[Issue 2025.73]

‘Dare Seize the Fire’, Jennifer R. Donohue

Art © 2025 L.E. Badillo

---

This isn’t how I’m supposed to die.

Knowing that, I take the risk. Behind me, Fisher bites off my name as I step off the edge, not engaging our comms, not extending his alarm to everybody’s ears. Just for me, that breathless moment. Then I’m weightless, and the wind takes me, edges of my feathers cutting the smoke.

There’s no reason but pure selfishness to play hero here. Luckily for the kid I’m plummeting to, ahead of the advancing line of wildfire, selfishness is one of my virtues. I dive faster than the fire, just, and snatch the kid off the ground before climbing again.

The kid was crying on the ground and now she’s crying in the air, but there’s a different timbre to it, choking off as the air thins out too much. I’ve don’t waste words trying to comfort or explain. She might be too scared to understand me right now; the wind is roaring very loudly, but I’m a siren; I can always make myself heard.

That’ll be in my reprimand, if they reprimand me for this. Not communicating with my team, going off-script, jumping alone, cutting it too close again. But when I’m back in the transport’s still-open mouth, and the medic closes in with a crackling foil blanket and an oxygen mask, parental voices ring out in panicked relief, one woman holding another back until the bay door closes and it’s okay to move around.

I pop the clips on my helmet and have just a second to grin at Fisher before one of the women slam-hugs me, almost taking us both off our feet. Nobody really thinks about what hollow bones translates to, or how little traction clawed feet have on metal decking, and I quarter-spread my wings to catch us. “Thank you, thank you,” she’s saying, and I’m still looking at Fisher, wide-eyed off guard. He smirks, at me, the bastard. You wanted to be a hero, his look says. This is part of it.

“I had to,” I say, which isn’t not true. I did have to, and my fingertips are still tingling, my skin zinging with the adrenaline. My why and her why aren’t the same, is all.

“She’s our whole life,” the woman says, pulling back. She’s looking at me earnestly, crying but not letting herself cry yet. It’s important that she tells me this, and that I understand. I settle my wings against my back, and I tuck my helmet under one arm and put my other hand on her shoulder, meeting her gaze. I can give her that much. I can understand that much. I don’t remember our evac when I was little, but I can catch the feeling.

“This is really hard, it’s okay. Now go to her.”

“Thank you,” the woman says again, her tears falling now, and she goes to her family.

“You’re all heart,” Fisher says, once he works his way over to me. He’s got the advantage of magnet boots, the disadvantage of being human and needing a wingsuit.

“That’s what they’ll say in my employee of the year writeup.”

“Oh, is that the writeup you’ll get?” All these civilians can hear us; he can’t say what he wants to. He can’t yell at me for scaring him, and really, he better not. He doesn’t get that kind of a say. That’s not what we have, from my perspective. If it is from his, I need to cut this off.

But not now, not here. Now, we’re making sure people have canned air if they need it, water, blankets. We now need to keep them calm to get to base, where buses will take them to shelters. I’m not the only siren on the team, but we try not to bunch up in the aftercare portion of an op.

Severin is soothing an older couple, and I know he’s using his voice on them, just a little. What’s the harm, if it keeps things calm? Nina is being a little less subtle, to my ears, but she’s also preventing a big rancher type from losing it over whatever just happened to his property and livestock, so who can blame her? Who can blame him?

It’s a good thing there aren’t windows back here in the transport, because I don’t think any of them could stand a bird’s eye view of the still-flaming wreckage that was once their lives. Hardly anybody can. But they’re thinking of it, and some of them are stunned, shocked into silence, but there’s still enough people crying for it to get under my skin and we don’t touch down at base nearly soon enough.

There are people here to get the evacuees unloaded and divided into buses, and the boss is here, probably to yell at me, and then a bunch of camera flashes go off because the media’s here too. I’d rather get yelled at. All of us on the team look at each other and then put our helmets back on almost as one, push carefully through the press of people and follow the boss inside.

“Meeting room before you hit the showers,” he says, looking at all of us and none of us at once. He wanted to be out there with us, but he isn’t operational anymore. He’s got a titanium shoulder and his lungs are too prone to collapsing now and he’s mad as hell about it.

He’s also one of the best bosses I’ve ever had, because he hasn’t forgotten what it’s like. Not that I’ve had many bosses. And now that I’ve had this boss with this jumper crew, I don’t know what else I’d ever want to do.

We pull our helmets and drape ourselves in the meeting room chairs, overstuffed leather executive conference types that were poached or appropriated from who knows where. They don’t smell like smoke; they’re not a reclamation.

The boss closes the door and looks at us. We smell like smoke, and I imagine he’s taking that in. Remembering. I wonder what he thinks of, every time he stands there fresh off mission, headset indents still marking his hair. He could use VR to watch our helmet cams and track the missions, but he doesn’t. Too close to the real thing while being too far. Is that what uncanny valley means? I don’t remember.

“We don’t have the time for a full debrief, but I want to say good job. From a quick nosecount, we evacuated every civilian in the map that we’d been told to anticipate.” My eyes flick to Fisher—see?—but he isn’t looking at me. There’s that other part…

“Why don’t we have time for a full debrief?” Brad asks.

“Because we’re getting sent out again,” the boss says. “Not people this time. Radar says that rain is coming, and there’s an urgent science mission that puts us in a riverbed a hundred and twenty clicks from here to gather endangered wildlife before the rain washes all this burned shit into their living rooms and wipes them out for real.”

Brad laughs, and the boss doesn’t. I don’t particularly like Brad; he’s a good enough jumper, but he overprojects his swagger to make up for not being a siren. Instead of making him look capable, it just makes him look like a cock. “Endangered wildlife,” he repeats. I was thinking about it being a hundred and twenty clicks; when we jumped, I saw how big the fire was but to hear how big…

“Affirmative. So shower up if you want, or get some shuteye, but you’ll be dusting off again in an hour.”

“An hour. Boss we need downtime. This is what, fish? It’s not like they’re going to be at an evac spot all nice and neat. How are we supposed to—”

“You don’t want to do it, Brad, you can sit out,” I say, cutting but also as neutral as I can be. I don’t look at him. I’m not pushing him. “Otherwise you’re wasting our turnaround time.”

He clacks his teeth on the next thing he was going to say, and nobody else speaks up. I’m not wrong. The boss waits ten seconds, thirty, then says “Dismissed. See you at transport in an hour.” We all stand up to go. He points at me. “Not you.”

“Of course, boss,” I say, sitting back down, and Fisher’s eyes flick to me. See? He’s saying, asking, and I wink at him. We wait, the boss watching the rest of the team file out, me sitting halfway down the length of the table, then the door clicks closed behind them.

“No whammies,” he says.

“No whammies,” I agree. Our ability to affect people is well known and little documented, and I don’t just mean being able to yell in such a way that a man’s skull falls apart. He’s not even supposed to be alone in a room with one of us unless he’s got his sound gun in hand. It’s in the holster, unsnapped for plausible deniability, but either he trusts me that much or familiarity breeds contempt.

We’re people and we’ve got rights, but we’re people who can make others do things and they have to regulate that, somehow. Tracking and testing, depending on age and aptitude and project involvement, and there are lots of projects that are eager to exploit sirens. I mean, implement sirens. Partner with. Create a shared vision of the future.

It isn’t just us who are good at spinning things.

The boss pulls out a chair and drops into it, pinches the bridge of his nose. I watch this performance with interest. “Amabel, what the fuck?” he asks, in as tired a tone as I’ve ever heard him use.

“I’m going to need you to be more specific, sir.”

“You can’t jump solo off transport after the entire team agreed everything was sewed up tight.”

“It wasn’t sewed up tight. I fixed that.”

He still isn’t even looking at me. ”It’s reckless and it’s going to cost lives.”

“That isn’t how I’m—”

“Yeah you always pull out your trump card, ‘this isn’t how I’m supposed to die,’ before you do your hail Mary shit, I get it, it’s part of your mystique. But there are regulations and there are people I answer to, and this isn’t just about you.”

I leave that on the table for three good, slow breaths, and then I say, carefully, “It was a little kid, boss. Her mom’s already lost everything else. I had the time to grab her, so I did. I knew I could.”

The quiet spins out between us. He’s really looking at me now, and I return the favor. Are we both thinking about my own evacuation flight? Maybe. Probably. I guess if I ever wanted to stop thinking about evacuation flights, I wouldn’t have become a jumper. None of us would have.

He drums his fingers on the table, studying me, and then sighs. He could ground me, he could fire me. I can’t make myself be more apologetic. I did what I had to do. “Just try to control yourself, okay, hotshot?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Dismissed.”

He’s still sitting at the table when the door closes behind me.

Fisher’s waiting for me just down the hall. I knew he would be, and I wish he wasn’t. “How do you even fucking know how you’re supposed to die?”

I sigh, because we’ve been over this. “It’s one of my aunt’s talents.” That one surprises a lot of people, when they first hear it. A lot of sirens have fractured families, from the evacuation, the war. Projects. Mine isn’t.

“No shit? Your aunt can tell how people will die?”

“That’s what I said. Under the right circumstances.” I’m about as sensitive as a brick, when it comes to having talents outside the usual. No fate-spinning for me, no green thumb, no marvel at cooking or with a needle. So I’ve got no idea how Aunt Agatha can do it, just that she can, and that she’s always right. “Anyway, I don’t know when, just how.”

“You always say that too.”

“What are we talking about, Fisher?” He starts to put his hand on the ladies’ locker room door as I start to open it, thinks twice when I glare at him.

“I just want you to think before you do things.”

“You aren’t my boss, and I already just had this conversation.”

“No, Mabs, I want you to think about us.”

Now is not the time for this. Not that I ever want it to be the time for this. “Why would I?” I ask, keeping my voice nice and even and calm, not angry, not venomous, or even very loud. He steps back, maybe not even meaning to, and I slip into the locker room. He could follow me; he’s done it before. He doesn’t.

“Well he has impeccable timing, doesn’t he?” Nina asks, toweling off her hair at her locker.

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” I say, shedding my fireproof jacket. I’ve got a change of inner clothes here, anyway. Outers, it doesn’t matter.

“Emotions run high on missions,” she says noncommittally. She’s a little older than me, more poised, more polished. She had to be, for her little sister, who is now in law school.

“Isn’t that the truth. And what do you think of the fish mission?” What do I think of the fish mission? At least I’ve got less chance of getting in trouble on this one, I think. Endangered species are important but not crying-kid-standing-at-the-hellmouth important.

She takes a thoughtful pause, but her feathers are unsettled. “It’s unusual, but it’s part of the job, isn’t it?”

“Think they’ll give us uppers to make up for the turnaround?” I ask, instead of saying anything meaningful.

Nina makes a face, but she says, “One can hope.” Not with siren metabolism, probably. For the humans, maybe.

“I’m not gonna be able to sleep,” I say, smiling, suggesting.

“Well Fisher’s just down the hall,” she says.

“He is.” I lean against the lockers.

She rolls her eyes. “Mabs, no.”

“Can’t fault me for trying.” I grin at her, but she isn’t wrong, it would be the worst idea. Worse than hooking up with Fisher has been in the first place.

She kisses me on the cheek as she heads for the bunkrooms. “I guess not.”

I shower hot as I can stand it, then cold as I can stand it, stretching against the wall and then lathering up. Combing my hair out and then brushing it, enjoying the sensation, before putting it in french braids so it doesn’t catch on anything. I’ve never met a siren who didn’t keep their hair long. Then I give my wings a good shake, spreading them out and flexing them. Unless something’s really gone wrong, our wings don’t really soak, and then don’t really stay wet, even with standing in the shower.

A hundred and twenty clicks isn’t far but not so close either, and I dig a bag out of the bottom of my locker to pack. It just makes solid mission-ready sense. Though also I have the luxury of not having to worry about dry boots and socks, the way the humans do. I throw in a couple changes of clothes, and I look over my first aid kit to make sure I’m not out of wound foam or painkillers. I guess food would be a good idea, and I take the bag and helmet and jacket and go down the hall. They did something to the linoleum in the kitchen to make it less slick for our claws, but it’s still just as shiny, so there’s a constant weird mental loop of “gonna slip/no you won’t” when you walk around in here.

The kitchen always smells like coffee, so I didn’t think about whether it might be new coffee until I was already in the room, and the medic, Danny, is sitting there with the boss and Kilo, one of the other human jumpers. They’ve got a radio on, turned down low. I would’ve assumed listening to the weather, but the boss abruptly switches it off about three seconds into a song that starts playing.

“I hate that fuckin’ song,” he grumbles. “If I caught it early enough, it won’t be stuck in my head for the next week.”

“Stuck in your head?” I ask, as they turn to look at me.

“You can’t tell me you’ve never had a song stuck in your head,” Danny says. I’ve never seen them not look tired, but I feel like they’re going to be a lot worse before end of day.

“Well, then I guess the conversation’s over,” I say, and go to the pantry.

“What, is that a siren thing?” Brad asks as I rummage through crackers and bags of jerky. I don’t really know what I want.

“Is what a siren thing?” They almost never ask me questions like that. I don’t know if they ask Nina or Severin, either.

“Not ever getting a song in your head? That happens to me all the time.”

“Well, Brad, I don’t feel qualified to comment on what that says about a person…” I say, smiling over my shoulder, and Kilo rumbles a laugh. I drop a handful of granola bars in my bag. There’s always bottled water on transport.

“Well, Brad knows we keep him around because he’s pretty,” he says. “Not for his brains.”

“Thanks, bud,” Brad says, but he’s laughing too. “I didn’t think you noticed.”

“Oh, we all noticed.”

“Okay last call,” the boss says, finishing his coffee and pushing back from the table. “We’ll feed you after, but Mabs has the right idea, grabbing rations.”

“I’m a trendsetter,” I say, zipping my bag.

“You didn’t take all the good stuff, did you?” Brad’s getting up too.

“No, just the birdseed,” I say, and we all laugh.

---

Severin’s always first on transport; he hates waiting around. I don’t know why, exactly. I’ve never asked him, I will never ask him, but I’m sure it can be tracked back to the source of all our traumas. How we got out, the landings we found here. He’s still got marks from a tracker on his left ankle; when he aged out, they removed it.

The boss is our pilot, and I don’t know why that surprises me, but it does. Our other pilot already did one mission today, there’s a mandatory nine hour in-between before she’s legally considered mission ready again. Our main pilot is on vacation, which sounds ridiculous, letting one of your evac pilots go on vacation in wildfire season, but these days, it’s always wildfire season. The boss isn’t cleared to jump anymore, but he’s allowed to fly.

We strap in before wheels up, and because of all the fires it’s impossible to know if it’s sunup or sundown because it’s just red at every horizon, but once we’re high enough, it’s clear we’re flying through the night sky. I look at Nina, ready to make a joke about it being less safe for a siren to be belted in on an airplane, but she’s looking at the crawling rainclouds on the satellite feed. She’s looking at the equipment we need to swoop down with to scoop up fish and whatever else the river will give unto us in that in-between time. Then she’s looking at the screen again, squinting, frowning.

“Look at the dam,” she says in a voice that makes even Brad and Kilo stop bantering.

“Repeat that,” the boss says.

“The dam at the reservoir,” she says, leaning over and pinching it bigger. We look at the dam. It looks like a dam, and I don’t know what about it caught her attention. Fisher’s breath kind of catches in a way I haven’t heard before, though. We all think we’re so cool, so unshakeable.

“The spillways,” he says and she nods.

“What’s a spillway?” I ask, when nobody else does, and for a minute I think nobody’s going to answer me.

“It’s what handles excess water from a dam,” Fisher says. “It’s already raining upstream, has been for days, and the water was already high.”

“Okay, so if the spillways are built for—” and Severin makes an impatient noise, leans over, and zooms in the screen even bigger.

“They’re failing. Which means the dam will fail.”

“Sorry if I’m not a civil engineer,” I say, but with it spelled out, now, I can see what they mean, see the water rushing in a widening, wandering path where it used to be just a couple streams, straight-sided and narrow.

“Now is not the time,” the boss says. The silence stretches between us, and we can all feel him asking the plane for more speed. I guess either way we’re racing against water, it’s just a matter of whether it’s water that’ll take us with it as it scours the landscape, or just water that’ll kill the things we’re supposed to be rescuing. Fish? Salamanders? I grab a tablet off the rack to look at the mission file, the info sheets, and I’m the only one. I wonder if any of us actually got sleep. Nobody does this job who isn’t a little bit reckless.

The government scientists don’t expect us to be particularly discerning; the specimen gathering and transport equipment that they’ve given us is kind of like cat carriers for fish, sturdy-handled, and self closing. Once you’ve dippered a load of river water, you get what you get, and we’ve got an excess of the carriers, enough for us each to do three or four passes, if we can. Probably the humans can’t, but they know how many sirens this team has.

Apparently there’s a kind of lungfish in this stretch of river that doesn’t live anywhere else in the state. It used to, but its habitat shrank and shrank. A kind of frog that spawns here, so it might be a flotilla of eggs that we pick up. Beavers, but we need to drain off the water if that’s what we get. Beavers are bigger than I thought they were, apparently. They’re also not endangered, but it’s hard to imagine seeing a creature you know for sure is going to be killed by whatever follows in the next hour and just leave it there.

“This is a hell of a mission,” I say, sort of to myself, sort of to break the silence.

“We agreed to it,” Nina says, either tiredly or patiently. I can’t get a read on her, and she did that on purpose.

“What are you, chickening out?” Kilo asks, and I shoot him a look.

“Phrasing.”

“You know what I mean,” he protests.

“I’m not chickening out. I just wonder why, if these things are so important, they were left there until now, when they might just be lost.” Have I ever thought about that before, what the ‘last one’ of a thing means? Sure I have. How could I not; I know how many of us got out. Our birth rates.

“Well, I’m not a zoologist,” Severin says, and he’s definitely tired, he doesn’t normally try to antagonize me, “but I think probably things do better in their natural environments. Provided they can reasonably be expected to exist.”

“I was just asking,” I say. I’m not going to fight with Severin. And we don’t normally have missions that we have a ‘why’ to ask about. This one isn’t necessarily even more or less personally risky to all of us. The wingsuits the humans use can get them in the air nearly with the same strength and speed that we sirens can attain. Nobody’s going to make a split second mistake and get drowned.

We ride the rest of the way in silence, watching the edges of the dam sagging and distending. We can hear the boss radio to somebody on the ground about it, but if the spillways are what’s supposed to prevent a dam failure, what is it that prevents a spillway failure?

---

I don’t know if I’ve ever been in woods after the burn. We’re always swooping in, literally, ahead of the advancing fireline. We aren’t recovery, we’re advance rescue.

Everything is gray, and a couple of the bigger trees are still burning, a seething glow peeking through their cracked bark. The air is thick here and I’m glad for the filtering on our helmets. A branch cracks and falls heavily to the ground someplace nearby, and I’m doubly glad for our helmets.

We land on land and walk down to the water because there’s so much ash on the surface, we wanted to be sure of how we were touching down. After our initial stunned silence, glancing around at the decimated landscape, we get to work scooping specimens. We were directed to this particular span of the river both because the things we were looking for had been spotted there previously, and also because they hoped the shape of the banks protected the river from the heat, and maybe made the animals congregate here. I don’t know if we’re scooping the right things out of the water, but we are scooping things, returning to the plane, jumping again. Looking at the satellite every time, at the advancing rain, at the crumbling dam.

We’ll make it, we’re making it. We’re tired, we’ve been going practically all day, and this is also weirdly boring, but we’ll make it.

We’re running out of containers, me and Fisher and Severin taking our last ones and diving, the others done and resting, hydrating. I look around in the water but I don’t see anything anymore; some dead fish, floating, but nothing else. We already brought up frog eggs and bunches of fish, and crawdads, and an eel. I don’t know what else. Fisher fills his carrier and goes back up.

I don’t know why I turn around, but when I do, a dog is standing on the opposite bank, staring at me. I stare back. It’s mostly black, with a white stripe down its nose, and its front legs are white, or would be white, I think, if they weren’t ash-gray like everything else.

“Amabel, what are you doing?” Severin asks.

“There’s a dog,” I say, pointing with the carrier thing in my hand, and the dog kind of crouches away when it flaps, but otherwise stands its ground.

“Dogs aren’t on the list,” Severin says. I look at him, blinking.

“What? Well, no.”

“Get your last specimen and let’s go,” he says.

“There isn’t anything, and you’re not the boss.” I turn my back on him and walk to the bank where the dog is. The dog backs away, circles out of sight, and then comes back to look at me again. Severin hums in his displeasure but doesn’t say anything else, and there’s the splash of him passing the carrier through the water, and his grunt and the rush of wings as he takes flight again.

The dog isn’t alone, I realize. I think it’s another dog at first, and then a third, no a puppy. No, no it’s a sheep and a lamb. The sheep has a green plastic tag in her left ear. What do I do about this?

“Amabel, come back up so we can go,” the boss says, smooth and even but his voice like a string wound too tight.

“I can’t yet,” I say, and he bites off what he’s going to say next and I know he’s viewing my helmet feed to see what the problem is. What will a sheep do, if I pick its lamb up? Can I put the dog in a carrier and then grab the sheep’s wool with my claws when I take off? Or will that hurt it? Her. Oh and the lamb. I don’t think I can do this alone.

“Amabel, we need to go,” he finally says.

“Boss, you can see—”

“Yes, I can.”

The sheep tries to move off and the lamb makes a plaintive little noise, trying to stumble hurriedly after her, and the dog immediately gathers her up and brings her back again. She flicks her ears as the lamb butts at her belly and stands still again, facing into the wind. The dog looks at me again and huffs through its nose, intentions clear. It needs me to fix this.

“I need an assist,” I say.

“No. I’m not sending anybody back down.”

“But I can’t—”

“The mission is over, you need to return to transport,” he says.

“No.” He can’t be surprised by this.

“Mabs, it is of the utmost importance that you get back up here. If you don’t, I’ll have to fire you, but also that dam is going right now and where you’re standing isn’t going to exist in—” I tap the side of my helmet and turn off the radio. I know. I leave the camera feed on because I made my decision but so did he.

I kind of laugh. This is like one of those riddles, for getting, what is it, wolves and geese across a river? Except I only have one shot at this, no multiple trips. Unlike how you can solve the riddle. Okay, I can zip the lamb into my jacket. I take a breath and reach down for the lamb, and the sheep lowers her head. I take my hands away, and she looks at me with her ears flapped back. I look at the dog, who shifts a little into a crouch and that gets the sheep’s attention.

I’ve never used my voice on an animal, but I have to try. “I know you don’t want me to take your baby, but it’s the only way I can get everybody safe,” I say. “I’m not leaving any of you, okay? Let me pick up your baby and put it in my jacket, and then I’ll put… somebody in this carrier. And then I’ll figure out the other one of you.”

The dog’s ears go up as it looks at me, considering, and the sheep looks at me and I’ve never spent so long looking at a sheep face before but I don’t think its expression changed at all. I crouch down to pick up the lamb and the sheep butts me. She doesn’t have a lot of momentum, it doesn’t really hurt, but she gets me in the shoulder and knocks me over.

“Hey!” I say, louder than I mean to, and all of the animals flinch. The dog barks at me once, sharply, white teeth and white-rimmed eyes. I try again, quieter, but pushing harder. “Let me help you. We don’t have time.”

How are you supposed to pick up a lamb? I crawl over, get one hand under its front legs and one hand under its butt and that seems to work okay. I tuck it against my shoulder for a second, unzip my jacket and push it inside, pulling the zipper up snug. It’s shaking a little, and then it nestles against my neck. It smells ashy but also milky.

The sheep lowers her head again, but the dog steps between us. I stand up, pick up the carrier, shake it out. I don’t think it’s big enough, even if I could get the dog to put the sheep in it.

This is so fucked, and when I hear thunder I think, well at least we got the river samples, but it just keeps going, grinding, grumbling, and it isn’t thunder it’s the dam or the spillways or both. We’re out of time. It isn’t close enough that I can see it, especially with the haze from the smoke, but the ground rumbles beneath our feet and even though I have her baby, the sheep turns and the dog grabs a mouthful of her wool and then lets go, stopping her. The dog looks at me apologetically, but I don’t know the rules.

“Twice in one day?” Fisher asks from right behind me. I shoot him a look; of course we can’t see each other’s faces. “The mojo doesn’t work on animals, huh?” He’s yelling and I wonder why then remember I turned my comms off. The rumbling is getting stronger, and in addition to the loudest white noise I’ve ever heard, the burned trees are cracking over like a giant is walking towards us.

“Not how I’d like. We need—”

“Like, five minutes ago, yeah.” He looks at the dog, and the sheep, and then goes to the sheep, takes her face in his left hand, and does something that I don’t quite understand, but it ends with the sheep sitting docilely between his feet. “Grab the dog, let’s go.” Fisher crouches and wraps his arm under the sheep’s front legs and just goes for it, not the best liftoff but the wingsuit can correct a lot for him.

I crouch to the dog, who curves against me, panting, and I use the carrier like a sling under its belly so that I have something to grip, glancing over my shoulder once at the wall of water that’s suddenly there, and throw myself at the sky. My claws get wet, I feel the pull, but we make it.

The air is filled with steam, and smoke, but I always know which way is up, and we climb above the treetops that are left, and then climb above the smoke, and then through the fucking thunderheads that finally rolled in. This is one of the hardest flights I’ve ever made, but when I get into the transport, Fisher’s waiting on the edge for me and I hate that he’s doing it and I want to slap his hands away but I let him grab my arms.

The doors close before I’m even really standing solidly. He takes the dog from me and puts it down, and I unzip the lamb from my jacket, but it isn’t until after I put it down with the sheep that my hands start to shake, and my legs, and I sink to the floor. Fisher touches the clips on my helmet and this time I do slap him.

He pulls his own helmet off, and I get mine off on the second try, letting it fall to the floor, where it spins away. That was closer than anything, I think, that was—

There’s a lot of talking and I can’t make sense of any of it and I put my hands up. Nina’s there with a bottle of water for me, and she seems pale and like she’s blinking too much. Severin doesn’t look at me. Even Kilo and Brad are quiet. Oh, should I give water to the dog and sheep? All this water. All that water. My feet are wet. It was that close.

Fisher crouches on the other side of me and I really need my space and I round on him and, carelessly, too loud, yell, “What?”

His hand goes to his face like I punched him, which I kind of did, and he shakes his head. He’s got that look in his eyes that made me make this mistake in the first place. Never fuck your coworkers, even if they do come back for you. “I guess that wasn’t it either,” he says.

Now I’m the one blinking too much. “What wasn’t it?”

He reaches out and takes me by the shoulders, gives me a surprisingly gentle shake. “That wasn’t how you’re supposed to die.”

We stare at each other as that rolls over in my brain, and as I catch my breath and the rush subsides, I can grab hold of it. I let him and Nina help me to my feet. “No. it wasn’t.” I’m laughing a little, not because anything’s funny, but because we lived through it.

© 2025 Jennifer R. Donohue

[Issue 2025.73]

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