She did not stop to think about whether this was her place to do. There was no calculation. She just went and she opened their door and said clearly and without raising her voice to the pitch that causes panic. I need you both to get up and put your coats on and go outside to the yard. Now EMTT was on his feet before she finished.
He looked at her face and he reached over and shook Chi shoulder and said, "Get up. Coat go. " She went to Gideon's door. He was already awake. She could hear him moving. She opened the door and said, "Fire kitchen or roof above it.
The boys are going out. " He came out of the room in his pants and boots, and she was already moving back toward the kitchen. The fire was in the roof above the kitchen chimney, visible in the crack, where the ceiling met the top of the chimney housing sparks from a crack in the chimney's upper section that she had noticed 3 weeks ago, and mentioned, and that had not yet been repaired. and she felt a flash of something cold and specific about that fact. And then she let it go because it wasn't useful. She went into the kitchen. Rosalie Gideon's voice behind her.
The ledger and the recipe book, she said. 2 minutes. The house is not going to come down in 2 minutes. The chimney housing is burning, not the walls yet. 2 minutes.
She knew where both items were. She knew where everything in this kitchen was, and in the dark she had lived in it for 6 weeks. And she knew it. the way you know a space you've inhabited with your whole attention. The recipe book was in its box on the far counter. The ledger was on the desk in the corner.
She went for the ledger script first because it had the ration plan and the account records and the winter food calculations, and without it, they would lose weeks of work. She had it in her hands in 30 seconds. The smoke was thickening. She went for the recipe book. The box was where it always was.
She picked it up. Inside she could feel the familiar weight of the battered volume, the cracked spine under the cloth cover. The pages her mother's hands had touched hundreds of times before hers did. She turned to go. Part of the ceiling above the chimney housing gave a sound like a groan, and she moved fast, and she was through the kitchen door and into the entry when she heard the larger collapse behind her.
Not the full roof, not yet, but a section, the housing itself, coming down in a cascade of burning wood and plaster that hit the kitchen floor where she had been standing 3 seconds earlier. She was in the yard. The cold hit her and she was in her nightclo and her feet were in her house shoes on the snow. And none of that mattered because she was counting. Two boys, Gideon, Mateo running from the bunk house with Roy behind him, the ranch hands coming out, everyone.
She counted again. Everyone was there. EMTT had Jaime against his side with his arm around his brother's shoulders. And Jaime was watching the fire begin to show through the kitchen window with wide eyes and a stillness that was their shock or particular steadiness that sometimes comes to people who have been. Frightened enough times to know how to stand inside it.
Gideon appeared beside her. He had come out behind her. She didn't know when. She hadn't seen him go back in, and he had a blanket in his h hands that he put around her shoulders without asking. And then he stood beside her and looked at the kitchen window.
"It's not the whole house," he said. "No," she said. "The chimney housing and the section of roof above it. " "If Matteo's men can get water on the north wall from outside, we can keep it from spreading. " He was already turning to Mateo. She heard him giving the instructions she just laid out. Heard Mateo moving the men. heard the organized noise of people responding to a problem with direction.
She stood with the ledger under one arm and the recipe book box against her chest and the blanket around her shoulders and she watched the kitchen window. Jaime appeared beside her. He put his hand in the pocket of the coat he'd grabbed correctly. He'd grabbed his coat and he looked at the window. Is the starter still in there?
He said. She looked at him. The croc, he said. Is it in the kitchen? Yes, she said.
It's in the kitchen. He was quiet. Is it gone? Thought she thought about the packed earth floor and the stone counter where the croc sat away from the wooden surfaces that were burning. The croc itself might survive, she said.
Stone doesn't burn. If the fire stays in the roof and the men stop it at the wall, the counter might be intact. But you don't know, he said. Not yet. He stood beside her in the snow in his coat and his boots with one sock still halfway off his foot. and he watched the window and she stood beside him and watched it too.
It took an hour and a half to stop the fire from spreading. Matteo's men worked with bucket from the well and the snow itself, packing it against the north exterior wall to cool the heat, and Roy directed two of them onto the roof on the south side to clear the burning debris before the wind could carry it. Gideon was in it with them. She could see him in the fire light, working with his men, doing the thing he'd been doing his whole life, which was managing catastrophe through physical labor and force of will. The kitchen was damaged.