12. Ash
ASH
“Unbelievable,” Kael mutters, arms crossed as we stall in the creekbed between the hill we just conquered and the next monster ahead. “You really are a heartless one-percenter.”
“I did tell you not to reply to him,” I say.
“Basic decency gets you no points.”
“If it doesn’t cost you anything…,” I say, but he’s already trudging up the next hill, forcing me to chase after him. “Alistair’s endorsement is more than a promotion. It’s years of freedom. It’s not ending up like—”
I bite my tongue, leaving Pawpaw and my parents unnamed.
“Please.” Kael flaps a hand behind him. “Spare me.”
It feels like staring at my first college rejection letter, my dream life already crumbled, with one pathetic chance to appeal. Kael’s made his decision, but if I don’t make him understand what’s at stake, no one will.
“HR literally told me the only hope for my career is Alistair Blackwood’s personal endorsement.”
“Sounds like you fucked up,” he says, and yes, I guess, that is the headline.
“I kissed someone on my team. At the holiday party.”
He shrugs without slowing. I can’t tell if he’s downplaying it to get under my skin or if he really doesn’t get it.
“It’s a big deal,” I say, raising my voice between the sharp inhales required to keep up. “No dating, no kissing, nothing with anyone on your team. Ever. I know that. I messed up. But they slashed my pay almost in half.”
He finally stops and looks back, grin wide. “Bet you go to the gym so people want to work with the good-looking guy.”
“Did you hear anything I just said? And studies show working out boosts productivity by fifteen percent.”
“Oooh!” He faces the trees and bellows, pumping his fists as he powers up the hill. “The responsible choice! Look at him, folks, squishing life into an even smaller, sadder little box!”
“Maybe I’ll ask Alistair to sponsor my life,” I mutter.
“What life?”
He has no idea how prepared I am for that question. Money buys time. Time is the only resource that matters, and I am not going to waste mine.
I pull out my phone.
“Your answer’s in there?” he snipes, as I thumb through files, searching for the tab I never show anyone.
“I have a whole list of things I’ll do once I’m free.”
“Of course you do.”
“A happy life doesn’t happen by accident,” I say, the phrase lifted from some FIRE podcast but no less true for it. “I’m designing my future. I’m actually thinking about what I want.”
“I’m not worried about how much time you spend thinking about yourself. I’m worried about how little time you spend actually living.”
My spreadsheet won’t load. The little wheel just spins and spins and spins.
“There’s no service,” I say.
“I feel bad for you,” he answers.
“I mean for Jenny. For the map. For the whole ‘actively being chased by fire’ situation, not because I can’t pull up some stupid list.”
“So you agree your list is stupid,” he says, cresting the hill and turning with his hands on his head, finally breathing hard.
I don’t have the air, the energy, or the patience to answer. I drag myself up beside him, lungs burning, and look out over the next stretch of empty road with nothing but dry trees and dry grass.
“Which way?” he asks, already annoyed by how long it’s taking me to breathe.
I hold up my phone. “No service. No map.”
“Then,” he sucks in a breath, “screenshots. Which way?”
The sign at the T-intersection reads HUMBUG SUMMIT ROAD. The new road is wider than the one we just climbed, but still unpaved, cutting across the mountain with a drop-off to the valley on one side and a steep, tree-covered incline on the other.
My screenshot shows Humbug Summit runs north–south. Left and right look identical, one of them leading straight into the fire. If we could see the sky through the trees, I’m sure there’d be a column of smoke making the choice obvious.
“Uh.” I flip my phone, but the screenshot rotates with the screen, the little compass icon now useless in a frozen image.
Kael snatches it. “Left,” he says immediately. “Then it’s a straight shot to a cemetery where we can bury your cold, dead heart.”
He shoves the phone back at me. Inskip Pioneer Cemetery is the first landmark between us and Paradise.
“Were you really a Boy Scout?” I ask, trying not to sound too impressed while I swallow the humiliation of my post-FIRE bucket list failing to load.
“Didn’t make Eagle. Which I guess would make my map-reading abilities unexplainable, huh?” Amused with himself, Kael heads left, keeping the valley on our left and the slope on our right.
Somewhere in that exchange he took a different kind of left turn, but I refuse to let my future hang on an insult.
“Alistair’s recommendation,” I say, yanking us back to my problem.
Kael drops his arms to his sides, resigned.
“At the time, it sounded like pigs flying. But then I tripped into your lap and… it’s hard not to wonder if the universe is lining things up.”
Kael stops walking so he can give my optimism a proper death stare, mouth open in mock horror.
“That’s what you think the universe is lining up?” He rakes his gaze down and back up my body, lip curling. “That’s sad.”
“What’s sad is people toiling for decades in jobs they hate, buying crap they can’t afford, to impress people they don’t like.
What’s sad is people saying they’re working at ninety-two because they ‘like their job,’ then when he dies, finding out he left nothing but debt and a pile of things he never did. ”
I look up. Kael is walking backward now, watching me with open curiosity as I unravel. I force my shoulders down, uncurl my fists, and flatten my toes in my boots.
“You okay?” he asks, rubbing his hands together.
“I’m fine.” Shame rushes in to fill the space old memories just cracked open.
“Hit a nerve there.”
“Drop it.”
“When ‘they’ became ‘he,’ it kind of stopped sounding hypothetical. Your parents?”
“Kael.”
“Come on. You can talk to me.”
“Drop. It.”
He finally does, smirk fading as he turns away.
Silence is a better companion than this.
The road levels out, and we fall into a fast walk, no cars, no engines, nothing human.
Once the pounding in my head quiets, I can hear the old trees creaking in the wind, birds carrying on like nothing’s wrong, and underneath it all the steady drumbeat of my freedom date sliding further and further away.
Pawpaw’s debt collection letter is in my bag and in my head.
I remember my parents on the car rides home from his house, wondering why he kept working and never took vacations.
I’d loved that he was always around. He’d spread his latest itineraries across the dining table, tracing routes with his finger, telling vivid stories about the trips he planned for other people.
To me, having a grandpa who worked as a travel agent and never traveled himself just meant one more constant, loving presence.
After he died, those itineraries changed from plans to unanswered prayers. Those car rides home changed too. What used to sound like harmless wondering turned out to be my parents circling a lie.
Beside me, Kael pulls his blanket over his head and shoulders, wearing it like a Star Wars Jawa, and we walk toward night.
Exhausted by Kael, and leaving my phone plugged into my laptop so we’ll have flashlight battery later, I watch my feet fall one in front of the other on the dirt road. The soft crunching becomes trancelike.
Something rustles in the trees, drawing my eyes left. A squirrel hangs by its front paws from a branch, swaying, then hauls itself back to safety. I glance at Kael, and he’s already watching. The little guy scurries down the trunk and vanishes, and my attention drifts past it to the view beyond.
Deep green forest, ragged mountains, and glassy lakes spread out below us. The air comes cold and clean off the distant snow-capped peaks.
The higher we climb, the more we can see behind us, the sinking sun lighting a growing wall of smoke in a reddish-orange halo.
“Looks like it’s getting worse,” I say. “But it seems like it’s keeping its distance, at least.”
I cross my fingers. Without cell service, it’s impossible to know if we’re moving too slowly or if it’s already over. From up here, it clearly isn’t.
The air shifts from crisp to cold, and I bury my hands in my pockets. The last gold of sunset catches in our exhales, turning them into tiny plumes of smoke from fires buried inside us.
“Beautiful,” Kael says.
“It’s the smoke making it that red.”
Kael sighs dramatically. “Beautiful,” he repeats.
“I’ve seen sunsets.” It comes out harsher than the joke I intended, but the wildfire chasing us feels like the more pressing concern.
Kael steps closer, looking back up the mountain.
“Look.” He points toward the peak. “It’s like the mountain’s shadow is chasing the trees, and their shadows are all stretching to escape before they get swallowed.
” He traces the dark sweep of it sliding down toward us, then turns back to the valley.
“And if you cross your eyes a little, the greens almost turn to gold.”
They still look like trees to me, but he’s mesmerized. The view draws out his dimples, and I can see the sunset clearly enough in the reflection on his glasses, warm and beautiful. He turns and catches me staring, caught again by his gravity.
“What?” He scrubs his nose with the edge of the blanket. “Got a booger?”
“You got it.”
I walk ahead, and the mountain’s shadow swallows us whole.
By the time we reach Inskip Pioneer Cemetery, the disappearing sun has turned the air to ice and made our phone flashlights mandatory.
A few feet off the road, we step under the trees and into total darkness. Kael trips over a low wooden fence, and our beams sweep across the ground, tracing the cemetery’s boundaries.
“We made it.” I point my light at an unimpressive green sign nailed to a tree.
There’s a small inscription beneath it: Those who rest here are known only to God.
I sweep my light across the plot. Everything is buried under pine needles, a few unmarked stones jutting up like gray islands in a brown sea.