Fire Season-eARC Read Online Free PDF Page B

now, scampering with odd, leaping jumps meant to minimize his contact with the burning tree limb. Despite this awkward gait, he flowed rapidly toward the open door of the air car. There he hesitated momentarily. The opening was bobbing alarmingly as the air car was tossed by the updrafts.
    Lionheart poked out his upper body, true-hand and hand-feet extended, beckoning urgently, reaching as if to grab the other. Perhaps seeing how Lionheart’s missing limb made this a very precarious position, the other treecat jumped into the air car. Stephanie and her burden were only a few steps behind. Feeling the limb under her feet creaking alarmingly, Stephanie half-leapt, half-lurched through the open door.
    “Get your feet in!” Karl yelled. “I’m pulling us out.”
    Stephanie hauled her legs in after her and felt the open panel sliding shut. Almost immediately, the jouncing of the air car settled somewhat.
    “I’m taking us back to your freehold,” Karl said. She noticed he was wearing his breathing mask and goggles. “I called and your dad is home. I told him we have a patient for him. Did the other ’cat get burned?”
    “I don’t think so,” she said, “or at least not badly.”
    Stephanie twisted carefully in the now cramped confines of the backseat, the injured ’cat in her lap. Lionheart was sitting next to the other treecat, thrumming gently, obviously soothing the other.
    She grinned at him. “Good job, Lionheart.”
    He bleeked and gave her a “thumbs up” gesture with his one true-hand. Then he motioned for her to put the injured treecat on the seat between him and the other cat. Now they both sat pressed against the injured one, making soothing sounds something like a Terran cat’s purr.
    At the time of her own injury, Lionheart’s clan had done something similar for her, somehow making her mind able to ignore the pain of a very badly broken arm, nearly broken leg, and several cracked ribs, so Stephanie did not interfere. Instead, she climbed into the front seat to give the ’cats more room.
    Karl, she noted, now had both respirator and goggles hanging loose on straps around his neck. She took off her own, but left the fire-suit on.
    “Were you able to get those out while keeping the car steady?” she asked. “I’m impressed.”
    Karl chuckled. “Actually, Lionheart got them for me. I was coughing my head off and that wasn’t doing any good for my piloting. Next thing I know, he’s shoving the respirator at me, bleek-bleeking like mad. I got it on and he brought me the goggles.”
    “Good for him!”
    “We got to add that to our list for Dr. Hobbard,” Karl said. “The one to show that treecats are human smart, no matter what some people say.”
    “Human smart,” Stephanie laughed. “You and I both know they’re smarter than some people we know.”
    Lionheart bleeked, reaching forward to pat Stephanie with approval.
    “Lionheart agrees with us,” Stephanie said. Then the background chatter from the SFS team cut into her thoughts. “Oh! Have you reported in to SFS?”
    She still felt a thrill when she referred to the Sphinxian Forestry Service by its initials—that was one of the “in” things she and Karl had picked up during their training as probationary rangers. She also got a kick out of addressing Frank and Ainsley by their titles, rather than first names, when they were on duty. Doing so acknowledged that they were all part of a group that went from the newly created Probationary Rangers up to Assistant Rangers, Rangers, Senior Rangers, with Chief Ranger Shelton overlooking them all from the very top.
    “I did,” Karl said. A sly grin stretched one corner of his mouth. “I told them that we’d been coming in from the north, but had encountered a tongue of fire that made going that way a bad idea. They told me not to circle around, that the fire was under control and that aircraft were coming in to dump water and fire retardant to halt the spread of the fire in that area,