Kowalski, who’s holding the house, because he made room for me beside him without a word and I have stopped pretending I can be anywhere else.

The traffic comes in fragments.