Chapter 2
Ezra
I have a rule about new information. I learned it the year I came out of the burn ward, when I was sixteen and brittle and angry and ready to set fire to anything that looked at me sideways.
The rule is this: when a piece of information lands hard, you don't react to it in the room you heard it in.
You walk out of that room. You go somewhere with air and distance and nothing flammable, and you let the news settle, and you don't decide what it means until the part of you that wants to set fire to it has stopped voting.
The firefighter — Isolde, she said, Isolde Flynn, Isolde like a knight's lover in a story my grandmother used to tell me — drops the news at three-seventeen in the afternoon, and by three-thirty-five I'm walking out of the clubhouse with my hands jammed in my pockets and my jaw locked so tight I can feel the back molars complaining.
The yard is bright. The day is hot. The air smells like dry grass and pine resin and the underlying char of the fire pit I lit this morning to burn off a batch of failed compound.
My wolf is awake and pacing under my skin and the heat in my chest is up two degrees from baseline.
I can feel it in the back of my throat. I always feel it in the back of my throat when I'm getting close to losing my temper. Like I'm about to exhale smoke.
I don't exhale smoke. That would be too literal. I just walk.
I walk past the forge, past the bunkhouse, past the long row of cabins on the eastern slope where the families live.
I nod at Della when she steps out onto her porch with a basket of laundry.
I nod at one of the new prospects who's hauling lumber up the hill.
I keep moving until I get to the fire pit.
The fire pit is mine in a way nothing else in the compound is mine.
The clubhouse belongs to all of us. The forge belongs to Casket.
The armory belongs to Savage. The fire pit — a wide circle of fitted stone set into a clearing on the western ridge, with a windbreak on three sides and an iron grate I can roll over the top to control burn — is mine because nobody else wants to be near it.
The compound calls it the pit. The kids call it the cooker.
The brothers call it Ash's office, which is the closest I get to a joke around here.
I sit on the stone bench at the edge of it. The morning's burn has cooled to embers under the grate. I poke at it with the iron rod I keep leaning against the bench and watch the orange flare up underneath the ash. The heat reaches my face. Most people would lean back. I lean in.
She knows about the compound.
That's the piece I keep circling. She knows the temperature.
She knows the lattice. She knows the residue pattern.
And the values she gave me at the bar — twenty-two hundred Celsius, the carbon ladder, the ignition geometry — were close enough to mine that any chemist who looked at her data and my data would call them sibling compounds.
Not identical. Sibling. The wrong sibling.
The one that came out lazy and uneven and the wrong color.
Someone reverse-engineered me.
That's a violation in a way I have to be careful how I describe to myself, because the wrong language about it is going to send me up the mountain looking for a man to gut, and I'd rather make sure I have the right man before I do that.
But it is a violation. My compound isn't a recipe you find on the internet.
It's the product of fourteen years of work — fourteen years since I came out of the ward and decided that if fire had taken half my body it was going to give me a way to make a living, and the only way to control fire is to understand it better than anyone else alive.
I read every chemistry textbook in the regional library system.
I took correspondence courses in materials science under three different fake names.
I built a lab in the back of my workshop with equipment Hex sourced for me out of decommissioned university surplus.
I developed a compound that burns at a specific temperature with a specific residue pattern because every fire I set leaves a calling card the Sinners can use to claim or deny credit as the club needs.
My compound is a signature. It is my signature.
It belongs to me in the way a fingerprint belongs to a man.
Someone has been forging my fingerprint.
For fourteen fires. Across four states. Over two years.
And one of those fires killed six firefighters.
I let out a breath. The embers under the grate jump a little, because my breath is hotter than other men's breath, and the dry tinder I keep at the edge of the pit smolders briefly before it gives up. I close my eyes.
The wolf wants out. The wolf wants to run the perimeter and find a scent to follow. The wolf doesn't understand that the man I need to find isn't going to be on the perimeter. He's going to be in records and patterns and chemistry results, and I'm going to need a firefighter to help me find him.
That part annoys me more than I want to admit.
The screen door of the clubhouse slams. I open my eyes.
Savage is walking across the yard toward me, and behind him, Priest, and behind him, Hex.
Conrad isn't with them. Conrad is still in church with the rest of the table, and the fact that Savage broke church on my say-so means I'd better have what I think I have.
Savage gets to me first. He's broad and gray and silent in the way he always is when something is wrong. He looks me over, looks at the pit, looks back at me.
"Talk," he says.
"There's a woman in the bar," I say.
"I'm aware. You think I'd be here if I wasn't aware."
"She's a firefighter from West Virginia. Two years ago her crew got killed in a wildfire that was officially ruled lightning. She doesn't think it was lightning. She thinks it was set. She's spent two years tracing the chemistry, and the chemistry brought her here."
Savage's face doesn't change. "She thinks it was you."
"She thinks it was somebody using my compound."
A pause. Priest joins us, then Hex. Priest is taller and quieter than Savage and watches with the patient eyes of a man who has counted bodies.
Hex is the youngest of the three and looks like a college dropout, which he is, and runs our intelligence, which he does because nobody who didn't know him would believe the kid in the band T-shirt and the wire-rim glasses runs the digital footprint of an outlaw motorcycle club.
He's already got his laptop tucked under his arm.
I tell them what she told me. Temperature. Lattice. Geometry. The fourteen fires. The fact that the compound is sibling to mine and not identical. The fact that whoever's been using it has been using it long enough and aggressively enough that we have a real problem.
Savage is silent for a long beat when I finish. Then he says, "How sure are you it's not yours."
I look at him.
He doesn't flinch from the look, because Savage doesn't flinch from anyone, but he raises a hand. "I have to ask. Don't take it personal. Could one of yours have leaked? A failed batch she got hold of? A site you didn't clean as thoroughly as you thought?"
"No."
"You're sure."
"I'm sure. My batches don't fail in a way that produces what she's describing.
I run my failures into the pit." I gesture at the grate beside me.
"I burn them at temperatures that destroy the lattice.
There's nothing of mine in the wild that's sibling to mine.
What she's got, somebody made on purpose, working from a sample they reverse-engineered. "
"From where."
"That's the question."
Hex opens the laptop. He sits on the stone bench beside me with no preamble — Hex doesn't do preamble — and starts typing. "Pull up your job log. The last five years. Every site. I want to know which ones could have left residue a chemist could have gotten his hands on."
I think about it. I think about my jobs the way another man might think about his children. I know each one. Each one has a date and a location and a purpose and a clean-up procedure that I do personally because I don't trust anyone else to do it.
Three sites jump out.
The first is a warehouse outside Charlottesville two years ago — a job for the Crows, a friendly chapter we'd done favors for. I burned the warehouse to cover up a weapons cache that had been compromised. The Crows handled their own clean-up. I drove out before the embers were cold.
The second is a roadhouse in Tennessee a year and a half ago — a job for ourselves. A meth cook had been operating out of it without our permission. We burned it. I supervised the clean-up but didn't do it myself because Conrad pulled me back to the compound for a security situation.
The third is the most recent — six months ago, a salvage yard in Kentucky, where a Sinners contact had been killed by a rival group and we needed to erase forensic evidence of the killing. I burned the yard. The clean-up went to a prospect named Wiley because I had two other jobs that night.
Three sites. Three places where a chemist with motive and equipment could have pulled samples I didn't know about.
I tell Hex. Hex types. The keyboard makes the small clean sound that always makes me think of dry leaves.
"Run those three," Savage says. "Cross-reference with anyone we know who has a chemistry background. Look for grudges. Look for displaced affiliations. Look for anyone who used to wear a cut and doesn't anymore."
"Already starting," Hex says. He's been typing for ten seconds. "Give me an hour."
Priest, who has been quiet, speaks. "The woman in the bar."
"What about her."
"You want to bring her in. On this."
I don't answer immediately. Priest isn't asking. He's predicting. He's watched me long enough to know what I'm about to say and he's giving me the chance to either confirm it or back away from it. Priest is like that. Priest watches.
"She's got two years of investigation data," I say. "She has chromatography from fires we didn't know existed. She has wind data. She has correlations. She knows the chemistry better than anyone outside this circle. If we're going to find whoever's using my compound, she's the fastest path."
"She's also a civilian," Savage says. "A grieving civilian. With firearms and a fire department vehicle and a reason to want one of us dead."
"She thought it was me when she walked in," I say. "She doesn't think that anymore."
"You're sure of that."
I think about her face when I told her about the lattice.
The way her expression shifted from rehearsed accusation to actual listening, and how rare that shift is in a person who has driven eight hours to confront someone.
She didn't want to believe me. She believed me anyway, because the chemistry didn't give her a choice, and because she's a professional, and professionals follow the evidence even when the evidence takes the easy answer away from them.
"I'm sure," I say.
"If she becomes a liability—" Savage starts.
"She's my problem."
"That's what I was going to say." Savage tips his head at the pit.
The embers flare again, because I'm angry and the air around me is warmer than it should be.
He notices the way the embers flare. He always notices.
"Conrad will want to meet her. After church.
Don't let her out of the compound until he does. "
"She's not going anywhere."
"Make sure of that."
He turns to go. Priest follows. Hex stays on the bench, typing, his eyes already on three different databases.
I sit for another minute. The fire under the grate has settled.
The wind has shifted half a point south.
The compound below us is quiet — quiet enough that I can hear the kids in the play area, a sound I usually like and that today reminds me what I'm protecting, which is everyone in this bowl with me, including some of them under the age of ten, and the man who's been forging my fingerprint has been encircling them whether he knows it or not.
I should go back to the bar. I should talk to her. I should set up the workspace where she and I are going to spend the next however-many-days working through her files and mine.
Instead, I stay on the bench another minute.
I think about her hand. The scar on it. The way it ran from the base of her thumb to her wrist in a pink-and-white rope I recognized the second I saw it, because I have one almost exactly like it on my forearm, set down by an iron pipe I grabbed during the fire that took the rest of me.
Hers is from saving someone. Mine is from saving myself.
Different fires. Same hand. Same proof that we'd both walked through heat that wasn't supposed to let us out the other side.
I don't touch people. I haven't, for years.
The last person who touched my scarred half and didn't flinch was a paramedic I never saw again.
The last woman who touched me at all flinched so hard her hand shook for a full minute after, and she apologized so much it stopped feeling like an apology and started feeling like a request for permission to leave the room.
I don't blame any of them. The skin is a lot. The heat under it is more. People aren't built to lean into a furnace, and I'm a furnace.
But Isolde Flynn's hand, when she set it down on the bar to look at the photographs, was scarred in a way I recognized.
And I don't know what to do with that.
I stand up. I knock the iron rod against the grate and the embers settle. The pit is safe. The compound is safe. The mountains are safe. For now.
I go back down to the bar to find the firefighter who came here looking for a killer and isn't leaving until we find him together.
Whatever else this is going to be, it has just started.