The fire that had taken everything was a flicker compared to the forest fire of guilt that Aria felt, knowing that in a way, because she had been the one to report Ciarra, she was the one to blame for all this. The people standing next to her were the people in the world who were already the most powerless and already the poorest. Now, because of her decision, the only thing they had was their lives and whatever items they could grab before running.

Darren was the one who anguished her the most. Because of his gruff, military demeanor, before tonight Aria had not imagined that he could cry. But Darren was crying. He stood in front of the rest of them, chaotically pacing back and forth. Each time he stopped, it seemed like he might run straight into the flames toward his camper. Each time he stopped, he re-evaluated the reality of his powerlessness to save his things. What shard of safety he possessed had been taken from him. The only relationships he had, which were with his things, were lost. Since he was a hoarder, it was a thousand times worse for him than it was for the rest of them.

Eventually, he went down on his knees and elbows in the dirt. He held his head with his hands and started rocking back and forth. Except for Palin, who by alerting them had most likely saved all of their lives, no one went to comfort Darren. They felt as powerless to comfort him as they felt about the fire. He began to hyperventilate and pull sticks and handfuls of soil toward himself and hug them as a barren replacement for the things that he had lost. The sight of him doing it made Aria start to cry.

With nowhere to be, once the ground had given way to ash and only the heat of what happened remained, they divided up. Luke, Wolf and Anthony took Darren deeper into nature to spend what was left of the night there. Robert and Mike started walking toward the city. But they didn’t sleep that night. Instead, they found a gas station, sat on one of the picnic tables outside and spent the night trying to help each other make sense of what had happened.

Taylor’s resistance to staying with Dan had been cremated along with the rest of his things. He took the fire as a sign from God that he was meant to move in with Dan, so he called him on the phone that the older man had recently given him. The phone had felt like an unwelcome leash until he had needed it tonight, Dan’s way of keeping track of him. But now it felt like a lifeline instead of a chain.