Fire had changed how Brunton looked at Caleb. Glances no longer slid over him like he wasn’t there. Eyes were narrowed – he had grown into something despicable. Embers floated redly behind his eyelids and in his dreams, platelets in a video about blood. Like Caleb bled flames. Or the earth was haemorrhaging its molten interior. Fire had a different meaning, once. Everything meant something else, before.

Caleb was often misjudged. ‘Have you ever tried hard drugs?’ Mum asked once, after a newsreader said Victorian country towns were losing a generation to ice. But Caleb would never take anything to dull the pain. He deserved pain. Sean had been like the dream brother he lost one long-ago summer at Gran’s. He’d been taken out of school. Mum had been pregnant. A bit fat and happy, then very sick and sad. She’d had a miscarriage. No one thought Caleb old enough to know what he’d lost.

That summer, at a racetrack fair, he first saw fire engines and fireworks: Catherine wheels and volcanoes and penny bangers. Mum was married to Dad – that summer, it was unthinkable that this could end. She told him about bunyips. Caleb spent hours at the creek, scaring himself with imagined monsters. A stupid summer, before he stopped being scared of bunyips or anything else he couldn’t see, realising he only needed to be scared of himself – what he could do, how terrible the consequences could be.

Holidaying in Brunton had been so different from living in Brunton. When they moved, Caleb knew no other teenagers. He’d tried to look after Sean, chasing away the mean kids at school, making sure Pattern was walked. But that all belonged to the Caleb of before. The guilt monster bit into him, sucking, consuming until he could stand it no more, until he had to reach inside himself using pencils and pastels, and pull his guilt out and throw it at a piece of paper, where it stuck, sometimes for long enough for him to go to sleep. Then it slipped off the paper, slid across the room and ate its way back inside him, increasingly violent with its gnashing teeth and hot breath until Caleb was pulled into horrified wakefulness with the voice – his voice – screaming inside his head, What have I done?

Some days, pain was all he had. Pain made up for things. He would control himself, keep his consciousness firmly in the damage he had caused and couldn’t fix. Maybe one day he’d find a way to make a difference, to do something positive with his life. Maybe. That was where his thoughts had been last year, when Jack suggested joining the CFA.

‘It’s a chance to contribute to the community,’ Jack had said. ‘You’ll like the group. You belong as soon as you put on the uniform.’