Nothing sobers a man up faster than watching his life's work burn twice.
We'd been at the compound less than an hour earlier, and everything had been ordinary — the crew working the new frame, Killian complaining about his shift schedule, Ronan reviewing supply invoices with the same careful focus he gave everything. Then one of the night watch had come tearing back on his bike, out of breath even through the shift, saying three words that had emptied the room before he'd finished the sentence: garage site, fire.
We smelled it before we saw it, the same way I had the first time — that thick, chemical stink of scorched lumber and melted plastic carried on the wind long before the garage site came into view. Ronan's bike didn't so much slow down as stop reacting to the throttle at all, lik
