Chapter 5
Isolde
The supply cabin burns on Tuesday morning at three a.m., and by Tuesday noon I know two things I didn't know before: Creed is escalating, and I'm in love with the wrong man.
The first thing is a fact. The second thing is also a fact, but it's the kind of fact I don't have a clean way to name yet, so I shelve it and work the fire scene instead.
The supply cabin is on the eastern perimeter of the compound — a small outbuilding on a wooded slope, used to store seasonal equipment and emergency rations.
No one was inside when it went up. Conrad got the call when one of the perimeter patrols saw the glow at three-fourteen and the brothers got to it before it spread to the trees.
They contained it with shovels and buckets and the small water tank we keep at the head of every access road.
By the time Ezra and I get there at six in the morning, it's a smoking shell and a smell I know in my bones.
Creed's compound. The same lattice. The same temperature signature. The same ignition geometry.
This time, though, there's a detonation timer in the wreckage.
Ezra finds it. He's crouched in the ash with a pair of tongs and a flashlight, picking through the debris, and he comes up with a charred lump that I can't identify until he sets it on a tarp and starts brushing it off.
Military-grade. Tritium-illuminated dial.
The kind of timer that runs to a tolerance of a tenth of a second and doesn't fail in heat.
Creed's old life as a demolitions specialist showing its hand.
"He's not improvising anymore," Ezra says.
"No."
"He's planning."
"For what."
Ezra doesn't answer. He just looks up the slope toward the higher ridges where the mountain runs east into rougher country, and his face has a quality I haven't seen on it before — a stillness that isn't the same as his usual stillness.
The stillness of a man who has just understood something he was hoping he wouldn't have to.
We spend the rest of the day at the scene.
We bag samples. We measure burn patterns.
We cross-reference what we find with the data we've been building over the last week.
By evening we have enough to compose a working theory: Creed is preparing for a major event.
The supply cabin was a test of his timing system.
Whatever he's planning next is going to use this timer and this compound and probably the geographic ring of fires we've been mapping. He's going to do something big.
When we get back to the workshop after the scene work, the sun is going down.
The compound below us is washed in long orange light.
The fire pit is going — Casket has been burning brush all afternoon to take down some of the fuel load on the western firebreak — and the smell of woodsmoke is on every wind.
I'm filthy. My jeans are streaked with soot.
My hands are black to the wrist. Ezra is filthier than I am, because Ezra wades into ash like other men wade into water, and his arms up to the elbow look like they've been dipped in charcoal.
He sets the sample bags on the workbench. He looks at his hands.
"Wash up," he says. "Then we'll test the residue against the others. I want to see if there's any variance from the previous fires."
The workshop has a deep stainless sink at the back wall.
I cross to it. I roll up my sleeves and run the water.
He comes up beside me, three feet off, and washes his hands in the smaller basin to my left.
We work in silence. I scrub my forearms with the rough soap he keeps in a dish on the lip of the sink.
The water runs gray, then brown, then gray, then clear.
I notice, the way I have been noticing for three days, that he's keeping a careful distance.
He stood with the workbench between us all afternoon.
He passed me sample bags by setting them on the table and stepping back.
He held the door open for me when we came in by reaching the door from behind it, so he didn't have to brush past me coming through.
None of it is rude. None of it is even visible to someone who isn't watching for it.
But I'm watching for it, and it's there, and it's been there since the morning in my cabin when I put my hand on his scars.
He's afraid of what I did.
I'm not entirely sure I'm not afraid of it too.
But I'm tired, and I'm filthy, and I just spent twelve hours in the ashes of a fire set by a man who killed my crew, and the only person in the world who understands any of that is standing three feet from me washing his hands and trying very carefully not to look at me.
I dry my hands on a towel. I turn off the water.
"Test the residue tomorrow," I say. "I want to try something in the pit tonight."
He looks up. "What."
"I want to confirm the burn temperature of his compound matches what you said. Let me set a small sample. You watch the burn. We document together. Verifies my data and your assessment in one operation."
He considers it. He's not just considering the request. He's considering me, the specific me, the specific way I'm asking, and what it might mean.
"All right," he says.
We take a small sample of Creed's compound — gloved, careful — out to the fire pit on the western ridge.
The day has cooled. The compound below us is settling into evening.
Lights are coming on in the cabin windows.
Someone is playing music in the bunkhouse, a slow song with steel guitar.
Ezra builds a small, controlled hot bed in the pit — clean wood, no accelerant, brought to white coal heat — and we set up a measuring station to the side: a thermocouple probe, a stopwatch, a steel test plate.
I place the sample on the plate. I step back.
He ignites it.
The reaction is bigger than I expected. It always is, with Creed's compound.
The chemistry was reverse-engineered with hunger instead of precision, and the result is a burn that produces more flame and less heat than a controlled fire should — a flashy, photogenic, theatrical burn that looks like a movie fire but doesn't have the structural temperature it should.
The yellow flame leaps up from the plate and out toward the windbreak, and a tongue of it licks across the side of the fire pit toward Ezra, who is closer to the test station than I am.
The flame catches the back of his hand.
It catches and it stays — a flutter of burning compound that he should be brushing off but isn't, because he's looking at the thermocouple readout and isn't aware. It's running across the skin of his wrist toward the cuff of his sleeve.
I grab him.
I do it without thinking. I reach across the test station, I close my hand around his forearm, and I pull him back from the plate hard enough that he stumbles a half-step.
With my other hand I sweep the burning compound off his wrist. The compound spatters onto the stone of the fire pit and burns out.
He doesn't react.
He doesn't react.
That's the part that hits me first — before the temperature of his skin under my hand, before the realization that I just grabbed him with the scarred side of him in my palm, before any of it. The fact that he didn't pull his hand back from the flame. The fact that he didn't even register it.
"You were on fire," I say.
"Yes."
"You didn't move."
"I'm always a little bit on fire." He looks down at his wrist. The skin where the compound was burning is red but not blistered. The burn that would put another man in an emergency room has barely raised welts on him. "I don't register low-grade burns. Hasn't been a problem in years."
"It's a problem right now."
"Why."
"Because you almost let it climb your sleeve. You weren't paying attention."
He looks at me.
I'm holding his arm.
I'm aware of this. I'm aware of the way I'm holding his arm — the way my fingers are wrapped around his forearm just below the wrist, the way the pad of my thumb is pressed to the underside where the vein runs, the way I can feel the temperature of his skin under my palm and it's warmer than skin is supposed to be.
Warmer than mine. Warmer than the night air. He runs hot. He's always running hot.
The fire pit crackles. The compound is burned out. The thermocouple readout is settling. We're standing on a ridge in the dusk and I'm holding his arm and neither of us is moving.
"You're burning up," I say. I don't know why I say it. The words come out without permission.
"I'm always burning up."
"Is it painful."
He looks at me for a long moment.
"Not when you're touching me."
I don't think. I step into him.
I don't decide to do it. I don't plan it.
One second I'm holding his arm and the next second I'm holding his face — the unburned half with my left hand, the burned half with my scarred right, my fingers spread across the ridges of his scar like I'm reading something written there — and I'm kissing him.
His mouth is warmer than the rest of him.
That's the first thing I register. The second is that he doesn't kiss me back for a full beat, and then he does, and when he does, it's careful in a way no kiss has ever been careful with me — like he's afraid of his own pressure, like he's holding himself back, like he thinks he might burn me through the mouth.
I don't let him hold back.
I push up against him. I get my arms around his neck.
I kiss him the way I've wanted to kiss him for three days and didn't know I was wanting to.
He tastes like woodsmoke. His hands come up — slowly, slowly — and settle on my waist, and then on my back, and then he's pulling me against him like he can't help it, like he's been holding it down for the whole three days too.
The temperature of his body, against mine through two layers of clothes, is something I've never felt on a human being.
He breaks the kiss. He puts his forehead against mine. He's breathing hard. So am I.