ORCHID MARK

Chapter Four — What Fits in a Suitcase

                           “A man walks into the fire not because he is brave, but because he is already burning.”

He was at the fire. Los Vangees.

He sent it.

Then he went back to smiling.

Vice Captain Brett Holland saw the suitcase before he saw Derek's face.

He let three full seconds pass before he said anything. In those three seconds, he took inventory: the bandaged leg, the soot still under Derek's nails despite a quick wash, the way Derek carried the bag not heavy with gear, heavy with something else. Brett had been a firefighter for nineteen years. He knew the weight of a man who had just lost something.

"You need to stow that in the locker room," Brett said finally. "Gear up in ten."

"Already stowed."

Brett nodded. He said nothing about the suitcase. Some things you don't press before a deployment.

"Briefing's at 0200. Los Vangees has requested mutual aid from six counties. Wind shifted at 2100 District 1 is directly in the path now. That's Morelbu Hills."

"The estates."

"The estates." Brett lowered his voice. "There are already fatalities, Derek. I need your head completely in this."

"When has my head ever been anywhere else?"

Brett almost said something then. Almost. Instead, he squeezed Derek's shoulder once, brief, the way men communicate the things they've decided not to name and turned toward the apparatus bay.

Christian Browning was waiting at the entrance.

He was flanked by two members of his clique Cooper, who had never completed an interior attack without retreating, and Mills, who had twice filed complaints against Derek for insubordination that had twice been dismissed. Christian himself had the easy posture of a man who had never worried about where he slept. His family's name was on a wing of the county fire academy. His position had been arranged the way positions are arranged when money is involved.

The Captain's seat was opening in six weeks. Everyone in the station knew the two names being considered.

"Moss." Christian offered a smile that didn't reach the eyes. "Rough night. Heard you were at the Meridian fire."

"I was."

"Domestic call, wasn't it? It must've been hard." He let the pause stretch just long enough. "Anyway. Los Vangees is not a standard deployment. Command structure will be strict. Any deviation from assigned sector protocol, any freelancing, any grandstanding and I'll have grounds for suspension on return." He tilted his head. "Assuming there is a return, of course."

It was the smile that accompanied it that did it. Not the threat Derek had absorbed threats from better men than this. But the smile. The genuine pleasure.

Brett stepped in. His voice dropped to something flat and cold.

"Browning. We deploy in forty minutes into an active mass-casualty event. You will not use this staging area to conduct your personnel politics. Am I understood?"

Christian held the smile for exactly one more second. Then he nodded, turned, and walked away with his two shadows at his heels.

Mills glanced back at Derek as he went.

Derek looked through him.

The convoy left at 02:30.

Derek rode in the second engine, beside a probationer named Torres who was on his first major deployment and was doing an admirable job of pretending not to be terrified. Derek had been that man once. He couldn't remember exactly when he'd stopped being him somewhere between his second structural collapse and the night he pulled a mother and two children from a second-floor apartment while the floor dissolved beneath his boots.

He stared out the window at the black highway and the distant orange glow that was not a sunrise.

His phone lit up on his thigh. He glanced down.

A text from an unknown number. Los Vangees area code the same one that had called twice before.

The message read: Are you Derek Moss? Firefighter, Vendric County? It's important that we speak.

Derek stared at it for a long moment.

He locked his screen and put the phone in his breast pocket.

Torres was looking at the horizon. "Is it always like that?" he asked quietly. "The color?"

"Yes," Derek said. "You never get used to it."

"Good or bad?"

Derek thought about that.

"Keeps you honest," he said.

The convoy rolled on into the burning dark.

District 9 held for six hours before the wind made it irrelevant.

Derek's team had been clearing firebreak along the upper ridge of a highway spur chain saws and hand tools and the particular muscle memory of men who do brutal work in brutal conditions and keep the complaints inside where no one can hear them. Torres had stopped looking scared around hour three. By hour five, he was anticipating orders before they came.

Derek filed that away. Good instincts. The kind you can't teach.

The dispatch came at 06:11.

District 1 compromised. Wind shift confirmed. Morelbu Hills fully in path. All available units reroute immediately.

They came down off the ridge into a scene that looked like the end of something. The staging area at Morelbu Hills' southern approach was controlled by chaos engines and ambulances and triage tents and news vans packed into a resort parking lot that had been, twenty-four hours ago, full of luxury SUVs. The mountain above was black and still smoldering. The air tasted of ash and the specific chemical bitterness of burning synthetic materials.