Page 5 of Into the Fire

Marty’s cleaner left the locker smelling of industrial orange. I put my boots on the lower shelf and shut the door.

I left the ready room and made it halfway across the gravel before Shep found me. “So they’ve got you in the bunkhouse,” he said. “Same bed as before?”

“Haven’t seen it yet.”

He fell in beside me, carrying a sandwich in one hand. “Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“The Meridian fire. Did you really come through the trees on a streamer and cut yourself out of a hundred-foot larch with a four-inch folding knife?”

“No streamer. The chute opened.”

Shep looked disappointed.

“I did hang up in a tree at Meridian. That part was true. Sixty feet, maybe, in a Douglas fir. I sat in my harness for two hours cracking jokes on the radio while a very patient man named Okafor talked a rookie through setting up a ladder. Then I climbed down a rope like every other man who’s ever hung up in a tree.”

“Boone was on Meridian,” Shep said. “He never talks about the old fires, though. He doesn’t really talk about anything before—” Shep walked right up to the Carson Ridge cliff and looked over. “Before I got here,” he finished. He took a large bite of his sandwich.

“What’s he like now?” I asked.

I heard about the time Boone drove to Kessler at midnight because Shep’s truck threw a belt outside the bar. I also heard that Boone had never once, in three seasons, made Shep feel stupid. He delivered that information with gravity.

“He’ll tell you what you did wrong,” Shep said. “He won’t ever tell you what you are. You know?”

I knew, but there were five years of Boone I needed to learn.

“Anyway,” Shep said, “he’s the best there is.”

Shep was still talking when we reached the loft, having transitioned from Boone to his truck, because all roads led to his truck. “So the guy quotes me four hundred, and I tell him Kessler Auto did Ramirez’s entire bed for two-fifty, which is not technically—”

The smells were the trigger: canvas, sewing-machine oil, and resin.

In my head, Dutch was below me and to the left, shouting through the smoke. One word. I could see his mouth form it.

Then it was gone, like always.

“—which is not technically a lie,” Shep said. “Right?”

“Right,” I said.

I’d stopped a half-step inside the door. Nash was at the long bench with a main chute laid out its full length. He didn’t look up. He ran his hands down the lines to the risers, and he squared the pack tray with the edge of the bench. Then he looked up.

“Vega.”

“Nash.”

He had gray at his temples, and it was bleeding into the rest of his hair. I’d still trust his hands. There were maybe three men whose rigging I’d trust without checking. One of them was dead, and one of them was Nash.

He’d been on Carson Ridge, too.

“Thursday,” Nash said. “Zero eight. Gear eval. Bring your feet, and we’ll size from scratch. I’m not trusting a five-year-old card.”

“My feet haven’t changed.”

“Your feet belong to a thirty-four-year-old fence builder. We’ll size from scratch.” He walked around the bench and shook my hand, one pump.

“You still climbing?”