They were out on a commercial fire alarm call that turned out to be false. Ned didn't mind it so much, really. The summer night was still, and in the middle of nowhere, on another anonymous stretch of pavement, everything was so quiet he could hear his blood in his veins.

"Not nodding off on me, are you?"

Ned shook himself a little and directed a wiseass grin at Mark, who was driving, and who also had a toothpick still sticking out of the corner of his mouth from after dinner. His six-day start on Ned gave him seniority, which both of them knew was total bullshit. Mark moved the toothpick to the other side of his mouth and Ned studied his fingernails, the still-raw crescent-shaped scar on the fat part of his thumb from a stupid mistake he'd made the week before.

"Engine twelve, come in?"

Mark grabbed the mic and Ned sat up a little straighter. The adrenaline letdown was fading as it rose again, while dispatch pointed them to another fire. When he placed the address mentally in the warehouse district, though, Ned groaned to himself. Another false alarm, another night of playing cards for nickels back at the station house. He'd almost pay a kid to chase a stray cat up a tree, just for a change of pace.

From three blocks away, though, Ned could tell he was wrong. The light pollution of the city was dim behind the veil of smoke, and this was out in the old part of town, where those too stupid to know any better rented storage space. The land had been cleared to make a short airstrip with a few flimsy metal hangars, the kind that would house a Cessna or pathetically small plane, for tourists or rich idiots, people who didn't know any better or had enough money not to care. He thought at first that it had finally happened, that some drunk kid had been too loaded to steer correctly and had taken out a few of those fly by night storage buildings, but it was just the one hangar on fire. He whistled softly in appreciation when they came in sight of it. Knowing there was little chance someone's life was in danger, Ned just stared at it for a moment, the flames licking high against the dark sky. Mark bitched when another engine pulled in behind him, and as soon as he had his braked, Mark and Ned went immediately for the hoses. In the comparatively dark lot beside them, an ambulance stood, the technicians staring at the blaze with the same expression Ned had pulled.

"Anyone else supposed to come in?" Mark called to Jimmy, who was helping unroll another thick hose.

"I think Lad is on the way."

"Why?" Ned called, grunting with the effort as he and Mark worked.

"For all we know a plane crashed in there," Jimmy pointed out. Ned shielded his eyes and slowly tracked his gaze over the hangar. Well, maybe if it plummeted straight out of the sky, Ned allowed, shaking his head.

"Better him than me."

A few police cars screamed through, parking haphazardly near the ambulance, and the officers inside came out with swaggering importance, exchanging the usual pleasantries with the technicians. In this heat he couldn't imagine anyone having enough energy to commit a crime. Maybe a wife might stab her husband if the air conditioning broke, but even that felt like a stretch.

Three minutes later, the fire came through something with a roar, and Ned glanced back at the truck. "I better take a look inside there before all the evidence is gone," he told Mark. "If there even is any."

Mark checked his watch, training the cascade of water on the flames. Lad was still at least five minutes out. "Okay," he said, but he didn't sound happy about it.

Suiting up, Ned was quick but thorough. Jimmy and Theo watched him, expressionless, as he headed to the hangar. Mark gave him only a brief acknowledging nod. Doing something as simple as this could get him killed, they all knew it. Judging the height of the flames at the front, Ned headed to the back, feeling like an astronaut as he slowly moved in the suit.

After he broke the rear door's lock with his axe, Ned had to blink a few times to adjust to the way the firelight cast everything into a thousand moving shadows, demanding all his attention as it consumed and consumed. He saw a gasoline or kerosene can, but it was already too close to the fire; as he watched, it went up with a spectacular crack, and then the roar came back into his ears. The roof was still intact and he didn't see the skeleton of a plane, crashed or otherwise. The whole thing was looking suspicious.

And then he caught a movement in the sea of shimmering flame around him, and even after he turned toward the other back corner it still took him a moment to make sense of what he was seeing. A patch of flame was dying there, and sitting on the ground beside it was a girl.

"Oh God, oh God," Ned gasped, and ran over, making note of everything, remembering it for processing later. The girl looked up at him with dull, half-interested eyes as he tried to scoop her up, but one of her slender wrists was handcuffed to what had recently been a folding cot. He put her back down gently, sweating now, and took out his axe. Three swift strokes, and she cringed at every one, before he could slide the other cuff off the frame. A thick rough blanket was crumpled on the ground next to her and he held it up.

"I have to wrap you in this, all right?" he shouted to her through his helmet, and she gave him a blank, dazed nod. The material he approved of, but the length he didn't. Her bare feet poked from one end, her white shoulders from the other. When he scooped her up into his arms, going over everything one last time, she put her head against his chest.

"Is there anyone else here?"

She shook her head, something he didn't understand twisting her features, and with a relieved prayer he set out for the same door he had come through. She huddled close to him as he jerked the door open and, covered in sweat and starting to tremble a little, carried her to the waiting ambulance. The two blueshirted technicians had the gurney ready when he arrived, both sets of eyes wide, but not as wide as hers, the whites visible all the way around the blue.

And then it was like time started again, and he could hear Mike shouting for a response in his helmet, and he could feel his hands clenching and unclenching inside the heavy gloves. If he'd been a few minutes slower, she would have been dead.

And, in the shimmering firelight, he had seen her skin, gleaming with sweat. A naked girl handcuffed to a burning cot in the back of an empty airplane hangar.

Ned took his helmet off and started back to his engine, looking back at the ambulance as he went.

The decompression had already started by the time they got back to the station house. The scent of ash and greasy char clung to his skin, even through the suit, and while he barely noticed it he knew Jenny would smell it immediately. He returned to the breakroom ten minutes later in clean sweats and a CFD t-shirt, still rubbing his hair dry, to see Jimmy, Mark, and Lad at the table dealing cards. Ned pulled the refrigerator door open, the shelves turning a glazed amber with age, the door itself liberally decorated with faint black fingersmudges that were ground right into the plastic. The ceiling tiles were worn grey, from twenty years ago when the boys would sit and smoke while playing cards, in an ironic compartmentalization of their own job and the frequent cause. From the corner a small television set droned the evening news, the pitch and fall of the newscaster's voice easily drowned out by the squawk of the dispatch radio.

"Throw me one?"

Ned grimaced at the contents of the refrigerator before settling on a bottled water for Lad, grabbing some noxious green tea for himself. "So what took you so long?" Ned asked Lad as he handed him the bottle, straddling a chair across from the other man.

"You mean how I was twenty seconds from going in when you came out the back?" Lad returned, with only a little anger in his voice, and Ned recognized it as frustration.

"Yeah, well," Ned said easily. "Far as I'm concerned, you can get the facetime for it."

Lad's hands relaxed on the cards, at that answer. His given name was Todd Lacher, but his captain had started calling him Laddie when he unerringly made his way through the training courses, finding the dummies and then the real bodies, limp and passed out from smoke inhalation, in the nightmares of crumbling houses and apartment buildings. Lad wanted to be captain one day, and they all knew it. Being behind a desk was the last thing on Ned's mind. Giving Lad the credit now could only help later.

"Anything on the news about it?" Jimmy asked, shrugging toward the television set.

"Haven't seen anything yet," Mark replied, dealing Ned in with the next hand. "What did it look like in there?"

"Pretty sparse," Ned admitted. "No plane, no remnants of a plane. Metal gas or kerosene can tipped over that went up as soon as I walked in, I'm sure the marshal will see that. Otherwise," he shrugged.

"And you found a girl in there," Mark prompted.

"At the back," Ned confirmed, keeping his gaze on his cards. "Probably disoriented from the smoke."

"Hey," Jimmy said in surprise, tossing his cards face-down on the table as he snagged the remote and turned the volume up on the television. They had, of course, noticed the news crews, but that was only later, and it was a slow news week. In a dizzying set of smash cuts the fire was framed against the black and orange sky, and then Ned recognized himself silhouetted against the burning hangar, only because the pale angle of a bare foot was visible beside his arm. Lad darted a bland look at Ned, but none of them had their names on the jackets. He was just another anonymous fireman on the file footage.

"The woman being carried from the burning warehouseã" they all snorted at the misinformation, "hasn't yet been identified, but she was taken to the hospital for treatment for smoke inhalation. Stay tuned for more on this story."

Smoke inhalation. Under the lights in the ambulance her fair skin had been flushed from the heat. Ned shook his head, sighing to himself. He'd probably have nightmares about not getting there in time, but she was obviously all right.

Even though she had been naked and handcuffed to a cot at the back of a burning airplane hangar.

"You want to make this interesting?" Jimmy said, turning the television back down when it was obvious they had heard all they were going to about the fire. "Nickel a hand."

"That puts me broke in five," Ned joked, digging in his pocket.

At the shift change Jimmy and Mark went to check the engines, while another band of sleepy-eyed firefighters trailed through the station house. Ned shrugged into his windbreaker and had just opened his mouth to wish Lad a good night when a teaser for the next morning's news came on.

"Local celebrity pulled from burning airplane hangar," a woman with frosted brown hair reported, eyes brimming with seriousness. "Details at 6 a.m."

Lad turned to Ned slowly, the half-full bottle of water still in his hand. He didn't have to ask, and whatever they said, Jimmy and Mark would back them up, he knew that.

"For all I care it could have been the Queen of England," Ned said, looking down to pull the zipper on his windbreaker. He shrugged. "You want it, it's yours."

Lad's pause was all but imperceptible, but he nodded. "I'll owe you," he said.

"Sure," Ned said easily. "And I'll make it good, too."

Lad half-smiled. "Thanks, Nicky."

He almost didn't go to Jenny's. At one-thirty, she was probably asleep. But he decided on it anyway, shushing King, her German shepherd, when he greeted him at the door. Jenny had fallen asleep drawing again, her pale blonde hair hanging over the edge of the bed, head cradled on her bent arm. The television was showing a sitcom that hadn't been on the air since he was a kid, the laugh track quiet as breathing. Ned smiled down at Jenny, lightly tossing the key in his hand, before he went to the kitchen for a drink. The flicker of her laptop's screen saver caught his attention, and he drained a glass of soda, debating.

He felt guilty when he pulled up her browser, keeping the page of photo textures she had left on the screen open as he navigated to the news station's webpage. What he was doing, well, there was nothing wrong with it; even so, he kept glancing over his shoulder, at the open bedroom door. He watched the uploaded video on mute but didn't see anything he hadn't seen in the broadcast. The girl's identity was still a mystery.

Ned rubbed his hand across his forehead, suddenly feeling incredibly tired. Jenny stirred a little when he pulled her art pad and pencils carefully off the bed, and half-rose when he gently tugged on the comforter. "Hey," she said, sweeping her hair off her face, giving him a dreamy smile. "You home?"

"Yeah," Ned answered, stripping his shirt off, watching her arch as she slipped under the covers. She turned her face in his direction, her eyes half-lidded, still smiling a little.

"You gonna be awake for very long?"

Jenny smothered an enormous yawn with the back of her hand. "Not unless you give me a good reason," she said, then laughed when he pounced on her.

Jenny Kendrick had been his high school sweetheart, and when she went to art school and he went to Emerson, they had still managed to stay together, even while all their friends were breaking up. He'd been in love with her since he was sixteen, and the sight of her still made his knees weak. She freckled in the summer when she came to cheer at the pickup baseball games, and for Ned, who could barely draw recognizable stick figures, her sketches and paintings were nothing short of witchcraft. She had sketched him asleep on practically every surface in her apartment and kept threatening to sell the entire series to a gallery, especially the one she had done in charcoal of him one morning after with the sheets tossed back and his chest just the suggestion of planes and strength. Whenever Ned looked at that picture he was flattered and puzzled at the same time. When he looked in the mirror, he didn't see it. But it was clear from the adoration in her face every time she looked at him, that she always did.

She had chosen the third-floor apartment for its windows, and in the morning, especially after he'd had a few the night before, Ned always regretted staying over. Undaunted by curtains or blinds, the morning sun turned the discarded pile of his clothes a brilliant white, and Jenny's hair almost transparent, a corona of pale gold when she walked out of the bathroom clad only in a towel.

"You going to sleep in? You were in late," she said, bending down to press a kiss against his cheek. Ned let his hand slide in where the towel didn't quite join, and he squeezed her bare hip gently. She smiled, but moved away.

"That a no?"

Ned groaned. "Not if you don't give me a good reason to stay awake," he said, unable to keep himself from smiling at the end of it.

Jenny laughed and turned on the television, and Ned, giving up, rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. The weather report promised another cloudless scorching day, and Jenny began to rummage through her closet. Ned grabbed the remote, ready to turn it to ESPN, when he remembered the promise the anchor had given on the teaser the night before.

"Don't you dare turn it to sports!" Jenny called, her voice muffled through her shirt.

Ned's witty reply sank from his lips as a generic fire graphic showed on the screen, and the morning anchor shuffled her blue pages. "A local celebrity was involved in an early morning blaze in the warehouse district."

"Huh?" Jenny called, then came back into the room. "You didn't tell meã"

Ned motioned for her to be quiet as the same footage he had already seen twice aired. "A Chicago fireman courageously pulled twenty-three-year-old Nancy Austin from the flames. Authorities haven't yet determined the cause of the fire, and no one else was hurt. Miss Austin was treated for smoke inhalation and released. What she was doing in the warehouse district is not yet known, but Miss Austin does have a small personal aircraft. We have not yet ascertained whether it was housed in the same hangar that caught on fire. We'll have more on this story at the noon news."

At the end of the fire footage was a short archive clip of the girl he had rescued, in a black formal dress, her head tossed back as she laughed at something off-camera. She was clinging to the arm of a tall, handsome man, but everyone, including him, only had eyes for her.

"What the hell?" Ned breathed, leaning forward. None of it made any sense.

"Nancy Austin," Jenny murmured, her brow furrowed. "Oh. Yeah. That's Nancy Drew."

"What, she got married?" Ned asked, turning to his girlfriend.

"I don't know if she got married," Jenny said, smoothing lipgloss on, "but she went to elementary school with me. Wasn't anything like the snob she is now."

"Right," Ned replied, his attention drifting as he sensed a long story looming.

"She was fine until her dad died, and then she inherited all that money, when she was in high school. Hasn't been the same since," Jenny finished.

"Mm-hmm."

Jenny paused for a second, and then a shirt caught Ned square on the side of the head, and he gasped out a laugh, shocked. "What was that for?"

"Not listening to me," Jenny retorted, hands on her hips. Her green eyes glowed when she was annoyed, although seeing her like that just now made him want to scoop her up and throw her back into bed. "You didn't tell me about that fire last night because you got all star-struck when you recognized her."

"Number one," Ned said, pushing the covers back, "I didn't tell you about the fire because we were otherwise engaged. Number two, I didn't even recognize her last night. I've never even met her, for God's sake. And number three," he said, kissing her on the tip of her nose when he reached her, "I don't get star-struck over anyone but you."

Jenny ran her fingers through his hair and sighed, her gaze searching his. "You could charm the moon right out of the sky, you know that?"

"I'm counting on it," he said, scooping her up, her laughter tingling over his skin as he kissed her.

After she left for the day, ten minutes late and laughingly blaming him for it as she kissed him goodbye, Ned headed back to his own apartment. Here, the sunlight came only through the edges, the seams where the quilts didn't quite block the windows, and from his bedroom he could already hear the air conditioner in the window rumbling to itself. He tossed his keys on the kitchen counter and pulled his shirt off, stepped out of his shoes, and was down to his boxers by the time he walked into his bedroom.

Nancy Austin.

He was about to close his bedroom door, but thinking of her, and in the back of his mind he hadn't stopped thinking about her all night, he swerved to the couch and swept up his laptop, rubbing his hand over the stubble on his cheeks. He just had to find out about her, and he could get it out of his system. Telling Lad he could take the credit guaranteed that, as far as Ned was concerned, their intersection had been quick and memorable and was now over.

She looked familiar to him and that was all, but seeing her on the news had been familiar too. His internet search brought up a hundred different news stories, most of them on celebrity blogs, but when he searched the name Jenny had mentioned, Nancy Drew, the hits were taking him to the Chicago Sun-Times, the River Heights Morning Record. Some of them were too old and the links were dead or misdirected, but he found a few that worked.

Nancy Austin's history only went back seven years. Nancy Austin wouldn't run into a burning warehouse, Nancy Austin would probably be with the group of drunk socialites who started it. Nancy Austin dated William Hastings III, whose faintly British name and faintly British tailor gave him an air of entitlement, who seemed to use his girlfriend as arm candy at every black-tie event in Chicago. Nancy Austin was photographed in skimpy bikinis at every major resort and had never met a bar she didn't like.

Nancy Drew, on the other hand, wore a pair of wire-rims and kept her red-blonde hair tied back, and she wasn't the main topic of any news story. She was buried in the final paragraph, she was in the background with her head down when the criminals scowled at the camera, and when she gave to a charity or attended a fundraising dinner, there were no pictures. The only time he found both names mentioned together was in an abbreviated piece on Carson Drew's death. The popular onetime district attorney had been killed by the husband of a former client, and then Nancy Drew, in her final act before becoming Nancy Austin, had brought to the police irrefutable proof, enough to put the man away for the rest of his life and her own.

And Austin had been her mother's name.

Ned blinked quickly a few times, his eyes dry from reading so long. He wasn't tired, but he was in that thin unstable valley beyond it, and if he didn't get some rest he'd be worthless for his shift. He made sure to close the browser before shutting the lid of his laptop, and then headed to bed, sighing in comfort as he slid between the cool sheets.

But it came back to him, just as it had every other time he had tried to close his eyes, since he had walked out of that hangar with her in his arms, her face against his chest.

Chained naked to a cot.

Maybe, somehow, at the edge of possibility, he could imagine Nancy Austin ending up in that situation. But it seemed far more like something that would have happened to Nancy Drew.

And Nancy Drew had been the one staring at him through those wide blue eyes, mute and shaking, after God only knew what had happened.

Ned sighed and closed his own.