“Right,” she told him. “But it’s protocol, Connor. We go ahead and deploy, just in case.”
“Then why are we moving the-”
“Because it’s the right choice,” she said. “I’m fine. Look at this! There’s nothing for it to burn. It’s just rock. I can sit here all day. It might get a little warm, but I’ll be fine.”
“Okay. Then we can all stay.”
Hannah said, “Connor? I need you to help her. I need you to.”
He looked at Allison, then Hannah, then back at his fire. It had caught the full force of the wind and found its slope and gathered speed, then sprinted to meet the rocks and foundered there. Behind it, the main blaze was very close.
“Finish the job,” Hannah said. “You can’t quit halfway through. Now help her get the shelter up.”
He didn’t say anything. Couldn’t come up with words, let alone get them out. He knew she was lying to him. At least about some of it.
“Get back in,” she said. “Connor, get back in, and this time, you stay there. I’m fine. Know that I’m fine, I’m not going anywhere. And thank you. You saved people. You don’t understand it yet, but I promise you that you did.”
“Then we don’t need to go down to-”
“You’re why I’m here, do you get that?” she said. “I’m here to make sure you get in that shelter and stay in it. Both of you. Now listen to me. You do not leave that shelter until you hear the sound of my voice. You’ve got to promise me that. It will seem like the fire’s gone, like everything is done, but you won’t know that for sure, not inside there. You won’t know what to trust. So you wait on the crew boss to release you, all right? And right now, buddy, I’m the crew boss. You wait on my voice.”
44
They had the shelter up in the ashes before the fire broke the timberline. Hannah watched it come on and she knew that it was up to the wind now.
She’d spoken with Nick only once about the possibility of dying in a fire. It had been the day he confessed that he would never deploy a fire shelter, that he didn’t like the idea. She’d argued with him then, told him how stupid it was, told him that attempting to run away from a forest fire was like running from the very hand of God-you knew you had no chance, so why would you try? All he would become, she had said, was another cross on a mountain. And his answer, with the sly smile that defused the debate before it could become a fight, was that he just wanted to make sure his was the highest cross.
I want to be winning the race at some point, at least, he’d said. Bury me high. Because he’d stayed to get her in the shelter, though, his had been the lowest cross at Shepherd Mountain in the end.
She couldn’t have run now if she’d wanted to, but she didn’t want to. She needed to watch. She owed them that.
God, it was gorgeous. A thirty-foot-high wall of orange and red dancers. She wondered vaguely if any of them at Shepherd Mountain had appreciated its beauty at the end. Thought that Nick would have, maybe. That seemed possible.
She knew it would pick up pace once it broke the tree line, but she had forgotten just how fast it could go. The astonishing thing was the way it raced uphill. Gravity owned much of the world, but it did not own fire. The flames broke the timberline in a rush and found what should have been a field of grass.
All that remained was ash.
It seemed to anger the fire.
A quarter of the way up the slope, the fire doubled its speed, advancing as if zipping along a fuse cord, rushing toward its detonation point. It reached the fire shelter at that speed and then she couldn’t see the shelter any longer. She could feel the wind, though, and the wind was good, it was gusting, it was what they needed, a fast-and-holding wind. There was nothing back there for the fire to eat, and so it wouldn’t stay. The smoke was thick but she could see the silver shimmer of the shelter, and she knew that the boy was alive inside.
“He’s going to make it,” she said. “He’s going to make it home.”
No one argued. The ghosts circled behind her in silent, respectful fashion and watched the flames move on, faster than would have been possible if the grass had remained, racing past the fire shelter, riding that beautiful wind up the mountain and on to meet her.
Nick came and sat beside her, close enough so that they were just barely touching, that graze of contact that gave her butterflies the first time and never stopped. She leaned against him and felt his warmth, and neither of them said a word. They didn’t need to. They could watch in peace now.
The job was done and the boy was safe.
45
He insisted that he’d heard her voice. His story never changed. At first nobody had seen the point in trying to change his mind-what did it matter? Later, Allison wondered if it was possible. If she could actually have called to him in the end.
All that Allison had heard was the fire. It had thundered over them and sounded and felt like nothing else she’d experienced in her life. It was like lying on the tracks as a long freight train scorched above you and somehow none of the wheels ever made contact.
Jace had tried to get out of the shelter and she had fought him. It wasn’t easy to hold so tight; it hurt terribly, but she had told Hannah that she would hold him tight and so she did and eventually he stopped fighting and held her too as the fire thundered on and on and the shelter began to feel like a burning coffin.
The sound faded but did not go away, and Allison was sobbing and terrified that they were running out of air; there didn’t seem to be enough oxygen.
“Air,” she said. “Air. We’ve got to get this thing open.”
He fought her again then, but it was different, he was holding her in, not the other way around. Allison wanted to claw her way out, even if the flames still waited, anything for a breath.
“Not until we hear her voice,” he kept shouting, “not until we hear her voice.”
She wanted to scream back that they were never going to hear her voice, because Hannah was dead and they would be too if he didn’t let her open the shelter. He kept fighting her, and then, just when she was certain she could bear no more, he said, “That’s her. That’s Hannah. Go on and open it.”
Allison had heard nothing but the fire and the wind, but she wasn’t going to argue the point, she had to escape that shelter, and so she fumbled it apart gratefully and they fell out into a world of smoke.
The fire was gone. The charred landscape showed where it had run on past them, and orange flames burned in the drainages on either side of them, but there on the hillside, all that was left was smoldering embers.
They were alive.
It was there that firefighters found them an hour later, after they’d been spotted by a helicopter. Two of the three survivors on the mountain, they told her.
“Three?”
“Two of you and a man on top. He signaled the helicopter, otherwise we might have been a long time finding you in all this smoke.”
“Ethan,” she said.
“I don’t know his name.”
But she did.
“You’re lucky,” he said. “You’re damn lucky. Three survivors, but we’ve got four bodies too.”
“No,” Jace said. “No, there are four survivors. If Ethan is up high, then there are four of us.”
The firefighter didn’t want to answer that, and Jace began to shout at him then, saying there were four, he knew that there were four because he’d heard her, because she’d called to him to tell him that it was safe, and then Allison held him again, and she did not let go until they were off the mountain.
The bodies told the stories that witnesses never could have, even though they had come to the mountains to eliminate witnesses. In the hospital, in a haze of pain and blood loss and medication, Ethan told anyone who would listen that the brothers were not American, and he knew this because one of them read the winds wrong. Nobody paid much attention. Ethan was saying a lot of things at that point.