Page 2 of Smoke Season

At least the end was in sight. The river gods willing, this trip would mark the last time she jumped like a jackrabbit at the sight of her own shadow whenever she handled the thing.

Looking back at her young charge, she reminded Emmett of the height of the lookout they’d seen this morning, the expansive views its steward must be afforded from its glass walls, and he nodded, though he didn’t look entirely convinced. “But who will put out the fire, after they spot it?”

Melissa, most likely.The thought brought with it another quick kick of worry, even as True laid what she hoped was a comforting hand on the crown of Emmett’s precisely shorn head, a recent haircut she knew he took pride in. But then she smiled, turning her palms upward to catch the first of the smattering of drops to hit their skin. Finally, the rain was upon them. An ironic sign of clear skies ahead? “Mother Nature will.”

Emmett glanced up, an experimental smile on his face. “Oh hey, yeah! Good.”

True glanced back to where Vivian Wu had managed to erect their tent. “It’s gonna pour, kid. Go give your mom her coat.”

Emmett ran off, his gait lighter somehow than it had been all trip, the careful posture True had observed in his body giving way to a loosening of limbs as he loped up the slope. True hoped Vivian saw the unwinding within him that she did.

She dug her own rain jacket out of her bag and pulled her hood up over her hat as she went about putting up the table and her own tent and fly. The heavy, hot drops felt good on her bare thighs as she worked. They ran off the bill of her hat to splash onto her cheeks, soaked her board shorts, and ran down her legs to cause her feet to squish in her Chacos. By the time she had the table set up, the rain was coming down hard enough to leave sudden puddles in the divots of the sand.

But before she could move to higher ground, it stopped almost as quickly as it had come on. Emmett popped back out of his tent, followed by his mother, who sported an Arc’teryx rain shell that True knew for a fact cost more than her entire wardrobe of river wear. Emmett’s was identical to his mother’s, though his petite build swam in a men’s extra small. Instead of seeming over-the-top, however, the detail struck True as touching. The care Vivian had taken to follow the packing list to the letter, buying only the best, served to remind True how important this trip was to her.

“It didn’t rain for long!” Vivian called over now.

No, it hadn’t. It hadn’t rained nearly long enough. True glanced back toward the ridgeline of Flatiron Peak. Through the haze of the moisture still clinging to the air, she felt pretty sure she could still make out the glow of the blaze taking shape, its smoke now a cloud, dense against the damp sky.

CHAPTER 2

The sudden rain was already letting up when Melissa Bishop closed the automatic vehicle-bay door of Carbon Rural Fire District 1 and made her way into the break room, Mother Nature saving her the task of the customary post-shift vehicle hose-down.

“Looks like you’re gonna have to wash that rig after all, Chief.” Rookie volunteer Deklan Jones smirked over the rim of his Diet Coke can as what had been furious pounding just moments ago gave way to a light patter.

“Yeah? Think fast.” Mel tossed the keys, which Deklan caught on instinct, in midair. “Guessyou’vegot the job now, newbie.”

“Wait ... what the ...?!” Deklan’s face flushed practically the color of his ginger hair in indignation. He threw a cursory glance around the room, as if in hope that someone outranking Mel would come to his rescue. Dave Lewis, captain of their station? Not likely, Mel thought. He stared at his phone with a disgruntled frown, obsessed with some game his teenage kid had told him he’d never beat. The big boss, Fire Chief Gabe Hernandez, was still stuck in the city of Outlaw for the day, at one of the interminable meetings that made him curse his position at the top of the station ladder, and Doug White, Mel’s assistant chief, was mercifully already in the process of clocking out, which meant that he’d decided to take a night off from questioning her overtime hours for a change. As a single mom—even if the title still felt unnatural less than one full year into her separation—and the primary breadwinnerin her family, she’d take what she could, thank you very much, and she’d save any apologies for her daughters, eight-year-old Astor and five-year-old Annie.

The thought of her kids brought the usual double punch of guilt for being here and guilt for wishing herself anywhere else, and she was glad to turn her focus to young Deklan.

“Eighteen years old and totally clueless. I keep telling you, kid, you gotta learn some respect for your superiors.” She flicked a fry Deklan’s way for good measure before scooping up the remaining wrappers from her crew’s takeout order and disposing of them in the garbage can at the end of the galley kitchen.

“For myelders, more like,” Deklan grumbled. “What are you, like, forty?” He said this like he meant seventy.

“Thirty-eight, for the record,” Mel told him cheerfully, already headed toward the door. “I know, I know, that sounds ancient to a kid fresh out of Carbon High. And speaking of kids ... I’m ready to see mine.” With any luck, she just might escape the station with time to catch up with their father before the customary kid handoff. Her feelings for Sam Bishop were every bit as conflicted as her feelings for her work, but shedidowe him a drink at the bar and grill they still owned together. He’d bought the last round, and lord knew they had plenty to talk about. She waved a farewell, mentally halfway to the River Eddy.

Naturally, the fire gods couldn’t letthathappen. The phone buzzed on the wall, catching Mel up short in the doorway, like a woman snagged abruptly on a line. A low curse escaped her lips. A call on the landline, instead of across their comms network, could only mean one thing: an interagency request. She listened as Deklan answered—anything to get out of washing the truck, Mel figured—while reluctantly fishing her cell phone out of her pocket. She didn’t relish having to call Sam to let him know she’d be late for pickup. Again. It would trigger their usual argument, or at least one of their top ten, and they were already tangoing to a one-step-forward, two-steps-back beat.

She’d just hung up when Deklan called out to Lewis. “Hey, BM? It’s a Red Book request for us.”

This got Lewis’s attention—the request, not the nickname, which Deklan swore, in all innocence, stood for Big Man, despite Lew ranking below Mel’s battalion-chief standing. He looked up from his phone screen with a groan.

“Red Book?” he confirmed, while Mel bade a silent goodbye to any evening at all at home, let alone an early one. The girls would be disappointed. Or at least Annie would be. Astor might turn one of her newly discovered, post-parent-separation surly looks in Mel’s direction.

Deklan nodded. “Outlaw National Forest Service has a blaze sighted on Flatiron.”

The operating manual commonly referred to as the Red Book outlined the policy of cooperation between municipal fire stations like Carbon Rural and wildland stations run by the United States Forest Service and Oregon Wildfire Response and Recovery, promising first response from whoever stood closest to any fire. In this day and age of brittle-dry forests, deadly pine-beetle infestations, climate change, and increased urban development, teamwork and swift action proved any community’s best defense. And Flatiron was close—damned close—to Carbon, where Mel’s kids called home. Where Sam still tried to eke out a profit at the River Eddy. As Lewis listened on the old landline, Mel stood in the doorway, her head craned upward toward the distinct topography of Flatiron Peak. Its oddly flattened top had been formed by volcanic action some ten thousand years ago. Mel had heard the spiel of its geological history just last month, when Astor had brought a collection of lava rocks home from her second-grade field trip, lightweight enough to float in the bathtub like a misshapen Navy fleet. She’d shown Mel her science trick in an increasingly rare moment of childhood levity. Was it the looming divorce that seemed to be robbing Mel’s eldest daughter of her childhood, or had that ball been rolling since her baby sister’s birth? NoI’m a Big SisterT-shirt should comewith a life-threatening heart condition for the younger sibling attached, but here they all were.

She squinted into the haze lingering after the electric storm, scanning the sea of evergreen carpeting the slope of the mountain, but couldn’t pick out the start of a fire.

“Uh-huh,” she heard Lewis say into the phone as some Forest Service interagency supervisor got him up to speed. “Eight miles south of here? Gimme the coordinates.”

Lewis waved his thumb and forefinger in the air toward Deklan, indicating his need for a pen, then wrote the GPS coordinates given to him onto the legal pad that hung by the door. “Yep. Sure.”

While Lewis’s attention remained on the call, Mel continued to scan the mountain, searching, searching, and thenthere!She saw it ... a fine but distinct plume of smoke, almost but not quite blending into the sky still thick gray with rain clouds. Below it, the telltale blur of orange glowed, fuzzy and ill-defined as a smudge on one of the heat maps she’d studied back in her first days as a novice, ground-pounding in Colorado. “Hey, Lew?” she called, leaning back toward the hallway. “I’ve got eyes on it.”

Mel instructed Deklan to make the initial callouts to the rest of the Carbon Rural volunteer crew—“What am I, a secretary?”—while White, Mel’s superior only in title, as Sam had been known to say, trudged back in to ready the rest of the team, his face set in stony resignation. For once, Mel couldn’t fault him for his mood. Like her, he’d had one foot out the door.

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