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 Emmett 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. 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 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.