Chapter 6
Ezra
She's asleep in my bed when Hex breaks the door down.
He doesn't break it down literally — Hex is more polite than that, and the door isn't locked anyway — but the sound of him coming through it at six in the morning is the sound of a man with bad news running ahead of his manners.
He doesn't knock. He doesn't call out. He just walks in, sees us, registers the situation with one sweep of his eyes, and turns his face to the wall.
"Get up," he says to the wall. "Conrad needs us. Now."
Isolde is already moving. She's a firefighter. She's been trained to come awake fast and oriented. By the time Hex has finished saying now she's swung her legs out of the bed and is pulling on the flannel shirt she left on the chair last night.
I get up too. The cabin is cold. The wood stove has burned down. I pull on jeans, a T-shirt, my cut. I don't look at her. I don't have to look at her to know where she is. I can feel her on the other side of the bed the way I can feel the temperature of a building before I light it.
"What."
"He's planning a wildfire," Hex says, still facing the wall. "Not a building. The whole mountain."
I stop with my arms half through the sleeves of my cut.
"Show me," I say.
Hex doesn't wait. He leaves the cabin. We follow him.
The walk to the clubhouse takes four minutes.
The compound is barely starting to wake — a few of the older brothers on the deck, a couple of the kids running for the schoolhouse early.
Casket is on the porch of the bunkhouse holding a coffee.
He nods at us as we pass. He doesn't say anything.
He sees what's coming on Hex's face and steps aside.
Conrad is in the meeting room with Savage and Priest. The table is covered in maps.
The biggest of them — the topographical map of the Bone Hollow basin and the surrounding ridges — is in the center, weighted at the corners with coffee mugs.
Hex's laptop is open on the side. Three monitors he's hauled up from the comms shed are running heat signature data, weather forecasts, and what looks like intercepted radio communications.
"Sit," Conrad says. He nods at Isolde. "You too. You're in this now."
She sits. I sit beside her. Across from me, Savage's face is the worst I've ever seen it.
Hex talks. He walks us through what he's pieced together over the last seventy-two hours.
Creed has been buying supplies for the past three months — accelerant base, detonation timers, fuel line, fuse material — in quantities that don't match small jobs.
He has been making test purchases in three different states, splitting the orders to avoid drawing attention, paying in cash.
He has been pinging cellular towers in a pattern that puts him in three different staging areas around our territory — north, east, and south.
None of those staging areas are at his Kentucky property. He has been moving.
And on Wednesday — the day after tomorrow — the National Weather Service forecast calls for a thermal inversion to settle over the Bone Hollow basin, with an east-southeast wind shifting to a strong easterly by mid-morning.
The conditions for a wildfire to run downhill at twice expected speed.
The conditions to drive flames from three simultaneous ignition points east-by-southeast directly into the bowl of the compound.
"He's been waiting for this," Hex says. "He picked his windows. He picked the supply cabin as a dress rehearsal for his timing system on a small piece of brush that wouldn't draw attention. He's been ready for two weeks. The weather just gave him the green light."
Isolde, beside me, has gone very still.
I know what she's seeing. I'm seeing it too.
Three ignition points. East-southeast wind. Inversion-pushed downhill fire. A bowl-shaped compound with cabins and a schoolhouse and a play area and women and kids and brothers and one man with a furnace under his skin who is going to have to figure out how to stop this.
"How many minutes," Conrad says. "From ignition to compound contact."
I do the math out loud. I know the terrain. I know fire behavior in dry summer brush. I know what an inversion does to a downhill run.
"Twelve to fifteen at the western point of ignition. Eight to ten at the eastern. The southern ignition runs slower because the slope flattens — maybe twenty. We'd be encircled by the time the western fire reaches us."
"Evacuation window."
"Less than thirty minutes from first smoke. Probably less than that, because the road south is the only one that runs out and the southern fire would close it within fifteen."
The room is silent.
Savage speaks first. "We don't evacuate. We hold."
"You can't hold a wildfire," Isolde says.
Her voice is steady. She's been a firefighter long enough that the bad news is still terrible but no longer paralyzing.
"Not one this size. Not with the conditions he's picked.
What you can do is cut firebreaks wide enough that the fire starves at the gap, and put up a burn-back operation on the inside edge to remove the fuel the wildfire would feed on.
You don't fight a fire like this. You make it run out of road. "
Conrad's eyes settle on her.
"How wide a break."
"Thirty feet minimum. Forty's better. For three sides of the bowl.
The fourth — the south side, the one with the road — you put a separate operation on.
Crew with a tanker. You hold the road open as long as you can, and when you can't, you fall back behind a secondary break.
The evacuation goes through if we cut it.
The fire defense holds if we cut the breaks. "
"How long does it take to cut a break that size."
"With professional equipment and a crew of twelve, working through the day and the night and the next day? You'd be cutting it close."
Conrad looks at me.
"Can we do it."
"Yes," I say. "With her. I don't know fire defense the way she does. She runs the defense. I run the terrain and the chemistry. We go together or we don't go."
She looks at me. I don't look at her, because looking at her right now would put my hand on her hand and I can't afford the time. But I feel her look. She doesn't say anything.
"Done," Conrad says.
He turns to Savage.
"Mobilize. I want every able-bodied member on this.
Brothers, prospects, hangarounds. Chainsaws, brush hogs, dozers, hand tools — pull everything out of the equipment shed.
I want Jo set up at the southern evac point as medical.
I want Della handling the families. I want—" He pauses.
He looks at Isolde. "What do you call your job, in fire? "
"Incident commander."
"Then you're incident commander. You give orders. The brothers will follow them. I'll back you. Make sure of it."
She nods. The set of her face is something I haven't seen on her before. The grief is still in it — it's always in it — but something else is there too. Purpose. The face of a woman who has waited two years to be useful again at the work that almost broke her.
"Then let's get started," she says.
We get started.
The next thirty hours are the hardest physical labor I've done in a decade.
We split into teams. I take the eastern flank with Casket and four prospects on the chainsaws.
Isolde directs from the central command point she's established on the workshop's deck, with Hex feeding her real-time satellite imagery and Della handling supply runs.
Spite, who started the morning calling her the captain with the curl of a man who didn't quite mean it, comes down off the western firebreak twelve hours in and addresses her as ma'am and means it.
She doesn't acknowledge the shift. She just keeps directing.
The breaks come together in pieces. The eastern flank — my flank — is the easiest, because the terrain is gentler and the brush is thinner.
We have a thirty-foot break cleared by sundown of the first day.
The western flank, where Priest and Casket and Savage's team are working, is harder because the slope is steep and the brush is heavy with old fall growth that takes the chainsaws longer to bite.
They're behind schedule by sundown. They work through the night.
So do we. So does Isolde, who hasn't slept since the briefing, who is running on coffee and adrenaline and the muscle memory of a job she's been training her whole life for.
I find her at four a.m. on the second day, standing on the deck of the workshop with a thermal camera trained on the western ridgeline.
The camera is showing us where her teams have done their burn-back and where they haven't, the cool stripe of cleared earth running along the inside of the cut break, the warmer area of brush still to be treated.
I bring her a sandwich. She doesn't take it.
"Eat," I say.
"In a minute."
"Now. You're not going to be useful tomorrow if you collapse."
She turns her head. Her eyes are red. Her face is gray with exhaustion and ash. She looks at the sandwich. She takes it. She eats it in three bites and doesn't take her eyes off the western ridge.
"Spite's behind schedule," she says.
"I know."
"If the wind comes early—"
"It won't."
"You don't know that."
"I know fire. The forecast is good through tomorrow afternoon. Spite has eight more hours before the inversion settles. He'll make it."
She doesn't argue. She just nods. She's at the point of exhaustion where arguing requires energy she'd rather spend on holding the camera steady.
I stay beside her. I don't say anything.
After a few minutes I take the camera out of her hands and aim it where she was aiming it, so her arms can rest. She lets me.
We stand on the deck in the dark with the thermal display lighting up our faces, watching brothers two miles away crawl across a ridge with chainsaws.
"Tell me about the wolf," she says, out of nowhere. "Yours."
I'm tired enough that I tell her.
I tell her about him. About the second shift.
About the heat that runs hotter in his coat than other wolves.
About the burn line that crosses his right side too — a dark stripe in the fur where the skin under it is scar tissue.
I tell her about the singed pawprints he leaves in dry grass.
I tell her that fire doesn't hurt him the way it hurts the rest of me.
Not entirely. In wolf form, I can walk through flame.
She lowers the thermal camera. She looks at me.
"Through flame."
"Through it. Not just past it. I've done it before. Once during a containment job that went sideways. I went in to pull a brother out. The fire couldn't get a foothold on the coat. Don't ask me to explain the biology. I don't know."
"How long can you stay in."
"Minutes. Long enough to do what needs doing. Not forever."
She's quiet for a long beat. The thermal camera in her hand sweeps slowly across the ridge.
"If Creed lights this mountain," she says, "you're our best weapon."
"I know."
"I don't want you to be a weapon."
I look at her.
She's looking at the ridge again. She isn't looking at me.
"I want you to be the man standing next to me when this is over."
The wolf, somewhere under my skin, makes a sound I can't translate.
"I will be," I say. "Whatever I have to do tomorrow, I will be."
She nods. She doesn't say anything else.
We work through the next day. The breaks come together.
By sundown of the second day, all three sides of the bowl have a thirty-five-foot break with burn-back stripe behind it.
The fourth side, the road, has a water tanker and three brothers and the agreement that if the fire comes for the road, the tanker holds it as long as it can and then falls back.
Casket has been on the radio with the surveillance team in Kentucky.
Creed is moving. He has been to the eastern staging area in the night.
He has been to the northern. He has been to the southern. He has not yet set his ignitions.
Tomorrow.
That night, I take Isolde back to my cabin. Not because I want her, though I do, in a way I don't have a clean word for. I take her there because she hasn't slept in fifty hours and my cabin has a bed and a wood stove and a lock on the door that the workshop doesn't, and she needs the dark.
She undresses slowly. She gets into bed in a T-shirt and my flannel pajama pants, which are too big on her and which she rolled three turns at the waist. I get in beside her.
We don't reach for each other. Neither of us has the energy.
She turns into me and rests her head on the unburned side of my chest, and her cold hand finds the burned side of my ribs and settles there flat, the way it has every time she's been close to me since the morning in her cabin.
"If this goes bad—" she says.
"It won't."
"If it does. I want you to know. I came here to find a killer and I found you instead. And you're the opposite of everything I expected."
I don't say anything for a long moment. I pull her closer. The wolf in my chest rumbles low, a steady heat.
"Whatever this is," I say, "I'm in it."
"I know."
"I don't know how to do this. I've been alone too long. I don't know how to be the man you need me to be tomorrow when I haven't been the man anyone needed me to be in eight years."
"You don't have to know how. You just have to show up."
I look down at her. Her eyes are closed. Her face is slack with the kind of tired that finally lets a person sleep. The scar on her hand is just visible against the burned skin of my ribs, the two of them lined up, pink-and-white against the ridged dark.
"I'll show up," I say. Quietly. So as not to wake her, if she's already started slipping.
"I know," she murmurs, almost asleep.
I lie there with her in the dark. The wood stove ticks. The wind outside is picking up, but it's coming from the wrong direction yet, the right direction for us, the direction that won't push fire into the bowl until tomorrow when Creed wants it to.
I close my eyes.
Tomorrow I become a weapon.
Tonight, just for the hours we have left, I'm a man with a woman asleep on his chest, her hand on the worst of his scars, the heat between them the only fire he can name.
I sleep, eventually.
Not for long. But enough.