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Eggs again Thursday? I'll buy bacon, since apparently you audit.

I stand on the apparatus floor of Station 9, six years of my life on every side of me, sixty seconds out from lying to my chief's face for her, and I read the word audit, and the laugh gets out before I can stop it, rough and stupid and fond, and that's when I finally understand what I'm in. It isn't the rain kiss or the counter or even the bed. It's this, right here, laughing at her joke about the lie she told me, with mine still warm in my mouth.

We're not falling, her and me. Falling's an accident. We're both walking in with our eyes open, like you enter any structure that's already showing smoke, and every firefighter knows the difference, and I put the phone back in my pocket and go find out what Thursday costs.

12

ZARA

Forty floors down, a dented blue pickup pulls out of my garage entrance, pauses too long at the empty intersection like its driver is arguing with herself, and turns north toward the cheap side of the harbor, and I stand at my window with a cold cup of coffee watching it go, and I make myself say the true sentence out loud, alone, to the glass.

“She knows.”

She doesn't know everything, not even most of it. But I watched her this morning in my kitchen doorway, still soft from my bed, doing arson investigation on my wrist with her arms folded, and I gave her bacon that doesn't exist, and she let me, and the letting is the part I keep turning over. A stupid woman would've believed me. A scared one would've pushed. Dani did neither. She catalogued the burn, the absence of bacon, the angle, the line, and I watched each item go onto the shelf behind those dark eyes, and then she asked where I keep my plates and hooked her ankle over mine and ate my eggs, and there's a word for a person who sees the fire and walks in anyway, and she wears it to work.

She suspects me, and she stayed for breakfast, and I don't know which of us that damns more.

The apartment is loud with her after she's gone. That's the wrong word, nothing in here makes a sound, but the bed holds the shape of her, both shapes, the sleeping one and the other one, and when I go to strip the sheets, standard procedure, hotel rules, my hands stop on the pillow and don't. I sit on the edge of my own bed like a guest in it and let the day before replay run, once, because rationing is how I survive everything. And my chest does the tightening it's been doing all week, and I finally stop calling it a malfunction. Attachment is supposed to be the flaw in the structure. It's holding more weight than the structure now.

Twice during the afternoon, I pick up the phone with her name open and a message half-built, you shouldn't come Thursday, and twice I delete it, because warning her off protects her and indicts me, and pulling her closer warms me and endangers her, and there's no sentence I'm permitted to send. So I do what I've always done with wrong. I schedule it. Thursday, eggs, bacon for the auditor. I'll be a liar over breakfast in three days, and God help me, I'm looking forward to it.

I strip the sheets anyway. I'm not stupid yet. The burns on my wrist pull when I wrestle the duvet, a clean hot complaint, souvenir of three a.m., a heat gun and a contact plate and my own hand half a second slow because I was listening for her breathing down the hall instead of watching my work. Eleven years without marking myself once, and the first night a firefighter sleeps in my bed I brand my own wrist like an apprentice. She read it in four seconds. I'd be proud of her if I weren't the evidence.

And tonight sits in front of Thursday like a river in front of a bridge nobody's built yet. Tonight is the Crestline.

I spend the afternoon with the file because the file is the discipline. Crestline Residences, south bank, thirty-one stories of pre-sold glass, the renderings full of golden retrievers and morning light. On the contractor's procurement sheet, third line down, the supplier from the Linden substitution memo, older now, same federal ID, selling the same wrapped poison under a new product name, and on the development side, behind two shells, Bellamy's money walking around in a hard hat. They're cladding floors nine through thirty-one starting Monday. Once it's on the building, proving it is a lawsuit. While it sits stacked on pallets on the unfinished fourteenth floor, wrapped and labeled and waiting, it can still be tested, and a burned pallet gets tested by a marshal, and a tested pallet ends a supplier, and that's why tonight can't wait for a more convenient time.

I've watched the site four nights across three weeks. The pattern doesn't vary. The crews are gone by six, gate chained by seven, one watchman in a trailer by the fence line with a space heater and a phone, asleep by one a.m. with the television's blue light jumping on his face, and his trailer sits forty meters upwind of the tower with two clear exits to the street. I have his employer's safety filings memorized; his name is Dale, it's stitched on his jacket, and Dale will not have to do anything tonight but wake up, step out his door onto open ground, and dial a number he knows.

I park on the dark side of the lumber depot at eleven and go in through the seam I found between hoarding panels on the river side, and the site swallows me. I’m enveloped by that under-construction smell, cold concrete, and the wind playing the unfinished floors like breath across a bottle. There's a white panel van parked inside the hoarding that wasn't there two nights ago, dealer plates, tucked between the crane base and the material sheds, and I stand still and watch it for four minutes. It's dark and settled on its springs, and I log it as a delivery staged for Monday's cladding crews and move, because the math says move, and the math has never been wrong about a building yet.

The construction elevator is padlocked, so it's the stairs, fourteen open flights with the river wind coming through the floor slabs, my breath metering itself like it has on every job since the first one. I showered the morning off me before I left, hotel-thorough, and I can still smell her on my skin anyway, or I'm carrying her in my head now, which is worse, a contaminant no protocol covers, climbing a tower I'm about to burn. The electrical access corridors on fourteen run behind the core, raw chases full of conduit and rated nothing yet, no drywall, no alarms, a building's nervous system lying open on the table, and I work along them by headlamp, gloved, unhurried, placing what I built at three in the morning while a firefighter slept in my bed. There are four units, spaced for convergence, each one sitting in its chase like a small patient stone, and the pallets of wrap stand stacked twenty feet away under their branded shrink film, the same product that climbed four floors of my life in eleven minutes. My hands stay steady the whole time, and the place where they're steady from is a place I'll answer for someday, but not tonight.

Somewhere on the tenth floor, a work light is burning, a single bulb on a yellow cord swaying at the edge of my vision through the slab gaps. I watch it for a while, and then I decide somebody left it on, waste, because the same men who substituted my sister's wall wouldn't pay an electrician to walk down and kill a bulb.

I'm placing the last unit when the sirens start.

They're distant, two of them braided together somewhere north, that rise and fall the city sleeps through, and I go still with my hand inside a wall like a thief in a movie, kneeling in the dark of what I'm about to do, listening. They're north and moving west, medical maybe, or a car fire, or a kitchen—somebody else's worst night. For the length of four full cycles of the sound, I am not a professional at all, I'm a woman on her knees in an unfinished tower wondering if that's her engine, if she's riding backward in her jump seat with her chin strap loose. The sirens fade off toward the bridge, and I stay kneeling another minute in the quiet they leave behind. Then I finish the work, because Natalia was twelve, and the pallets are still there, and nothing about either fact changed while I listened.

Going out, I pass the van again, but it hasn't moved and tells me nothing new. The watchman's trailer glows its steady television blue, and the gate chain is exactly as I left it. I walk the riverside seam out of the site at six minutes to one with my heart rate at sixty and my wrist stinging under the glove, the cold mud smell of the river following me up the bank.

Petra's envelope is taped where Petra tapes things, under the lip of the standpipe cabinet on level B3 of the Dunmore Street garage, a manila rectangle with grocery-store tape, and I sit in my car under the dead camera and open it by dome light, expecting the usual, council agendas, a permit trail.

It's photographs, eight of them, long lens, time-stamped.

The first shows Valentina Mercer at the Calloway, nine days after the fire, in civilian clothes, photographing the records-suite windows from the sidewalk. The next two have her at the warehouse on two different weekends, once with a flashlight at dusk, walking the collapse line with her hands behind her back like a woman at a museum. Another catches her outside the marshal's office at seven in the morning, not entering, talking lean-and-close with a records clerk on the sidewalk, coffee in hand, no notebook in sight, nothing on paper, nothing official anywhere near her. And the last one, the one Petra has flagged with a small red dot in the corner, has Mercer parked on Camden Avenue in a personal vehicle, the morning after the law office burned, three car lengths from where I stood and offered her firefighter my open door.

There's a note in Petra's pencil on the back of that one. No file number anywhere. She's doing this alone. Watch this woman.

I sit in the cold car and go through the eight photographs twice, and it must be what generals feel when they finally see the opposing camp's lamps laid out across a valley floor at night. I planned for Internal Affairs. The marshal's office is a slow institution with rules I can recite. But this is a fire chief with no file number, off the clock, walking my scenes in her own boots and her own time, asking nothing in writing, and that's not an institution. That's a hunter who's stopped reporting her position, and she sat three car lengths from me while I told Dani to bring her suspicion. The calm square-shouldered face in these photographs is the face of the only person in this city who might assemble me before I'm finished, and she commands the woman who slept in my bed last night, and at the Saltbox Dani said her name like she was standing behind her.

I run the timeline against her and it's tighter than I'd like. The journalists need the Hartwell Pace story to break, and stories take weeks, sourcing and lawyers and a Sunday edition, and Mercer is walking my scenes now, this week, on her own clock with no procedure to slow her down. If she assembles the pattern before the documents land, I'm not a whistle blowing on a rotten city. I'm an arsonist with a dead sister and a grudge, and everything in those two boxes becomes a grieving woman's collage after all, and the men in the cc lines hold their press conference about tragedy, and the word cladding goes back in its sealed box. She can't get there first. That's the whole war now, her speed against mine, and as of tonight I'm about to hand her a fresh scene to walk.

The photographs change my procedure on the spot. I get out and wipe the lip of the standpipe cabinet where Petra's tape sat, two passes, and I walk the ramp to check the dead camera with my penlight, the lens, the housing, the cut conduit behind it, dead for true and not for show. Every margin I run gets one extra pass from now on, because a woman with no file number is working my own method back at me, and the first one of us to get lazy loses.

I put the photographs in my coat against my ribs and start the car. She's another woman keeping a private file on this city. We could compare methods, she and I.

I cross the river and park on the gravel apron by the old seawall, where the south bank lays itself out across the water, the Crestline a black comb against the glow of the city behind it, and I sit on the hood of my car in the November cold with my phone in my bare hand, wrist stinging, and I make the call I always make first, the one to nobody, the inventory. Watchman in his trailer, forty meters upwind, two exits. Wind out of the northwest at eight knots, pushing any spread toward the river and away from the gate. Pallets uninstalled, unprovable in a courtroom and unmistakable in a lab. Nobody above ground level but the river birds.