Chapter 5
Tim felt strangely quiet through the rest of the meal, as if the chaos of his emotions had been burned away by Macy’s touch.
The problem was that he now stood in the “black.” It was the area that a forest fire had already been through, stripped of color by heat and flame until there was only the black of char, the gray of ash, and the blue of sky shining between leafless black branches. Flare-ups of spot fires might occur, and there were often surreal patches of green that the fire had swept all around but not burned. It was a quiet, almost serene space.
It was also a place where you stood after a fire, wrung out and half wondering what you were supposed to do next. Smokejumpers stayed ahead of the fire to cut it off. They only crossed into the black when they had to escape, o
