She watched the table and thought, "This is not the same as what I had in Cheyenne. Not a better version of what I had in Cheyenne. " A different thing entirely. She went to bed. She did not sleep. She was still awake when the smell reached her.
It was subtle at first, just a trace, the kind of thing you might dismiss as the stove settling or the wood burning unevenly. She lay still for a moment, and then she was sitting upright in bed because her cook's nose had been in kitchens for 15 years, and it knew the difference between wood smoke and something burning that should not be burning. She was at her bedroom door before she was fully awake. The smoke was in the hallway, thin but real, coming from the direction of the kitchen. She went to the boy's room first.
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.