The Firefighter's Match. Allie Pleiter

sky was always falling with Sam. And he usually wanted Alex to fix it. “They don’t need me back at headquarters. A man’s future is hanging in the balance here. I think WWW can handle any publicity woes.”

      He heard Sam pull a door shut and his brother’s voice lowered to barely a whisper. “They’re calling it equipment failure.”

      That sure sounded like studio types to him. “Come on, Sam, what did you think they were going to say? They can’t very well stand up and boast that one of their production assistants dropped Max. Where was the guy on the belay line when Max fell, anyway?”

      “The producer just roasted me in her office. She says the guy on the belay line is saying it was gear failure. Our equipment. They’re saying it was our line and hardware that failed.”

      This was exactly why Alex had never been keen on this promotional venture in the first place. It raised their visibility, but it also made them a target for finger-pointing if anything went wrong. Adventure Gear didn’t need the national exposure—they already had a good reputation among outdoor enthusiasts. The people who spent serious money on their gear knew AG products were top-notch. Alex never saw the point in high visibility to the reality television audience—he guessed ninety percent of them were couch potatoes who’d never seen the inside of a tent and never planned to. “They’re blowing smoke. You know it’s usually human error, and our stuff is better than that. And they aren’t even using our SpiderSilk lines until next season.”

      “Not entirely.”

      The tiny red alarm in the back of Alex’s mind that had started flashing hours ago suddenly bloomed into a full-blown wail. A surge of dread filled him so quickly he nearly lost the horrid coffee he’d just downed. Oh, no. The SpiderSilk prototype lines he’d delivered. They wouldn’t, would they? Alex stood up, not caring that he knocked the chair back to rattle on the floor in the empty cafeteria. “Sam. Sam, tell me you did not allow WWW to use the SpiderSilk. They were only supposed to look at it for next season—not use it now. Tell me they weren’t using the SpiderSilk. Tell me that right now.”

      The silence hit him like a brick wall.

      “Right here, right now, Sam. Tell me you didn’t give them some kind of permission to use the SpiderSilk. Tell me Max Jones didn’t fall from a rigging of the SpiderSilk.”

      “You’d said they were through testing.”

      Alex sank back to the table, stunned. Oh, Father God, what have I done by stepping back and letting Sam run things? I knew something like this would happen if I left. I knew it and ignored it because I was sick of Sam.

      “I said they were through initial testing. That doesn’t mean we’re ready for a man to dangle from them. At night. In the rain. That’s a brand-new coating we were using. What were you thinking?”

      “You said it was like nothing we’d ever made before. We tested them way beyond fourteen kilonewtons. You said they would revolutionize the industry.”

      “Next year. When the UIAA approved them as ready. We tested for weight with traditional belay devices—not for rain or melting point.... They’re not ready.” Alex raked one hand through his hair, panic rising up his spine until it gripped his throat. “Sam, how could you do this? Do you have any idea what you’ve done? To Max? To us?”

      “They were making noises like they’d go with someone else next season if we didn’t sweeten the deal. They didn’t want to wait until next year to showcase the SpiderSilk. They thought the unknown, the ‘test pilot’ element gave a great new twist. Hey, come on, the guy even knew he was using a prototype and signed a special release waiver and everything. And nobody said anything about a climb in the dark during bad weather.”

      “And it never occurred to you to ask me if I thought the SpiderSilk was ready?” Alex was shouting into his phone.

      “Hey, you’re the one who went AWOL and left me to run the company, remember?”

      They’d had a million arguments like this in the past year. AG was second in market share, and Sam was gunning full out for the top spot. He’d always been a little too eager to cut corners in the name of flash and speed, and Alex had always been the one to stop him. In truth, at times Alex had been too cautious, and Sam’s bold strokes had leaped the company forward to new heights. It was only recently Sam had begun to gamble on things that should never be risked. They’d fought so much in the past month that work had become torture. Alex had finally grown so weary of the constant battle that he had indeed taken a break to try to figure out if it was time to leave Adventure Gear altogether. It was the whole reason behind his seclusion in Gordon Falls—which was a joke, he realized. If he’d really wanted to get away, what was he doing secluding himself so close to where the show was?

      “You should never have done that. Never.”

      “Well, I didn’t think you much cared what I did anymore. They way you talked, you weren’t coming back. Are you still walking away?”

      A part of Alex—the squabbling sibling, angry, finger-pointing part—yearned to throw his hands up and do just that. In his two-week absence, Sam had managed to trash the Adventure Gear reputation it had taken Alex years to build. He wanted to say that he was done trying to rein Sam in, trying to hold on to integrity in a profit-hungry world. In this moment, Alex felt more than ready to leave AG in the dust and go get his joy back in some new adventure.

      “I don’t know.” It was a truthful answer.

      “We don’t have the luxury of ‘I don’t know.’ Fine, Alex, go ahead and disappear like you always do.”

      And that was just it. Alex did disappear. Too much. He’d come to realize that his “adventures” this past year were really just running away from the unpleasantness AG had become. Some part of Alex knew it was time to decide to either truly leave or truly stay. Nothing could have forced the issue more completely than the disaster that now lay in front of him. He wanted to have some comeback for the deserved accusation Sam just hurled at him, but he didn’t have one.

      Sam nearly growled into the phone, “Just know that this time I can’t guarantee there will be an AG to come back to if you bolt again. At least I can say that I was doing what I thought was right for the company. Risks don’t always pay off, and this one blew up in my face, but...”

      “No, this one blew up in Max Jones’s spine. A man’s life, Sam.”

      “This is my doing—I get that.”

      “Do you? Do you really?” Alex wanted to think that Sam had finally made such a mess that he would wise up. A failed product or a botched marketing ploy was easy to shake off—for Sam, anyway. Had the cost finally been high enough to get through to Sam? Could he walk away and know Sam would pay attention to these kinds of issues in the future?

      His brother’s growl dissolved to a sigh. “We’ve been in worse scrapes than this, you know we have, and solving this kind of stuff is what you do best. Come on, Alex, you’re our fix-it guy. You come up with the hot new product and then convince the world that they can’t live without it. You can get the family on board with seeing things our way—I know you can. I’m asking you to help. But I’m not going to beg.”

      This wasn’t a business decision anymore. JJ was upstairs wondering if her brother would ever walk again. For whatever reason, God had orchestrated him right into the middle of this storm, and he now knew he couldn’t walk away from it. There would be no bolting—not even back to Denver.

      “I’ll stay here at the hospital until we get word on Max Jones. Get the ropes and hardware back from production and get Doc out here on the next flight.” If anyone would be able to ascertain what had happened with the equipment, Mario “Doc” Dovini would. As their chief climbing expert and product development specialist in Denver, Doc would be the man with the answers. After all, they’d taken to calling the flamboyant Italian “Doc” because his diagnostic skills were so extraordinary.

      “I got part of the gear back thirty minutes ago and Doc is due in at 10:48.”