Free On the Burning Edge by Kyle Dickman

started.”
    Renan stammered through the answer: fuels crew to hotshots in six years. Marsh, Steed, and the squad bosses kept firing questions his way: “Have you ever lied at work?” “Where do you see yourself in five years?” “What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever been through?” Renan paused for a moment before answering the last one. He never intended to bring up the illness. He hadn’t relapsed in years, and the doctors didn’t think his fighting fires would pose a danger to him or the crew.
    “The two months I spent in a wheelchair,” said Renan. He told the whole story: the haunting numbness that crept up his spine and signaled a seizure’s approach, the exhaustion that lingered for months after, the white void of blindness, the fear that his sight might never return, the struggle to accept what he couldn’t control, the decision not to let it hold him back. Marsh, Steed, and the squad bosses listened to Renan intently. Interviews didn’t usually turn up such captivating stories.
    Renan was working as a valet attendant at a Scottsdale golf resort when Marsh called to tell him that he wasn’t getting the job. Marsh judged the risk to be too great—too much liability for the city and the crew. That afternoon, Renan drove the hour and a half back to Prescott so he could ask Marsh to his face what it would take to change his mind. He told Marsh that the illness had passed and that if he hired him, he’d do everything to stand out—his career was at stake. A week after that meeting, one of Granite Mountain’s top applicantsaccepted another job. Renan was again parking cars at the golf course when he got another call, this time from Steed. “How would you like to be a part of the crew?” he asked. Renan danced a celebratory jig while Izod-clad retirees milled about the clubhouse.
    —
    Back at the station, the door of the saw shop swung open and Steed marched in. “Load up! We got a fire!” he boomed. The men hustled to the rigs, and by the time Grant got in the back of the Alpha buggy, Renan’s seat belt was already buckled.
    The hotshots caravanned—Steed’s supe truck up front, followed by Alpha and Bravo—as they drove across the flats of the Prescott Valley and toward a plume of light gray smoke. Around noon, the grass alongside Perkinsville Road had caught fire, and gusty winds had pushed the flames to nearly a thousand acres.
    Donut, who controlled the stereo, put on a rap tune, “Bugatti,” by Ace Hood: “Damn, life can switch on you in a matter of seconds.” Donut slapped the ceiling with the flat of his hand, yelling out the chorus: “I woke up in a new Bugatti!”
    Kevin Woyjeck, a twenty-one-year-old rookie on Bravo squad, thumbed out a text message to his dad, who was a firefighter in Southern California.
WOYJECK : 25 miles away…We see smoke.
    DAD : Calm…Get your calm on.
    WOYJECK : Everyone’s calm. Don’t worry. I’m super. Calm.
    Renan peered out the window, hoping to glimpse the fire. A helicopter worked the blaze, and sunlight glinted off the fire engines already on scene. He paid closest attention to the column.
    Smoke tells a fire’s story; it’s the signature. The obvious by-product of combustion, smoke is a mix of evaporated moisture and released gases. Bits of charred wood and soot wafting upward give the visible vapor color. Heavy materials—timber, oil, and houses among them—that burn hotter and more slowly also tend to produce darker smoke. But on the prairie fire, the smoke was thin and white, angling eastward over the plain with the breeze. It told Renan that the blaze was a wind-driven brush fire: cooler than a timber burn but in quick-burning brush and grasses. Firefighters tell legends of brush fires that, during the windiest days in Southern California, keep pace with interstate traffic. Grass and brush fires are the most volatile burns.
    “Yellow up, boys,” Clayton, Alpha’s squad boss, yelled to the back from his seat in the cab. Renan’s