---

The Smokejumpers

By Sierra Bibi

When Fern jumps from the plane into the smoke for the very first time, she believes she has nothing left to lose. That’s not to say she’s unafraid exactly—not even hundreds of hours of simulations and dozens of practice jumps can prepare you for the reality of plummeting into the hazy unknown of an active forest fire. No, her fear is definitely there, but folded and tucked somewhere deep inside herself. Compartamentalized.

The smoke hurtles towards her, the ground below hidden. She rips her parachute—a massive thing designed to support the heft of her exoskeleton—and jerks backwards.

She is a dandelion seed suspended in the breeze. It is this moment of silence she savors, here in the air. The precious moments before the pneumatic wheezing of the exosuit, the whir of coolant, and the mechanical buzz of air filtration. Before the chatter on the radio and roar of the fire. There is no thought, only sensation. She clears her mind in preparation for what comes next.

Around her, the other jumpers do the same. She spots Larch in her matching blue parachute. She can just make out the shape of the strangers from up north, but in the haze the color is lost.

The mission is a simple one: create a line to stop the Lonehorn fire from spreading up to the evacuated town nestled in the foothills. She couldn’t save her own tiny Oregon town; she can’t go back and unburn Summer Valley, but maybe she can save this one.

Something yanks her, hard, as if she’s been plucked by the hand of some unseen giant, and she slams against a tree. Terror blooms in her chest, an acrid panic rising up her throat—but there’s no pain, only a jostling discomfort. The suit absorbs the worst of the impact. The ground is thirty feet below her and she braces for it to rise and meet her. But she’s motionless. Stuck.

She takes a calming breath. She trained for this. Her parachute is snagged in the upper branches of a Douglas fir. She unclips the axe from her belt and saws at the harness. It takes a minute—it’s heavy duty and she really has to hack at it—then she lands feet first, titanium suit leaving deep imprints on the forest floor. She doesn’t feel it at all; she’s logged fifteen hundred hours in her exosuit during training. She and the suit are one. When she first saw its hulking silhouette, she expected its movements to be halting and awkward.

And at first it was. Training was a grueling and lonely time—made worse by the fact she was the only black woman in her unit. She spent long days in the suit, relearning how to walk, wobbling around like a toddler and sometimes planting face first on the ground. Then she stayed up late studying for the knowledge exams: suit mechanics, field repairs, forest ecology and fire science. She’s proud to have come out the other side—only a quarter of her class graduated. And now that she’s got the hang of it, she moves smooth like butter. Like a dancer. She could do a pirouette in this thing.

Outside, the ambient temperature is 140°F. This is nearly hot enough to burn the inside of her lungs. Within the suit, her breath is cooled by the refrigeration system, giving her the sensation of standing in the frozen foods aisle of a grocery store. She reminds herself to keep an eye on the thermostat. They warned them during training that it was too easy to get complacent inside the comfortable shell. The suit can withstand up to 300°F before she goes baked potato—but an active forest fire is many times hotter than that. And the hotter it is, the harder the suit has to work to keep up.

She flips on her radio and confirms her safe landing. She’s the last one; the others have already reached the line: she sees the blips of them on the map in her viewfinder.

Overhead, the drones circle back to drop supplies at their camp. Fuel and coolant for their suits, food and shelter for their bodies.

Fern runs, each stride in the suit propelling her forward in a long jump, the navigation system leading her through the hazy conifers. Over the radio, Larch says, “It’s heading our way. We have two hours, give or take.”

At the line, chainsaws buzz and shovels break the earth. In the suits, the four of them are identical, equally matched for strength and speed. Only their callsigns hovering over them like digital halos on the viewfinder distinguish them: Larch and the two strangers, Redwood and Alder. Fern’s callsign, embarrassingly, is the same as her real name. When she had protested, her commander shrugged. “You’re already named after a plant.”

Fern activates the chainsaw attachment on her left arm, the mechanicals droning like a wasps’ nest. She joins Alder clearing brush, while Larch and the other stranger dig trenches.

“Wood!” Alder yells.

The others leap out of the way of the toppling tree. There’s something familiar about that voice, Fern thinks as the wood cracks and splinters. Someone from her training class? Almost all of her class had opted to go north to Washington or south to California, she had been one of the few who requested to stay in Oregon. They had their pick of territories. One of the perks of smokejumping: in the West, people like Fern are always in demand.

The temperature outside ticks up. It’s getting harder to see through the smoke, and her eyes water although she knows she’s just replaced her air filters and the stinging sensation is all in her head. She dials up the infrared in her viewfinder, turning the world into a kaleidoscope of orange and reds.

The work would be backbreaking, but the suit is a strength multiplier. It’s trivial. In less than an hour, they’ve accomplished what would’ve taken a human crew days. They’ve cut down a dozen risky trees, removed thousands of pounds of brush, and dug a trench stretching from the Mackenzie river to the ravine.

“Line is built,” Alder radios in. “Heading to camp.”

She’s positive she knows that voice, but from where?

The four of them run wild, like a band of horses. The exosuits are fast, built to escape wildfires that can reach up to 15mph and, now that the real work’s done, the team can’t help but show off. They careen over rocks, leap over downed logs, and weave in between the trees. Alder lets out a hoot over the radio as he somersaults down a hill to the self-driving truck waiting on the fire road.

The others load into the back, but Fern is frozen with realization. She knows that voice.

It’s Daniel Seung.

 

---

 

Fifteen years earlier

 

Outside the Doug Fir Inn loomed the sort of dense, foreboding forest that witches inhabited in fairy tales. The kind where wolves howled in the night and little girls went missing. Just looking at the treeline gave Fern hives. She never dared further than the front lawn.

Armed with Grandma’s garden spade, she dug a hole and buried one of her dolls in her nicest doll clothes. Then she gathered her stuffed animals, who cried and cried while she hugged them close and comforted them. Finally, she laid a sparse bouquet of daisies on the mound and said a few words like they had for her parents.

“I told you to play outside, not dig holes in my lawn.”

Fern turned on her heel, cradling her stuffed otter to her chest guiltily. “Sorry, Grandma,” she muttered to her boots. Ever since she moved in with Grandma, she was always being told to play outside. But Fern didn’t know how. In the city, “outside” was a crumbling sidewalk buffered against four lanes of traffic by patchy weeds and broken glass.

When Grandma moved to retrieve her garden spade, her face softened at the pitiful daisies on the overturned dirt. “Go have an adventure in the woods.” She gave her an encouraging nudge towards the trees. “That’s what your mom used to do when she was your age.”

Fern nodded and trudged towards the treeline. She stood on the threshold and took a deep breath, her hands fidgeting with the buttons on her overalls. She was still working up the nerve to take the first step when Daniel Seung burst from the forest.

He sprinted past her in his light-up sneakers, nearly toppling her over in fright. It was the first time she’d seen a kid her age around the inn.

“Want to play?” Daniel asked.

“Okay.” She followed him into the woods, scared but determined not to show it.

As soon as she crossed the tree line, it was like she entered another world. But not the one she imagined. Everything was green and smelled muddy and alive. Her rain boots slipped on the thick moss, tripped under the mess of rotting logs and branches.

He gave her a tour of the forest as if he owned the place, naming trees and rocks and streams as they passed. He plucked plump mushrooms that popped up after the rains in every shape and color—even purple, her favorite. He pointed out watchful owls hidden in the trees, caught frogs, and showed her delicate three-leaved flowers—trillium—the prettiest flowers she’d ever seen.

He showed her slugs, fat wet things, brown and yellow and one with black and white spots like a cow.

“Where are their shells?” she asked.

They didn’t have shells, Daniel explained. Fern marveled at how something so vulnerable and soft could exist in the world. She felt frightened on their behalf, worried that her or Daniel would unthinkingly step on them. From then on, whenever she found them on the trail, she’d carefully lift them with a stick out of harm’s way.

Daniel’s bravery was contagious. Fern played in the woods from morning until night fall all summer. When school started, their budding friendship was only cemented further. They were both different—it wasn’t just that Daniel was Korean and Fern was the only black girl most of her classmates had ever seen up close—but because of the strangeness of their families. Daniel’s parents were foreign, Fern’s parents were dead. Both were so unimaginable to the children of Summer Valley they might as well have been the same thing.

When school was in session and the rain and snow kept them indoors, they traded comic books back and forth and drawings in their sketch books. When the weather was good, they camped in the woods, swam in the lake, and ran feral through Summer Valley.

As they grew older, Fern started to notice Daniel in a different way. He’d always been good at drawing, but he became exceptional. She marveled at the way he could capture the subtleties of light and shadow dancing through the trees with colored pencils. Sometimes he would even draw Fern. It made her blush, to feel his gaze on her, to see herself through his eyes. And the way he smelled, like spearmint gum and clean sheets, seemed to tie her stomach in knots. When she borrowed his hoodie, she wore it until his own smell faded completely. His smile too, was different now. It seemed to hold some new kind of puzzle, one she desperately wanted to solve.

Throughout the years, the other kids had teased them, calling them boyfriend and girlfriend, to which they invariably responded ewww, gross. Now Fern wondered if it would be so bad to be boyfriend and girlfriend.

The summer between eighth grade and freshman year was to be their first apart. The Seungs were headed to Canada to visit family for eight weeks. Fern had been sulking about it since she found out in April.

She and Daniel spent the night before he left in their cabin. Little more than a lean-to, they had built it the summer before with Grandma’s help. It barely kept out the rain in the winter, but still, it was a place of their very own. The ceiling was strung with green and purple Christmas lights, the walls were papered with torn-out pages from comic books and Daniel’s sketches. Fern dragged an old mattress from the inn and decked it out with retired linens and pillows. Daniel’s bluetooth speaker played low, crooning music.

That night they laid on their backs, staring up at the artificial lights, listening to the moody music, the weight of melancholy settling both of them into silence.

“I can’t believe you’re going to be gone for the whole summer,” Fern said finally, turning on her side to face him. “It’s not fair.”

“Come with,” he said. “You’d love the Fraser Valley. It’s beautiful.”

“Grandma would never let me.” Summer was the busy season, and as Grandma got older Fern had inherited more and more chores around the inn: cleaning rooms, checking in guests, making breakfast in the mornings.

“It’s only until August.”

They looked at each other for a long moment. She found herself lost in the dark pools of his eyes and all of the sudden her cheeks were wet. She didn’t cry, she hadn’t cried since her parents died. Daniel reached up and brushed the tears away. His hand lingered.

“I promise I’ll be back,” he said softly.

Who leaned in her first, her or Daniel? It was impossible to say, but the next moment her lips were against his, warm and soft. When they broke away, they both smiled shyly at each other, pleased.

Daniel left early the next morning, and she spent the rest of the summer daydreaming about that kiss. Imagining how, when he got back, she’d tell him how she felt and ask him to be her boyfriend.

He never came back. Late July, a fire sparked in the north. The Elk Run fire would become one of the worst ever, consuming thousands of homes and millions of acres by the time it snuffed itself out. When they talked about it on the news, Fern envisioned a hungry fire demon, gobbling up everything in its path.

She didn’t have to imagine for long. One evening, the foothills glowed an eerie orange in the night and by the next morning, the town received evacuation orders. Grandma stalled as long as she could. Fern watched from an upstairs window, nauseous with fear and smoke, while Grandma stood for hours on the front lawn in a respirator with the hose in hand, spraying down the grass until the water stopped coming out of the tap. Later, she would wonder, if they had left just a little earlier­—a week, a day, even a few hours—would Grandma still have gotten so sick? The inn was everything to her, her family’s legacy, and in the end she had lost it anyways.

It was then, as they drove on the empty highway with the haze of Summer Valley in the rearview, Fern first had the thought that maybe it was better not to have anything to lose.

---

At camp, the jumpers have put enough distance between themselves and the fire to take off the suits. It’s hazy, and the unfiltered air tastes of campfire, but they’re upwind and away from the worst of it. The sun is setting. Their suits are equipped with night vision, but their bodies need rest and the suits need to recharge. The fire will still be there in the morning.

Fern releases herself from the exosuit, the hinges opening with a mechanical gasp, and steps out. She’s both blissfully unencumbered and way too light, like she lost a limb. The others have done the same, the row of unoccupied suits now stand at attention like terracotta warriors. The others clean themselves, refuel, and set up camp for the night.

She sees all of this from her peripheral, she doesn’t dare glance at the others, because what if she’s wrong? What if it’s not Daniel? The weight of that disappointment might be too great for her to bear, suit or no.

As she’s struggling with the biodegradable tent fly, flapping wildly in a gust of wind, a voice says, “Let me help.”

Her heart does a somersault. She looks up. He’s taller and even more handsome than when she said goodbye to him all those years ago, the baby fat melted away to reveal strong cheekbones and a square jaw. His kind eyes are, startlingly, the same. When they meet hers, a jolt of electricity sparks through Fern.

Daniel’s face drops. “Fern? Fern Powers?”

She nods, words suddenly sticking to the roof of her mouth like a spoonful of peanut butter.

“It’s Daniel. Daniel Seung? We were neighbors? Back in Summer Valley, remember?”

Of course she remembers. In her mind, she built a shrine to him—his colored pencil sketches, the comic books, the slugs and mushrooms, all surrounding the snapshot of the Christmas-light colored kiss they shared in their clubhouse. She replays these memories so frequently she isn’t sure what is true and what is embellished now—did his tongue dart into her mouth when they shared that kiss? Did he really reach out and hold her hand that first time she followed him into the forest?

Daniel probably didn’t think about her at all. He texted her at first, but as the fires got worse that summer, his responses dwindled to one word answers and finally dried up altogether. One night, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, drunk on her friend’s couch where she’d been sleeping the past month, she’d finally looked him up. She typed out a long, vulnerable message, vulnerable in the way she couldn’t be with anyone after Grandma was gone. She told him how lost she felt, how much she missed him, and how she thought about him all the time.

He never responded.

Fern’s grip tightens around the tent pole. “Sure, I remember.”

“It’s been so long. How’ve you been?” He sounds earnest, a friendly but distantly polite smile on his face, yet the question still irritates her. Clearly, she’s been terrible. No one joins the Climate Corps—let alone the smokejumping division—because things in their life are going well. But then a pang of guilt knifes her, because if he’s in the Climate Corps too, what did that say about the way his life turned out?

“Fine.” The word comes out more icily than she intends. She doesn’t ask how he’s been. Even if they’re both here, they are not the same. Someone like him probably enlists for the excitement or as a personal challenge. People like Fern join because they have no other choice. The world shines on confident, happy people like Daniel, while Fern would lug an umbrella around for the rest of her life.

She turns away, pretending to be engrossed by the tent.

“Can I help—“

“I’ve got it,” she says shortly.

---

Daniel cooks dinner. Alder, she corrects herself. If she doesn’t think of his real name, if she doesn’t look at his face, she can pretend he is just another comrade. Larch and the other jumper, Redwood, are swapping stories and laughing. There’s always a giddiness at the start of firefighting work, before the fatigue sets in. It’s what she imagines a sleepover might be like.

Fern keeps herself at a distance. She pours over her suit’s diagnostic data for no reason and tries not to look at Daniel. Alder. Every so often, she can feel his eyes on her. His gaze feels heavy, hot, or maybe it’s just the smoke-tinged air.

When he hands her a bowl of mushroom risotto and takes a seat next to her, she can ignore him no longer. “So, how’d you get into smokejumping?” he asks.

She shrugs and takes a bite of risotto. “This sounded less boring than farming.”

“I remember when you were a little kid, you were afraid of everything,” Daniel teases, gently nudging her with an elbow.

“I lost my fear after the fires I guess,” she says. “I didn’t have anything left to lose.”

He gives her a look. Pity? “Did your grandma…?”

She shakes her head. “Not in the fires. A couple years after. We stayed too long, though. She didn’t want to leave the inn. She never really recovered, breathing in all that smoke at her age.” She doesn’t want to think about Grandma, the crackling sound her lungs made when she inhaled, the oxygen tank trailing her around the house like the grim reaper. “How’s your family?”

“They’re doing well. We ended up staying in Canada with my aunt and uncle. I moved back here after high school.” He pauses, frowns and looks down in his bowl like he’s searching for something. “The first thing I did when I got back was drive up to Summer Valley. I couldn’t believe it—the inn, the forest, our cabin, it was all gone.”

Her breath catches on “our cabin.” The clubhouse. The forest. The kiss they shared. She pushes it out of her mind. She spent years building up her armor. She can’t go back to being weak. It feels like being out of the suit in the middle of an encroaching fire. She feels naked and light as a leaf.

The smoke is stinging her eyes. She knuckles away the tears on her cheeks and stands. “Think it’s time to turn in.”

Daniel looks up at her, hurt and confused, but then shrugs, resigned, turning his attention to Larch and Redwood. Fern stomps towards the tent, climbs in, and winces her eyes shut, listening to the sound of the others joking and chatting like a party heard through the apartment wall and tries to force herself to sleep.

---

Fern wakes with an orange, hazy sun and fixes herself an instant coffee. The wind is picking up. That worries her. In firefighting, wind is always the enemy.

She goes through the checklist. The exosuit is fueled, the battery backups are charged, the dirt from yesterday’s work has been wiped clean from the shimmering, photovoltaic skin; the lubrication reservoir is refilled, air filters replaced, and she even polished the chrome helmet. When she’s done, she and Larch check each others’ work.

The plan today is to split into two groups. As the fire continues climbing towards the line they set yesterday, they’ll flank it from the east and west, building two more lines and hopefully giving them containment, or close to it.

After breakfast, the pairs suit up. Larch and Redwood head east. Daniel and Fern hike west. She would’ve preferred to go with Larch, but she accepted the orders without complaint. Daniel doesn’t need to know that he’d gotten under her skin. He knew too much already.

As they hike, the radio channel between them remains open but silent. Daniel is subdued today. She knows she’s upset him and she’s both guilty and pleased—guilty for lashing out in the first place, pleased that it was so effective.

When they’ve reached their position (confirmed by a satisfying ding from the suit’s nav system), they start on the line immediately. Trees are felled, brush is cleared, ditches are dug. The exosuit makes the work easy but no less monotonous. Every so often she looks up at him, but of course in the suit there’s no eye contact, no smiles, nothing recognizable as Daniel in the identical exosuit, only her mirror twin.

The wind is growing stronger. The crowns of Douglas fir on the other side of the line sway in the gusts.

An aerial report comes in on the radio. The fire’s moving west. Abandon the line and retreat.

She can feel the heat growing as the temperature in her viewfinder ticks up, even through her suit. The air filtration system is whirring with effort. It must be close. The suit can withstand extremely hot temperatures but not indefinitely. They only have so much fuel, so much coolant.

She turns up the thermal vision in her viewfinder, and then she sees it. The unmistakable blinding white of fire, so much brighter than everything around it. It rushes the line, hopping from crown to crown on the trees overhead.

“Run!” Daniel calls.

Fire can rip through the forest, but their suits are faster. Their mechanical legs pump, springing up over downed logs and boulders, leaving deep impressions in the earth behind them. It’s an effort, with the heat and air filters working hard. The sound of Daniel’s breathing through the radio is a small comfort. Fern’s stomach sinks as she watches the fuel gauge tick lower and lower.

By the time they stop, it’s getting dark. They are only a few miles from Larch and Redwood’s location, but the fire amputates the two groups from one another.

It’s another night camping, just the two of them this time. The drone picks up their position and drops another box of supplies. She takes off her suit, feeling shy and small. Too soft, like a slug.

She refuels the suit and unpacks the supply box. There’s only one tent this time. Shit. She looks at Daniel, who is out of his suit too. He is long and lean, like a dancer, she thinks. Something stirs in her core.

As they eat their dinner on a downed log, Daniel asks, “Do you remember the last time we saw each other?” It’s the first words he’s spoken to her all day.

She freezes. Does he?

“Before I left for the summer. In our cabin, do you remember?”

“Of course I remember our first and only kiss,” she blurts, blushing. “I had a massive crush on you.”

Daniel’s eyes are lively, amused. “Had?” There’s a teasing note in his voice.

“Had,” she says firmly. She can’t let herself want him. She hasn’t allowed herself to want anything in so long. She lost herself in the physicality of her training and the study of the mechanics and the maintenance of the suit. She swaddled herself in it, even when she wasn’t wearing it.

“Why did you become a smokejumper?” she asks. Daniel had wanted to be an artist since he was five years old. He was always doodling in the margins of things, always equipped with a sketchbook in his backpack.

He looks down at his knees. “After the fires, I wanted to feel like I could make a difference. I don’t know that I am, but it feels better than sitting on my ass.”

“I know what you mean,” she says. “It feels like everything is fucked.” Prior to joining, Fern had been borderline homeless and drinking herself into oblivion just to get to sleep every night. Anything was better than that.

The air is heavy. The smoke is bitter in the back of her throat as she eats her freeze-dried chickpea curry. There’s a tension there too, and she can’t help but ask, “Why didn’t you respond to my message?”

He frowns. “What message?”

She blushes. He’s really going to make her say it? “The long, embarrassing one I sent three years ago.”

“Fern, I never got a message from you.”

Hope spikes in her chest, shoots straight up in the air like a flare gun. Had she mistyped the email address in her inebriated state? Maybe she never even clicked send, it didn’t matter though—by some miracle, he never got the message.

He had no idea she’d spent the past seven years pining over him. She feels drunk on possibility.

“I looked for you, y’know. You disappeared,” he says.

She digs her boot into the dirt. “I kind of shut the world out after Grandma died.”

Daniel puts a hand on her shoulder and squeezes. “Well, I’m glad you’re back.”

Her heart beats double time in her chest. She’s thrilled by the tender way Daniel is looking at her, but also terrified, as if she’s tiptoeing along the edge of an open elevator shaft. There’s power in having nothing left to lose. Letting Daniel back into her life would be like drilling a giant hole in the center of her suit.

The hour grows late as they talk about everything and nothing. It’s almost as if they’re back in their clubhouse again, having this conversation under the green and purple Christmas lights. As the night wears on, they gravitate towards one another, until their thighs are almost touching. There’s a heat between them, and Fern feels if they do touch, they may spontaneously combust.

When they finally yawn and stand and head to bed, the sky has cleared to reveal the glowing full moon.

---

Fern wakes in the middle of the night to see Daniel facing her, his eyes fluttering under his closed lids, his breath soft, his inky black hair. She feels safe next to him. Safe in a way she hasn’t in years.

As she drifts back to sleep, she curses herself for giving up so easily. For not trying harder to find him. For almost letting him slip away.

The next time she wakes, it’s to an alarm blaring. She knows that sound from her training, but it takes her a bleary-eyed moment to place it.

Evacuate. The words make her sick to her stomach. The wind’s shifted again and the fire is heading straight for them.

The two of them stumble out of the tent, ash raining down like snow. The night air feels heavy in her lungs. She can hear the roar of wildfire as she steps into her suit and closes herself off from the world around her.

They run east, towards another fire (there’s always another fire), small in comparison to the Lonehorn fire but one that’s been threatening to merge with it for the past few days. There’s few other choices. They need to get to a high point. Somewhere the helicopter can pick them up.

It’s effortless in the suits, but Fern watches with alarm as the power drains. Ninety percent. Eighty. Seventy-five. The filtration system is whirring harder than ever, the air in the suit is uncomfortably warm.

Sixty percent. They’re only a few miles away from the high point, but on the uphill grade, their pace slows. They’re on all fours, scrambling up rocks and over logs. Fern doesn’t allow herself to feel afraid. Her mind is focused on a single word. Evacuate.

When the fire came to Summer Valley, before they evacuated, smoke snuck under the gap in the door and through the cracks in the windows and through keyholes like an unwanted ghost. The Doug Fir Inn was not built air tight. Her eyes burned all the time, and she had a constant headache. She tasted it first thing when she woke up every day that week. She can almost taste it now.

Forty percent. The temperature gauge is all over the place and Fern’s movements become jerky and robotic as they slow to a crawl. Most of the suit’s power is going to the life support systems.

Thirty percent. Twenty. There’s so much noise—the roar of the fires, the pneumatics of the suits, the heavy tread, the buzzing mechanics—Fern almost doesn’t realize she’s alone until the suit alerts her to the fact with a paternalistic beep.

She turns around. Fifteen percent. Daniel is pinned under a tree, two feet in diameter. Her pulse slows, her blood suddenly molasses in her veins. She never heard it fall.

“Daniel,” she breathes in the radio, fearing the worst. His chest plate is concave under the log. “Daniel, answer me.”

“I’m here,” he says after a moment. “I think the suit is busted. Everything in my viewfinder is flashing red.”

Twelve percent. Ten. Shit, it’s dropping fast now.

“Go,” he says. “You don’t have time. The helicopter can’t wait forever. Please Fern, go on without me.”

She can’t lose anything else to the fire. She refuses. It’s taken too much from her already.

Eight percent.

She doesn’t respond, just steps to the tree and begins to lift.

“Fern,” Daniel warns.

Six percent. Four. Two. She can feel it, her own muscles straining against the robotic limbs as she heaves.

One percent. She raises the tree off of him, but he’s immobilized in his suit, he can’t get out from under. With one final burst of adrenaline, she pushes the tree off to the side.

And then she’s frozen. The suit has ceased locomotion, programmed as it is to reserve the backup power supply to keep her alive. But they can’t stay here. They’ll cook in the suits.

She unlocks herself, birthed from the exoskeleton on unsteady legs like a baby horse. The air is hell to breathe and her skin is slick with sweat almost instantly. She bites back rising panic. She’s trained for this. She grabs the emergency masks off the back of the suit, and straps one on her own face.

Daniel is still there on the ground, stuck, like a turtle on his back. She hits the emergency release button and he gasps. She hands him a mask, pulls him up by a sweaty hand. She leads them uphill in what Fern hopes is the right direction.

Her breaths are short, gasping. They crest but even at this elevation they are smokeblind. She should’ve brought the radio. Will the helicopter know where to find them without the suits?

Daniel squeezes her hand, and she looks in his eyes, which are red and watering but inexplicably smiling. He points.

She sees the ladder hanging in the void and hears under the roar of everything else, the whirr of the helicopter.

---

Fifty years later

 

“Did you really used to wear this?”

Aza hangs from the arm of the exosuit, squinting at Fern skeptically, as if she can’t believe that she could’ve ever been anything other than a grandmother.

Fern nods and gently ushers the child away from the suit, which although it is now worthless (it has been outmoded by a dozen incarnations of the exosuit, that are sleeker, faster, slimmer), it’s still her suit, damnit, and it deserves some respect. She sits, achingly, on a bench in the middle of the hotel lobby, which has become a sort of museum over the years.

“To fight bad guys?” Aza asks, her legs swinging from the bench.

Fern laughs. “To fight fires.”

For a moment the girl falls silent, contemplating this. Fern’s eyes move across the lobby with pride. Over the framed photos of her own grandmother and the original Doug Fir, over the articles detailing the decades of devastating fires, and Daniel’s paintings throughout. Forest landscapes mostly, some breathtakingly exquisite, others scarred with blackened trees.

The suits are the latest additions as well as the centerpiece of the exhibit. It took a lot of online sleuthing, calls to old Climate Corps friends, and a considerable shipping fee to get both of them here. She teared up when she saw hers. It was like seeing a taxidermy of an old pet. She wanted more than anything to climb inside one last time, feel the limbs move in sync with her own, to feel invincible again. Of course, battered and burned after dozens of missions, the thing is inoperable now.

Aza lays her head in Fern’s lap and looks up at her, all big brown eyes. “Why’d you stop?”

“We ran out of fires to fight,” Fern says. “Let’s go find your grandpa.”

The girl shoots up and runs out the hotel door. Fern trails her in the bright April afternoon. He’s right where she knew he’d be, this time of year, the light filtering through the conifer needles just right in the spot where their clubhouse once stood (or, at least, where they believed it once stood). The trees have grown back, though they’re not as mighty as they once were, still young and tender-barked, still swaying in the wind wildly. They will be steady one day. Fern is sure of it.

“Grandma was telling me about when she used to be a robot,” Aza says, tackling her grandfather with a hug.

“Whoa!” Daniel exclaims, deftly steadying his easel from toppling over with one arm while hugging Aza with the other.

Fern studies the canvas. Lately, her husband has been painting close-up compositions: a veiny leaf, the brown gills of a mushroom, the shadows and spikes of a pinecone. Today, he paints two banana slugs on the forest floor. They’re slick yet ridged, eyestalks pointing in opposite directions, so heartbreakingly soft it makes her want to cry. It reminds her of something, but she can’t put her finger on it.

She scoops up Aza, balancing her on her good hip (the robotic one). She’s still strong enough to do that, at least. The two of them regard the painting.

“Well, what do you think?” he asks Aza.

Aza scrunches up her face. “Gross.”

Daniel laughs.

Aza smiles shyly and wraps her arms around his neck. It hits Fern then, what the painting reminds her of. It’s the way she felt when she first saw Aza bundled in her mother’s arms, a soft squish of a thing. Or seeing Daniel in his old age: the gray hair, the knobby knuckles of his hands, the collection of wrinkles that now gather like the folds of a fan when he smiles. Everything is so impossibly fragile. There’s so much to lose in this world. Too much.

She wouldn’t trade it for anything.

“What do you think?” Daniel asks, tucking the paintbrush behind his ear.

“It’s beautiful,” Fern says.

---

Host Commentary

By Mur Lafferty

And that was “Smokejumpers,” by Sierra Bibi.

About the story, the author had this to say: “I was inspired to write this story after living through the Oregon wildfire season of 2020, which was the most destructive on record and burned more than one million acres. In difficult times, it’s easy to turn to cynicism; it takes courage to hope. Now that I have a daughter, I have to be courageous for her sake.”

I grew up in the NC mountains—the Appalachians—and wildfires were never a thing we worried about. The concept of fires just racing through forests that have stood there for decades is terrifying to me. I first experienced fires in the Spokane Worldcon in 2015 where the con was hanging up notices everywhere saying “DO NOT GO OUTSIDE, THE AIR IS UNBREATHABLE.” Although it didn’t offer us other alternatives on where to sleep, so we had to go outside. I was trying to understand why the air was full of smoke and we had literal ash falling on us, but no one was panicking because the fires were very far away. The morning sunrise looked apocalyptic. I guess it’s true that the worse your atmosphere is, the more beautiful the sunrise. Kind of a high price to pay for a few minutes of beauty if you ask me.

This story has the kind of positivity and hope we look for in Escape Pod, even though the actual setting is our terrible reality of climate change, the focus is on the strength of the people fighting and how technology got adapted to better deal with it.

Although I will admit I’d rather have technology that addresses the actual cause of the climate change instead of the symptoms, it’s not a lie that forcing the world to focus intently on one problem can create anything from great technology to powerful art. Flowers growing from manure, I suppose.

We want to thank everyone who nominated Escape Pod for the Best Semiprozine Hugo! We are incredibly honored to be on the ballot again, and hope you take a moment to check out the amazing finalists this year. On behalf of Valerie, Kevin, Phoebe, Summer, Adam, Alasdair, Tina, and the rest of the team, thank you so much for trusting us to bring you excellent stories every week.

Escape Pod is 100% audience supported, and we count on your donations to keep the lights on and the servers humming. Head to https://escapeartists.net/support-ea/ to see all the available donation and subscription options, including Patreon, PayPal, Ko-Fi, and Twitch.

You can also support Escape Pod for free by rating or reviewing us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite app. Whether you’ve been a dedicated fan of Escape Pod for years or just started following the cast, thanks for tuning in.

Escape Pod is distributed on a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license. Our music is by permission of Daikaiju.  You can hear more from them at daikaiju.org.

That was our show for this week. Our quote comes from Lisa Whelchel, “There’s something about childhood friends that you just can’t replace.”