The smell of wet soot is a heavy, greasy thing that clings to the back of your throat like a secret you never wanted to keep. I was standing in the skeleton of what used to be a high-end data center, my boots crunching over the calcified remains of 42 high-end server racks. The air was thick with the scent of ozone and ruined ambitions. I’d just spent 22 minutes trapped in a conversation with the facility manager, a man who seemed to believe that if he kept talking, the insurance adjuster would somehow find the ashes more sympathetic. He didn’t understand that I don’t care about sympathy; I care about the pour pattern of the accelerant and the specific crystallization of the copper wiring. I tried to leave three times, but he had that desperate, rhythmic habit of starting a new sentence before the last one had even cooled. It was a social fire I couldn’t extinguish without being a jerk, so I stood there, nodding, while my internal clock ticked away 1322 seconds of my life that I will never get back.
Fire is rarely the monster people think it is. People see a wall of flame and they think of rage, of chaos, of something untamable. But fire is actually quite obedient. It follows the laws of physics with a devotion that is almost religious.
The Obedience
