Chapter Two: A Fair ExchangeThe first thing Derek saw was the wine — two glasses, deep red, catching the light on the coffee table.The second thing was Mike, wearing Derek's own pajamas, the gray ones with the frayed left cuff Erin had sworn a dozen times she'd throw out and never had.The third thing was his wife.Erin stood at the stove in a cheerful apron printed with cartoon kittens, stirring something that smelled like garlic and butter. She looked comfortable. She looked at home.This was the same woman who had once sent him a long, furious email about how domestic labor divisions reduced women to servants in their own houses. She'd sent it after a dinner party where someone's husband made a joke about who did the dishes, and she'd cried afterward, actually cried, saying she was terrified of becoming that — invisible, unpaid, unseen. Derek had read the email twice, then a third time, and agreed with every word of it. So he'd taken over the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry —

Chapter Four: Eleven Minutes"Moss." Brett's voice was flat, the voice he used when there was no time to soften anything. "You seeing the news?""I'm seeing it.""Los Vangees jumped two ridgelines in the last hour. It's in the resorts now, it's in the residential streets. State's activated mutual aid across four counties, and we're on the list." A pause, the sound of something shuffling on Brett's end — a duffel bag, a jacket. "All available personnel roll out oh-two-hundred. That's ninety minutes, Derek.""I'll be there.""I mean it when I say this might be the worst one we've ever seen." Brett's voice dropped, softer now, almost careful. "I've got guys calling their kids right now who haven't spoken to them in months. Say your goodbyes properly tonight, Derek. However that looks for you.""Understood.""You good?"Derek looked down at his split knuckles, at the blood drying along the seam of his own thumb. "I'm good, Brett.""Ninety minutes." The line went dead.Derek stood in the h

Chapter Six: The Line That Won't HoldSix hours on the road put them into a county that no longer looked like anything on a map.They'd driven through the last hour in near silence, the convoy's headlights carving through a haze that thickened with every mile, radio traffic from other departments bleeding through in fragments — evacuation counts, resource requests, one exhausted voice reading off a list of structures already lost in a tone that had long since stopped sounding shocked by any of it. Derek watched it all through the windshield and felt something in him settle into the particular stillness that came right before a job that mattered more than he did.The sky over Los Vangees was the wrong color — a deep, bruised orange that never fully brightened into day and never fully darkened into night, just hung there, thick with ash that fell like dirty snow onto the windshield. Fire Chief Rodriguez Hale met them at the staging area with a face that had clearly not slept in two days

Chapter Eight: The House in the FireDerek hit the front porch at a dead run and didn't slow down.The door was already half-consumed, the wood soft and blackened, and it gave way under his shoulder with almost no resistance. Heat rolled out to meet him — a wall of it, thick enough to feel like a physical hand shoving him back.He went in anyway.The first floor was a maze of smoke and collapsed furniture, orange light pulsing through gaps in the ceiling where the fire above had already started eating through. Somewhere close, glass cracked and gave way in a small, bright shower. He dropped low, counting doorways by memory and instinct the same way he had a lifetime ago in Suite 318, except this time there was no woman waiting on the other side to look at him like he was an inconvenience.There was just a staircase, half of it already burning, and a house that had stopped feeling like a house and started feeling like something with intent — something actively trying to keep him out."

Chapter Ten: The Wrong NameThe field hospital had been set up in what used to be a high school gymnasium, cots lined in uneven rows under fluorescent lights that flickered every few minutes when the backup generators strained against the load. A banner still hung crooked over one basketball hoop — CONGRATULATIONS CLASS OF — the rest of it lost behind a curtain someone had strung up to give the more serious cases something like privacy. Derek sat on the edge of a cot near the far wall, an oxygen line clipped under his nose more as a formality than a necessity, while a nurse redressed the burn on his forearm he hadn't noticed getting until an hour ago, her hands quick and unbothered, the motions of someone who had done this a hundred times tonight already and would do it a hundred more before sunrise.Two beds down, behind a thin curtain, Margaret lay hooked to a monitor that had finally settled into a steady, unhurried rhythm.They'd stabilized her twenty minutes ago. The doctor said