Moments after takeoff from MHA’s base camp, Carly had crawled into the back of the Firehawk; she and her husband had spent most of the flight studying the fire maps. Robin had been alone the whole way. The short night’s sleep hadn’t been a problem for the first six hours of the flight, but the second half of it had been increasingly done on nerves—by now they were raw nerves. Eleven hours at a helo’s controls was a long day by anyone’s standards.
The one fact that had done the most to keep her on point was that she was flying in Emily’s seat.
At first, when they all fell in behind her, she’d thought it was because they were all evaluating her, watching her fly, judging how she handled every air pocket and cross breeze. Then, after the refueling in Vancouver where no one paid her any spec
