The smoke comes before the fire does.

It starts two houses down — a flicker in a second-floor window that no one moved fast enough to stop. By the time the roof catches, the block is already becoming something else: a heat trap, a panic funnel, a killing ground where frightened people are moving without direction and desperate men are watching for exactly that kind of confusion. Canton is no longer a neighborhood. It is a box with no lid and not enough exits.

Mark Smith has run every calculation about staying. He has hardened this house, buried supplies in its walls, told his family it was worth defending. Now the house next to him is throwing embers into the dry October air and the wind is not running in his favor, and none of the math he has done adds up anymore. Sarah already knows what he is working toward. The argument that follo ...