“Heads up!” a firefighter shouted, voice punching cleanly through the rain. “Inbound debris!”
“Deflect,” the captain snapped, already waving two of her crew toward the angle where the dumpster would pass. They splashed to the edge with long pike poles, braced heels against concrete, and lowered the steel tips like spears—not to stab, but to nudge.
“Rook,” June said, already moving, “we can give them a third point.”
He didn’t ask how. He grabbed the neon strap tail, looped it around the base of the light pole, and ran it low across the water like a shallow fence.
“Everyone off the lip!” the captain called. “Back two paces—now.”
We stepped. The dumpster slid into view, metal flanks slick, a stenciled phone number ghosting through the rain. It hit the makeshift fence and juddered, swung its nose, kissed the pike pole, and rode up an inch. The strap groaned. The pole bent. The dumpster spun just enough to miss the hole and carry on downstream with the blank indifference of big objects doing what gravity tells them.
