Page 63 of Igniting Her

“She is not you. I know that.” Cassie pressed her fingertips harder against the plaque. “She is herself in every way that frightens me. She sees what I am doing and stays long enough to give me another chance. Then I hurt her because she stayed.”

Upstairs, a pipe shifted. The station breathed around its sleeping crew.

“She told me she’s falling in love with me.”

Cassie closed her eyes.

“I love her.”

The truth did not change shape when spoken. It did not become manageable or less dangerous. It simply existed in the bay, carried by the same air as Jules’s name.

Cassie had believed the repetition lived in the women: brilliant firefighters with quick instincts, fierce loyalty, and too little respect for the part of danger that arrived after success. She had been wrong. The repeating thing was her. Loving in silence. Converting terror into command. Preparing the loss before anyone had left.

She opened her eyes and looked at the plaque.

She was standing in the same fire twice.

Nothing in twenty years of burning buildings had frightened her more than recognizing it and knowing she might still obey it.

17

ELLIE

The Santa Ana had been trying the station doors since before dawn.

By eight, the wind had stripped three palm fronds into the parking lot and rolled an empty recycling bin uphill. The county map on the day-room television glowed red from the foothills to the coast. Humidity: nine percent. Gusts along the ridges: forty-five miles an hour and rising. Every department channel carried some version of the same instruction—check your equipment, expect simultaneous calls, do not let routine make you stupid.

Cassie delivered the morning briefing with the bay doors closed against the dust.

“Red-flag staffing is in effect. No outside training. Brush gear rides on both apparatus. If we catch anything above the canyon roads, watch the wind before you watch the flame.” Her gaze traveled once around the table. It reached Ellie and did not hesitate. “Questions?”

Teak lifted a hand. “If I blow into the harbor, does the department recover me or write off the equipment?”

“Depends which equipment you take with you,” Cassie said.

The crew laughed. Ellie did too, half a beat late.

Since the call on Mariner Lane, Cassie had behaved with faultless care. She assigned Ellie work equal to her skill. She remembered when Ellie had missed lunch and left a covered plate in the warming drawer without saying who had done it. She never touched her. She never used her first name. Nothing in her manner admitted that she had held Ellie through tears or heard the truth whispered into her shoulder.

Nothing denied it either.

The uncertainty stayed beneath Ellie’s ribs through apparatus check and the first two medical calls. By early afternoon, the wind had scoured the sky to a hard blue and put grit between her teeth each time she crossed the bay. Mo topped off the drinking-water cooler. Priya checked the trauma bags again. Jamie secured anything on the rear apron light enough to become airborne. Nobody said they were waiting for the big one.

At one seventeen, the tones dropped.

“Engine 12, Rescue 12, Engine 7, Truck 6. Residential structure fire, multiple callers. Eight-hundred block Mirador Crest. Evacuation in progress. Possible extension to vegetation.”

Every chair moved at once.

Ellie stepped into her turnouts while the dispatcher was still repeating the address. Coat, hood, radio, helmet. She climbed into the rear cab beside Jamie as Mo started the quint. Across the bay, Teak and Priya pulled Rescue 12 into the wind.

Engine 12 cleared the apron in seventy-six seconds.

Smoke was visible before they reached the canyon road, a black column bent nearly horizontal above the hills. Dispatch added callers as they climbed: a house fully involved, embers crossing the street, residents evacuating on foot, one vehicle blocking access. Then a sheriff’s unit reported a spot fire below the ridge and asked for more engines.

The incident channel filled before they were halfway there. Engine 7 called from the opposite side of downtown. Truck 6 was trying to come up from the coast road. A second sheriff’s unit asked whether the fire department could open the evacuation route while law handled door-to-door warnings. Dispatch answered three voices at once and lost part of each.

Cassie waited for the overlap to clear. “All Mirador units, switch to Tac Three. Engine 12 is first due. Law owns evacuation traffic. Fire companies keep access open and proceed to the address.”