The True Heiress's Revenge: Exposing My Toxic Family on Live TV novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: Fire in the Rain
Dropped on a mountain with a moldy pack, Demi lights a fire in the rain on live stream while her brothers refuse to share, and at dusk they come to take it.
The helicopter lifted off the ridge and left her in the rain.
Demi stood with the pack at her feet and watched it shrink into the clouds.
Her camera operator, a tired woman with a rain cover over her lens, checked a small screen on her rig.
"We are live," she said. "Forty-one thousand watching already."
"Already?"
"Your brother Dean is the draw. Your sister's fans came with him."
Demi nodded.
The show gave each contestant a ridge, a pack and fourteen days.
The family cast had been dropped close enough together to meet.
Two hundred yards down the slope, a blue tent stood between the trees, and two men were arguing over a stove.
One was Dean, in a new rain jacket with the tags still on.
The other was taller, with a boxer's broken nose and heavy shoulders, hunched over a map.
Her fourth brother, Bruce.
He was a stuntman, the one Pellham son who could actually survive a mountain.
He looked up the hill and saw her.
His eyes stayed on her for a moment, and then he looked down again.
Demi walked down to them with the camera behind her.
"Can I share your fire tonight?" she asked, loud enough for the lens.
Dean laughed and did not stand up.
"There are two of us in a two-person tent. Pack your own."
"Bruce?"
Bruce kept his eyes on the map.
"Celia said you would be fine on your own," he said. "You have always been fine on your own."
"Right," Demi said.
She went back up the hill.
She sat down by the pack and opened it in front of the camera.
The first thing out was a ration bar, green with mold along one side.
The second was a box of matches that came apart in her hand, soaked through.
The third was a hunting knife with a blade so dull it would not cut the rope it was tied with.
At the bottom lay a tarp with the seams slit open along the whole length.
The camera operator lowered her rig.
"Somebody packed this for you?" she asked.
"My sister did," Demi said clearly. "She told me she wanted me to be safe."
On the little screen, the chat began to scroll too fast to read.
Within a minute one phrase rose above the rest, over and over: Who packed that?
The camera operator read it aloud.
"Somebody is going to have to answer that tonight," she said.
"Somebody will," Demi said.
Demi set the useless things in a neat row.
Then she got up and walked into the trees.
She did not need matches.
A thousand worlds had taught her more than one way to make a flame, and the oldest was the one the couple in the backwoods had beaten into her at seven.
A dead cedar stood in a hollow, split by lightning, dry in the heart of it where the rain could not reach.
She took a strip of its inner bark and shredded it fine with her hands.
She cut a straight stalk of dry fireweed and notched a flat slab from the log.
The dull knife was good for one thing.
She spun the stalk between her palms, steady and fast, until her hands were hot and a thin thread of smoke rose from the notch.
Then she tipped the ember into the shredded bark and cradled it and blew.
It caught.
Flame came up through the rain, small and yellow.
She fed it twigs, then sticks, then split cedar.
By the time the fire was as big as a hat, the camera operator had stopped saying anything at all.
"Say that again," the woman said to someone through her headset. "Three hundred thousand?"
Demi turned the slit tarp over a branch and tied it back together with its own cord.
She set the dented tin cup against the coals and filled it with rainwater.
When it boiled, she dropped in a fistful of fir needles, and the smell of tea rose into the wet air.
"The chat wants to know how you did that," the camera operator said, almost in a whisper.
"I wasn't going to freeze on camera to make anybody feel better," Demi said.
The woman laughed out loud, and then covered her mouth.
The light went gray.
Demi sat with her back against a boulder, hands around the cup, watching the viewer number climb past five hundred thousand.
Below her, the blue tent had gone dark.
Dean's stove had never lit.
She heard boots on the wet stones.
Two shapes came up the slope, Dean in front and Bruce a step behind him, both soaked to the skin.
Dean's teeth were chattering and he did not bother to hide it.
He stopped at the edge of her firelight and held out his hand.
"We are taking your fire," he said. "Hand it over."
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