Stranger Than Fiction [Emma/Vasco]

Vasco Izar

I’d been up on the roof again setting down tile when one of the Wickersham boys came riding up on a horse so fast, I thought he was liable to fall right off and break his neck. He waived his arms above his head and shouted for me to come down. By the time I’d made it halfway down the ladder to the ground, he’d turned the horse around so I could hop right on behind him. As I steadied behind him, he gave one look to me before tugging the reins and setting us off.

He’d been out by the granary closer to the town center when he’d got the news. Sunrise had come and that’s when blazes were discovered. Reports on places out east saying a silo was going up, and then another, each one mentioned another blow to my stomach so that by the time he explained there were fields on fire, too, I was holding onto him so I didn’t fall right off the old stallion.

The thing about fields going up could’ve been some sort of accident, maybe if some idiot drunk started a little blaze to clear some land. Or maybe a set of kids set off fireworks because they were bored of the lockdown that’d been put in place. People did strange things when they were cooped up too long, stupid, awful things that they’d never be able to explain when the ash settled.

But silos are a whole different matter.

Anyone who’s worked the fields enough to know that silos don’t just catch. No, it takes a whole lot of effort to get them burning hot enough that there’s danger you’re going to lose most of what’s inside. The silos are packed densely, so there’s not a whole lot of air in the space where your stock is – whether it’s grain, barley, or something else – with a shaft that runs along the inside up to the fans, and back out again. You might find a set of electrical wires set off a little blaze, and that could cause a problem. Sometimes when there’s a high heat and a drought, you could see them catch. But this? A sustained burning through the night, multiple silos, no alarms going off until things had gotten out of hand?

Some folks tried their best to smother the blaze. Heard about how Katelyn rushed into action, along with all the other folks that tried to get the water to flush it out. It’s a strategy that was probably a reaction out of fear, some of the young ones thinking the fire goes out with moisture.

The best way, heck, the only way you’ll control the blaze enough is if you divert and empty the stock so what’s inside drops underneath the spot where the fire’s taking place. Which is harder than it looks, since you have to eyeball the temperature, where the heat’s coming from, and how low you want to go. Not to mention to find a way to collect whatever comes out so it doesn’t spoil or get ruined.

I did my best to marshal the farmers so there was direction, and to call on the firefighters, most of them volunteers, with a better plan.

Maybe it was that there’d been so many setbacks, or that the quarantine had become the new normal, but a part of it was – electrifying. Spreading out a map across an old picnic table, pointing out the silos and peeling off into teams, we knew we had to act if we didn’t want to lose what was inside those silos.

Worse, that the longer we delayed the more consequences we’d – I’d – face for letting the country’s food supply go up in smoke.

Had it been a few months ago, I don’t know if I would’ve been up to the charge. I’d sunk so low, I didn’t know if I was ever going to rise up again. Or that I shouldn’t have been looking at life the way almost anyone else did, that we were ruined, and that we were destined to be trapped reliving the same horrors again and again. Empty tables, empty chairs, and empty beds when our kids got ripped from us.

Thank god for this place, though.

Even as dark as it was, I couldn’t help but think of Yani offering her hand. Marisol’s whispers. Druso ready to hand me another beer. Katelyn, offering to share the load.

I liked to believe that the Capitol only tried so hard to pull us down because they knew – the minute that we all did wake up, and come together? They wouldn’t have been able to stop us.

I rubbed at my eyes and wiped away the soot that had collected across my face.

When I took a seat in the mayor’s office, it was the first time in about twenty-four hours that I’d taken some time for myself. I couldn’t smell anything other than the smoke on my clothes, couldn’t taste anything other than the acrid dust that collected around me. I closed my eyes and thought about how nice it would’ve been to not have been sitting here, leading the district through one storm into a another.

The door to my office opened, and I cracked an eye.

“Buenas, Emma,” I leaned back again in my chair and stretched my arms above my head in a yawn. I hunched forward onto my desk and rested my chin on my hands. “I meant to come home but I needed to just sit alone for a little while. It’s… well, it’s been bad out there.”

“I’m worried.”