Free Nothing Left to Burn by Patty Blount Page A

quitting anything. But it would really help if you’d stop staring at my ass.”
    The breath got caught in my lungs, and my face burst into flame. “I wasn’t staring at your…at your ass. I just like to watch you walk.” Oh God. The words that left my mouth sounded so much better in my head than out in the real world. I snapped my teeth together, resolved to never speak again until I was thirty.
    “Hey, Man. What’s up?” Kevin frowned at us.
    “We’re good. Grab a seat,” she ordered.
    Bear ambled in and nodded a greeting at me. By the time my dad came in, the whole junior squad was present and accounted for.
    “Good morning, cadets. Page seventy-six, please. What is the fire triangle?” Dad waited for a volunteer, and when no one spoke up, he called on Max.
    “Fuel, heat, and oxygen.”
    “Good. What about them?”
    I read about this yesterday. “They’re essential elements for ignition,” I answered with confidence.
    “Yes, but what about them makes them essential?”
    “Remove any one of those elements to stop the fire.”
    Dad’s jaw twitched. “Yes, but you’re not answering the question.”
    I damn well was. “They’re all essential—”
    “Reece, you said that already. I want you to tell me why they’re essential.”
    Amanda intervened. “When the three elements are combined in the right quantities, a fire can spontaneously occur.”
    Dad clapped his hands. “There it is! The right quantities. That’s the key here, cadets. You know what they teach you in the military? Know. Your. Enemy.” He paced between the tables, pounding a fist into his palm on each word. “The military spends countless hours gathering intelligence, analyzing, predicting, knowing what the enemy is up to. Your enemy as firefighters is fire, and to beat it, you need to know it. Reece, maybe you should read page seventy-six again.”
    I crossed my arms and bit my tongue.
    “Lieutenant, maybe you should explain the chemical process.” Amanda indicated her photocopy on the table.
    Dad’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh, should I? I wasn’t aware that I needed to hold anybody’s hand.”
    “I didn’t suggest holding hands. I suggested explaining the process so that my squad understands the chemistry that causes fire.”
    I stared at Amanda, astounded.
    And impressed.
    Really, really impressed.
    I snuck a glance at my dad. His face was red, but he smiled. “Okay. Why don’t you explain the chemical process, Captain Jamison?” He pulled out a chair and sat.
    Amanda’s face flushed, but she stood up and faced the class. “Your handout explains what causes combustion. The fire triangle tells you that you need something to burn—that’s your fuel. You need heat at a temperature high enough to make that fuel source burn—which is called what, Reece?”
    I knew this. “Its flash point temp.”
    She nodded and kept going. “You also need oxygen. Why?”
    Gage put up his hand. “Because combustion is an oxidation process.”
    I knew that too. Oxidation, the same process that causes metal to rust, is what fire was—except a hell of a lot faster.
    Amanda grabbed a marker and drew a simple time line on the whiteboard. “Okay. You’ve got oxygen, fuel, and heat at the right combo, right here.” She tapped a point on the line. “This is called ignition. Then, the fire goes through a growth stage because the flame that results from ignition is now increasing what?”
    “Heat,” Bear called out, and she nodded.
    “Right. As heat is produced and unchecked, growth accelerates. Additional fuel sources, when heated to their flash point temperatures, will ignite. At this point, superheated gases are collecting at the highest point of a room.” She marked points on her time line as she spoke. “When the fire heats everything in reach, we say it’s fully developed. If nothing else changes, the fuel source and oxygen source get depleted, and the fire starts the decay process and eventually loses intensity.”
    She stepped