“Just tripped,” Jace said, and now Ethan’s eyes returned and focused on him.
“Just tripped?”
Jace nodded. Marco was standing right behind him; he had made a big show of helping him up and then hadn’t stepped back, was so close Jace could smell his sweat.
“All right,” Ethan said, turning away and starting to walk again. “We have our first man down. Let’s talk a little about how we walk, and how we land when we fall. That second part is the most important. Remember that the pack doesn’t affect just your balance, it affects how hard you go down, so if you can, try to-”
Marco whispered, “Stay on your feet, faggot,” into Jace’s ear as they marched along, and Raymond and Drew laughed. Jace didn’t say a word. His right calf was warm with blood, and drops of it showed now on his boot.
Your own fault, he told himself. You can’t even remember your name.
He kept his head down and counted the drops of blood as they appeared on his boot, and with each fresh drop, he reminded himself of his new name.
Connor. Connor. Connor. I am Connor, and I am bleeding, I am Connor, and I am alone, I am Connor, and two men want me dead, I am Connor, and Jace is gone, Jace is gone for good.
I am Connor.
7
They watched through a modified gun sight as the boys hiked, watched them in silence and marked their course on the map, then took their bearing and heading.
“That’s the basics,” the bearded twenty-something-year-old named Kyle said. “Of course, if it’s smoke, you’ve got a lot more to report. Not just the bearing.”
Hannah Faber straightened and stepped away from the Osborne fire-finder and nodded, wetting her lips and looking at the door of the fire-tower cab and wishing that Kyle would walk out through it and leave her here alone, wishing he could grasp that if there was anything she did not need coaching on, it was Wildland Fire 101. His words washed over her: he had worked for the forest service for two years and was tired of the grunt labor they offered him and had thought this would be relaxing, a chance to maybe do some writing, he knew he had a novel in him or maybe a screenplay but sometimes poems seemed best…
All of this poured out of him as asides as he took her on a tour of the place, which certainly didn’t need much commentary. Bed here, table there, woodstove. Check, check, check. The closer he got to her and the more he talked, it seemed as if she could actually feel the nerves fraying inside her, peeling in overstretched threads, not much left. Fire season. It was back and it was close. She wanted to be alone.
He’ll be gone soon, she told herself. Just make it through a few more minutes.
Kyle had stopped talking and was eyeing her pack, and that annoyed her. Sure, it was only a backpack, but it held the contents of her life, and Hannah had grown awfully private about her life in the past ten months.
“Some damn serious boots you brought to sit up here,” Kyle said.
Tied to the back of her pack was a pair of White’s fire-line boots. To those who laid trench lines and swung Pulaskis, they were the stuff of legend. She’d tried to save some money the first year by buying cheap boots, only to have them blow out within two months, and then she followed the lead of the experienced crew members and bought the White’s. The pair on her pack was brand-new, waiting for action they would never see. She knew it was stupid to have brought them, but she couldn’t leave them behind.
“I like nice boots,” she said.
“I’ve heard women say that. Usually talking about a little different look, though.”
She managed a faint smile. “I’m a little different woman.”
“You spend a lot of time in this area?”
“Been up a few times,” she said. “Let’s get to it, shall we? You were going to talk me through the radio protocol.”
Then it was on to the radio, his eyes away from her pack and from the fire boots. Finally they moved to the topographic maps on a chart table.
“When you see smoke, you call it in. So your first job is to see it, obviously, and then you have to give them the right position. That’s where this little thing comes in.” He indicated the Osborne again, which was essentially a round glass table with a topographic map underneath it. On the outside of it were two rings, one fixed and one that rotated. The rotating ring carried a brass sighting device, just like a gun sight.
“Harder to demonstrate with no active fire,” Kyle said. “That’s why we used that camping group or those Boy Scouts or whoever they are. Think you can find the mountain they were hiking beneath on your own?”
She found it again. Immediately.
“Good work,” Kyle said. “Now comes the harder part. Try to guess, without using the map, what distance they are from us.”
Hannah stared out the window and off to the south, locating the peak above the group, and while she didn’t look at the map, the map was in her mind. She studied the mountain, let her eyes trace a creek running down from it, and said, “Seven miles.”
“Seven?” Kyle smiled. “You like to be precise, right? Well, you’ll like Ozzy, then.”
“Ozzy?”
He shrugged. “You get bored up here, you start nicknaming shit, I don’t know. Point is, it will let you be a lot more precise. Here.” He rotated the bezel of the table and lined the brass sight up with the group of hiking boys again. She knelt and peered through, taking the boys in as a whole, not wanting to focus on any particular one-she couldn’t have the memories that might shake loose, absolutely could not revisit those memories here, in front of him.
“Okay. Got them.”
“Great. That was fast. Now pretend they’re not a group of kids but a fire. Something in there could burn you. You’re flustered, you’re scared, something out there is dangerous. You’re pointing at a hundred and sixty-one degrees, see that? So now you know it’s at a hundred and sixty-one degrees from your tower. Now look at the map and show me where you think it’s burning.”
She studied the topographic map, its gradients showing elevation changes, and found the most visible peak near the blaze, then worked down and pointed with her index finger.
“Around there?”
“Pretty close. Actually…wow, that’s real close. An inch is two miles on that map. Use the ruler there and tell me how many inches it is from us.”
It was just a shade under three and a half inches. Seven miles.
“Damn,” Kyle said softly. “Good guess.”
She allowed a smile. “I’ve watched some smoke in the past.”
“In towers?”
“No.”
“Where, then?”
“Hotshot crew.”
He tilted his head. “And now you want a tower?”
She’d said too much. Her pride had reared up, but it had been a mistake to mention the crew, because now Kyle understood. He’d listened to enough radio traffic to understand the food chain. When the regular-hand crews got into a blaze they couldn’t handle, the hotshots would roll, and the only ones higher up on the food chain than them were the smokejumpers. Bunch of guys parachuting in behind walls of flame. Cheaters, Hannah had said to Nick once, watching them descend. We had to walk our asses in here.
Nick had laughed hard at that. He’d had a beautiful laugh. At night, she went to sleep hoping that his laugh would come to her in her dreams instead of the screams.
It never did.
She kept her eyes away from Kyle’s when she said, “Yeah, the fire line is more than I can handle these days. So, listen, when I see the fire, I call it in, and what else?”
“Hang on,” he said. “Hang on. You’re Hannah Faber, aren’t you? Were you at Shepherd Mountain last year?”