A sample from
Burnover
The relative humidity had dropped four points in the last hour, and Rafe Delgado wrote the number down in pencil because pencil didn't lie the way memory did.
He worked the little glass box at the top of the ridge the way some men worked a rosary — the same circuit, in the same order, so the hands stayed busy while the eyes did the real work. Belt weather kit off the nail. Sling psychrometer out the north window, whirled until his shoulder ached, the wet-bulb reading dragged low and stubborn. Fuel-moisture sticks off the rail, weighed against the little brass scale that had come up the mountain in a mule pannier before he was born. Wind speed off the anemometer, whining its thin note on the roof. Each figure into the logbook in a hand so square it looked printed, each figure worse than the one before it.
Twenty-two percent and falling. A single-digit fuel stick. Wind out of the southwest, gusting, backing a few degrees each time it came around, which was the part nobody down in staging would want to hear, because a backing wind was the sky changing its mind, and a fire under a sky that changed its mind did things that got people killed.
Twenty miles out, past three folds of blue country, the column stood up over the Craggs.
He'd been watching it since noon the way you watch a stranger in an empty parking lot — not staring, just never quite letting it out of the corner of your eye. Early on it had been a lazy thing, gray-white, leaning off to the east the way a well-behaved column should, top sheared flat by the wind aloft. Honest smoke. He'd logged it and left it alone.
It was not leaning now. Sometime in the last half hour the top had gone from gray to a dirty cauliflower cream, boiling up on itself, punching a hard bright dome above the shear line. Rafe knew that dome. That dome was the fire making its own weather, its own wind, ceasing to care what the forecast wanted from it. He stood at the north glass with the psychrometer still swinging from his hand and read the sky the way his grandmother had read the faces of men who came to the door, and what the sky said was: not today, and maybe not you, but soon, and somebody.
He picked up the radio to call it in.
That was when he heard the stairs.
Sixty-one steps up the tower's steel legs, and Rafe knew every one of them by the noise it made — knew the third-from-bottom that rang, knew the flex of the switchback landing, knew the particular unhurried heaviness of a man who climbed like he already owned whatever was at the top. He knew that climb specifically. He'd have known it in his sleep, and had, twice, and woken up angry about it.
He set the radio down. He did not turn around.
The trapdoor at the catwalk knocked back on its hinge, and the afternoon came in warm and resinous, and Ellis Kade hauled himself up into Rafe's forty square feet of the world like he'd been invited.
"Delgado." Ellis was breathing hard from the climb and hiding it, one hand on the rail, yellow Nomex dark down the spine with sweat, a line pack still on his shoulders. Green eyes doing the thing they did, taking a full inventory of the room and finding it faintly amusing. "They said you were up here talking to your instruments. Didn't believe them. Here you are."
"You're on my catwalk," Rafe said.
"I climbed all this way. Least you can do is offer me the view." Ellis crossed to the west rail without being asked and put both hands on it and looked out over the country, and Rafe hated, with a specificity that surprised him every single time, how good the man looked doing it — loose and certain, the sun laying gold along a jaw that hadn't seen a razor in three days, at home fifty feet in the air on a stranger's tower. Ellis Kade had never in his life walked into a room and wondered whether he was welcome. It was the single most infuriating thing about him, and Rafe had a long list.
"Incident's reorganizing," Ellis said, still looking out. "They're pulling the staffed lookouts back or doubling them up, depending. I drew the short straw and the long walk. My crew's down in the timber below you, chasing the little stuff that's been creeping the drainage since noon — nothing that won't lie down once the sun's off it. Came up to tell you: pack it or plan to sit it out, dispatch's call, but they want a body up here either way with eyes on the Craggs run." He finally turned. "So. Which is it, viejo. You staying, or you letting somebody competent drive for once?"
The whole grudge, in ten words. Rafe felt the old heat come up his neck and clamped it flat, because the heat was exactly what Ellis wanted and Rafe would sooner burn than hand it over.
"You want eyes on the Craggs run," Rafe said, "you've got them. That column's gone convective in the last thirty minutes. Top's boiling, shear's losing the argument, and the surface wind's been backing southwest to south-southwest for an hour." He nodded at the logbook without looking at it. "It's in the book if you can read cursive."
Ellis's mouth did something. Not quite a smile. "There it is."
"There what is."
End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.