T
he dream that night was
as it always was, a dance between vivid memory and something spectral and mythic. Around Hannah there was only the smoke at first, and somewhere inside it the hiss of distant hoses, like snakes, and then the smoke parted and there was the canyon that separated her from the children. In reality it hadn’t been so deep, maybe fifty feet below the ridge on which she’d been standing, but in the dream, the ridge always took on the feel of a balance beam and the canyon stretched on endlessly beneath it, a bottomless pool of black. As she crossed the ridge, the hissing of the water rose, the snakes becoming creatures that could roar, and then inside the smoke were ripples of red and orange heat, and still she walked, crossing that expanse of blackness.
When she saw the children in the dream, they were silent, and somehow that was worse. In reality they’d been screaming, they had
shrieked
for her help, and it had been terrible; at the time she could not have imagined anything worse. Then came the first dream, their silent eyes on her through the smoke and the flames, and that was a far more powerful pain, always.
Scream for me,
she wanted to tell them,
scream as though you believe I will get there.
But in the dream they already knew she would not.
The dream children vanished, lost to blackness filled with hundreds of minuscule red dots, tiny embers that floated toward her on a blanket of heat. She woke at the same point she always woke—when the heat seemed to become real. It built in the back of her mind, came on and on, and then suddenly the whisper was a scream and she knew that it was too hot, that she was going to die, that the flesh was actually beginning to melt from her, peel away in long charred strips from her bones.
She gave voice to the screams that the children could not and then she was awake. The heat was gone, those blazing lead blankets whipped away, and she was aware of how cold it was in the cab of the tower. Her breath fogged as she took rapid, hysterical gasps, stumbling to her feet. She always had to move, had to run, that was the first instinct. If you could run,
run.
The night it happened, she could not run. Or did not. Others had. She’d looked up the side of the mountain, saw the litter of deadfall, massive downed pines the whole way. It was breccia rock up high, loose and prone to sliding. Behind them, the fire caught a southwestern wind and howled; she would remember that sound until the day she died—it
howled.
Inside the flames, spectacular, horrifying things were happening—eddying colors, deep red to pale yellow, as the fire fought itself, adjusting for position, seeking fuel and oxygen, which was all that it needed for life once someone provided the spark. It had been given the spark, and then the wind gave it the oxygen and the dried-out forest gave it the fuel, and the only thing capable of stopping the monster’s growth was Hannah’s crew.
There was a choice, waiting there in the drainage, in an area they never should have approached: Break protocol and run, or hold protocol and deploy shelters. It was evident to everyone by then that the fire was gaining speed and was not going to be stopped. They all fell silent for a few seconds, recognizing what they had done, the way they’d trapped themselves, and she believed that more than a few of them also remembered the way it had happened, the way Nick had decided they would not descend into the gulch and Hannah had convinced him otherwise. There was a family down there, and they were trapped, and Hannah had believed they could be saved. Nick hadn’t. She’d won the debate, and they’d descended into the gulch, and then the wind shifted into their faces.
A quarter mile away, on the other side of a too-shallow creek, the family of campers looked at them and screamed. And Hannah screamed back, telling them to get into the water, get under the water. Knowing all the while that there wasn’t enough water to save them.
Her crew scattered then. A unit so tight they usually moved as one, but panic was a devastating thing, and it was upon them now. Nick was shouting at them to deploy fire shelters; some were shouting back that they had to run; one guy was telling them all to dump everything, every bit of gear, and sprint for the creek. Another one, Brandon, simply sat down. That was all. He just sat down and watched the fire burn toward him.
Hannah watched them make their choices and then disappear. Someone grabbed her shoulder and tried to tug her up the mountainside. She’d shaken him off, still staring at the family they’d come down here to help, this foolish family who’d camped in the basin, who’d pitched their tents inside the monster’s open fist. The screaming children seemed to be addressing her personally. Why? Because she was a woman? Because they saw something different in her eyes? Or because she was the only one dumb enough to just stand there and stare?
It had been Nick’s voice that finally registered with her.
“Hannah, damn you, deploy or die! Deploy or die!”
The shouted words were nothing but surreal whispers in the midst of the fire’s roar. The heat registered next, a staggering wave of it, and she had the sense that the wind had picked up again, and she knew that was bad. She looked up the slope and saw the backs of those who’d elected to run and then Nick shouted at her again and finally he’d deployed his own fire shelter and shoved her into it. The shelter popped up like some tinfoil joke tent. The heat was all around her and oppressive then—a deep breath found nothing; the oxygen had been scalded out of the air. She crawled inside as the first tongues of flame advanced through the drainage like a scout party. The rules were simple: You got inside, you sealed yourself off, and then you waited, waited, waited. When the roar of the fire was past, that did not mean that the fire itself was. You could step out thinking you were safe and still be scorched.
She was facing southwest, into the wind, as she brought the flap of the fire shelter down around her. The last thing she saw, other than the living wall of fire marching toward her, was the boy. He was the only one left. The girl and her parents had ducked into the tent, evidently imitating the procedures of the firefighters on the other side of the creek. There was only one problem—their tent wasn’t fireproof. The family had pressed it beneath a ledge of stone, hoping to somehow duck the fire, but the boy fought off his parents and stayed outside, terrified of waiting for the flames. He wanted to run, wanted to get into the water.
She watched him splash into the creek, running just ahead of the fifteen-hundred-degree orange-and-red cascade behind him. That was the last thing she saw before Nick sealed her in. She was grateful for that. Grateful that he’d still been running. He made the creek too. Got under the water.
Boiled in it.
She didn’t know that until the board of inquiry’s investigation.
Hannah had stayed in the shelter for forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes of the most intense heat she’d ever felt, surrounded by human screams and fire roars. The blaze tried to kill her, it tried its very best, chewing tiny holes through the fireproof shelter material. She’d watched them develop, a hundred glowing dots, like a sky of bloodred stars.
They’d been trained to wait for release from the shelters by the crew boss. By Nick. She didn’t know then that the crew boss was dead.
“My God,” she said in her fire tower now, and she started to cry again. How long did a thing like that chase you? How long would memories like that keep their hands tight around your throat? When would they decide it was time to let you go?
She laid her head down on the Osborne, the copper bezel cool against her skin.
The man Jace hated most was Ethan Serbin.
Forget about the two coming after him, and his parents, who’d brought him here and promised he’d be safe, and the police, who’d agreed to the plan. The one Jace absolutely despised once his tears stopped was Ethan.
Because Ethan’s voice wouldn’t go away.
All those silly rules and mantras and instructions, falling on his ears day and night since he’d arrived in Montana, wouldn’t stop even though their source was no longer around. The lessons lingered behind like floodwaters. He wanted them gone. He was tired and he was scared and he was alone. It was quitting time.
There is no such thing as quitting time. Remember that, boys. You rest, you sleep, you pout, you cry. You’re allowed to get mad, allowed to get sad. But you’re not allowed to quit. When you feel like it, remember that you are allowed to stop, but not to quit. So give yourself that much. Stop. Just stop. And then, remember what
STOP
is to a survivor—sit, think, observe,
plan. Spelled out for you, right there at the moment of your highest frustration, is all you need to do to start saving your life.
Jace didn’t want to do any of those things, but the problem was the waiting. He didn’t know how far off his killers were, how long he’d have to sit here before they found him.
It might be a long time.
He was doing the things he needed to without even intending to do them—he had sat; and he was of course thinking, he couldn’t avoid that, not once the tears were done; and without meaning to, when a light went on in the darkness, he found himself observing.
It grabbed his attention because it didn’t belong. There was another human presence on the mountain. Someone with electricity. Distant, but not so far away as to be unreachable. He stared in confusion, trying to comprehend how it had come to exist, and then he remembered the lunch break and the landmarks Ethan had used to help them orient themselves to their position on the map. You had to pick things that were unique, features that didn’t blend in with the rest of the scenery, and then you triangulated your position using the map and the compass. Pilot Peak was one unique point, and Amphitheater was another, but for the third, they had not used a mountain. They’d used a fire tower.
Jace observed the light and began to see possibilities he hadn’t noticed before, possibilities he hadn’t even wanted. There had seemed to be two choices—hike down with the others to the death that was waiting for him, or stay back alone in the mountains and wait for death to come to him.
The light beckoned, though. It told him there were other ways this might end.
You’ve got to observe the world you’re in to understand what parts of it may save you. At first, it may all seem hostile. The whole environment may seem like an enemy. But it isn’t. There are things hiding in it waiting to save you, and it’s your job to see them.
The fire tower was within reach. What it contained, he didn’t know. Maybe somebody with a gun. Maybe a phone or a radio, a way to call a helicopter in and get him off the mountain before anyone even knew he was missing.
Despite himself, Jace was beginning to plan.
But in his mind he saw his pursuers again, heard those detached voices, so empty and so in control, and he knew in his heart that he shouldn’t have been allowed to get away even once from men like those. They didn’t leave witnesses behind. Even the police had said that, had told it to his mother, to his father, had scared them so badly that they agreed to send their only son into the wilderness to hide. He’d escaped once and no one could escape them twice, certainly not a boy, a child.
But I made fire. I’m different now. They don’t know it, but I do.
It was a small thing, a silly thing, and he knew that, but still the memory gave him the faintest touch of strength, and he thought of the hiking he’d done and the fire tower that beckoned and he wanted to surprise them all. Not just the evil pair behind him. Surprise them
all.
The police, his parents, Ethan Serbin, the world.
Nobody got away from those two. But Jace already had once. He’d been lucky that time. They hadn’t been certain he was there, and the clock was ticking for them. But he hadn’t known they were coming then either. He’d been unprepared. He’d been weak.
He was prepared now, and he was stronger. There was no need to pretend to be Connor Reynolds anymore, but while Jace Wilson had once been the secret within Connor Reynolds, now it was reversed. Connor and the things he had learned in these days in the mountains were the secret within Jace Wilson.
And the two evil men coming for him weren’t prepared for that. They were expecting to find the same boy they’d left behind once, the boy who’d hid, and waited, and cried.
A boy who looked just like the one on the trail now.
“We don’t have quitting time,” Jace said aloud. These were the first words he had spoken since he’d been awakened by Ethan’s shout. His voice sounded small in the darkness, but at least it was there. It reminded him of his own existence, in a strange way. He wasn’t dead yet. His body still worked. It could speak.
And it could walk.
A
llison could feel hands
on her, and the hands hurt, but then they hurt less, and she knew that a drug had been in the mix. At first she was on the ground, and then they moved her with care, guiding her out of the wreckage that had once been her home. She heard them complimenting her on her hiding place. She’d done a good job with that, it seemed. Common sense, she thought. She’d just wanted to get to water. In the end she hadn’t even turned it on, hadn’t been able to, but the shower floor was a good place to curl up. She was low for the smoke, and the tile in the room was unappetizing to the flames. They had moved on in search of fuels more to their liking and then they had been interrupted before they had a chance to return to her.
That perfect bathroom, the granite-tiled room and its porcelain tub with a mountain view, the finishing touch of their golden home together, had saved her. She hadn’t gotten any water, but there was plenty in there now—a hose jetted streams of it through the shattered window, steam rising in angry response.
Out in the yard, the paramedics worked on her some more, and no one was asking questions yet, they were just trying to fix her. The questions were coming, though. She knew that and she knew that she had to give the right answers.
When they brought the backboard out, she was terrified. It was something you didn’t belong on unless you were hurt very bad, or dying. She tried to pull away from it and she told them that she could stand and they held her down and told her that she could not.
“Tango’s been standing for three months,” she told them. The logic seemed sound to her, but it didn’t alter their decision. She was lifted and lowered onto the backboard and then they were carrying her out through a dizzying whirl of colored lights and toward an ambulance. One of the paramedics was asking her how the pain was, and she started to tell them that it was bad, but then stopped. No more drugs. Not yet.
“Need to talk to my husband,” she said. Speaking allowed long needles of pain to enter her face through her lips and slide all the way up into her brain.
“We’ll find your husband. He’ll be here soon. Just rest.”
Most of her wanted to accept that. It would be good to see Ethan, and she wanted to rest, she wanted to do the things they kept instructing her to do—rest, relax, be still. That all sounded excellent. It was a little too soon for it, though.
“He has a GPS messenger,” she said; she was in the back of the ambulance now, though the ambulance wasn’t moving, and the paramedics seemed to be working hard to ignore her, but thank God there was a police officer present, one she knew, one Ethan had worked with on rescues before. His name was well known to her but she couldn’t think of it. That was embarrassing, but she hoped he would understand. She gave up on finding his name and settled for direct eye contact instead.
“Please,” she said. “I need to get him a message. You know how. The GPS can—”
“I’ll get him the message, Allison. You just tell me what to say. I’ll get it to him.”
He kept looking away. She wondered what he saw. What she looked like to his eyes.
“You t-tell him…” Now she stuttered, because it was critical to get the wording right. That was imperative. To find a way to make Ethan understand without allowing the rest of the world to understand. A secret code. Husband-and-wife. Why hadn’t they ever developed a code? It seemed like something they should have done. Buy groceries, do laundry, create code.
“You need to get this right,” she told the police officer. “Just as I say.”
He seemed concerned now, but he nodded. One of the paramedics was asking him to step back, trying to close the door, but he held up a hand and told them to wait.
“You tell him that Allison says she is fine, but that JB’s friends are coming to see him.”
“We’ll tell him you’re fine. He’ll be here soon. You’ll see him very—”
“No.”
She tried to shout and the pain that brought on was excruciating, but she tunneled through it. “You need to say it right. Tell me how you will say it.”
They were all staring at her now, even the paramedics. The officer whose name she could not remember said, “Allison is fine but JB’s friends are coming to see him.”
“
Two
. Say
two
of JB’s friends.” It was important to be detailed. She knew that. The more details he had, the more prepared he would be.
The officer said that he would. He was receding from her but she couldn’t feel the ambulance moving and the door was still open. That was fascinating. How was that happening? Oh, he was stepping back. Funny how fast the drugs worked. Very disorienting. Very good drugs. She told the paramedics that. She thought they would like to know how good these things were. They were busy, though; they always seemed to be busy.
The door closed and the ambulance shifted beneath her and then they really were moving, bumping down the driveway. She could see the men with the pale blue eyes again and she could see her husband’s face and she wished that she’d been able to send the message herself. The officer had better get it right. There were two of them, and they were evil. Maybe she should have used that word in the message. Maybe she should have been clearer. She had said that two friends were coming, but that was so far from the truth.
Evil was coming.
This time the dream was different, gentler in its layers but more evil in its content. This time the boy was coming for Hannah. He was walking right toward her, wearing a headlamp, marching to her tower, and she was terrified of him and whatever message he carried.
You’ve lost your mind,
she thought, staring out the window as the boy with the lamp reached the base of the tower steps and began to come up them, the steel rattling against his feet.
He couldn’t be real. A boy just like the one who haunted her, walking out of the night woods, out of the mountains, all alone and bound for her as if he’d been marching toward her all this time?
The terrible thing stopped after ten steps, though. Held tightly to the rail, looked up at her tower and then back down. Came up another few steps in a rush, moving awkwardly with the weight of an outsize pack on his back, then stopped again and put both hands on the step in front of him. Holding on to it as if for balance.
Hannah was still developing her theory of ghosts and she didn’t understand much about them, but one thing she was sure of: they weren’t afraid of heights.
She rose from the bunk and walked to the door, and down below the boy began his surreal ascent from the blackness again, the white beam of light guiding him toward her. She opened the door, stepped out into the night, and shouted,
“Stop!”
He nearly fell off the tower. Stumbled into the rail, gave a little cry, and slipped sideways; the pack caught him and kept him from sliding down the steps.
Ghosts were not scared of the living. Nightmares didn’t tremble at the sound of your voice.
“Are you okay?” she called.
He didn’t answer, and she started down the steps. He watched her come, the headlamp shining directly into her eyes.
“Please turn that light off.”
He reached up and fumbled with it and clicked something and then the light shifted from harsh white to an eerie crimson glow. A setting designed to protect your night vision. She walked down until she could see him.
He bore no resemblance to the boy from her memories. He was older and taller, with dark hair instead of blond. His face was covered with dirt and scratches and sweat, and he was breathing hard. He’d been walking for a while.
“Where did you come from?”
“I’m…I got lost. Heading back to camp.”
“You’re camping?”
He nodded. She was close enough now to see that there were streaks on his face where tears had cleared the dirt.
“You’re with your parents?”
“No. I mean…not anymore. Not now.”
It was a strange answer, and his eyes made it even stranger. Flicking around like there were options all about and he needed to find the right one. For a yes-or-no answer? Hannah looked at him and tried to see what she was missing. There was something. He was dressed for camping, yes, and he had the pack and the headlamp, all the proper equipment, but…
The pack. Why was he still wearing it if he’d gotten lost on his way
back
to camp?
“How long ago did you wander off?”
“I don’t know. Couple hours.”
That put him strapping a full pack on after midnight. A pretty serious bathroom run.
“What’s your name?” she said.
Again the flicker of the eyes. “Connor.”
“Your parents are out there somewhere, but you don’t know how to find your way back?”
“Yeah. I need to get in touch with them.”
“I’d say so.”
“You have a phone up there?” he asked.
“A radio. We’ll call for help. Come on up. We’ll get it straightened out.”
He got to his feet slowly. Holding to the railing as if he fully expected the stairs to collapse beneath him and leave him dangling from it. She turned and led the way up to the cab. The moon was descending, and in the eastern sky there were the first perceptible lightening shades of dawn. She’d been awake until well past midnight listening to the reports from the fire line. They’d failed to contain the flames before dark and had called for a second hotshot crew to help. In the morning, she expected there would be discussion of a helitack unit. For a brief time, there had been added excitement when reports of a second flare-up a few miles away came in, but that turned out to be a house fire, quickly extinguished. Now it was just the one blaze out there in the night. The wind that had picked up at dusk had blown steadily all through the night and showed no sign of wanting to lie down in front of the oncoming day.
Poor kid,
she thought. Whatever he wasn’t telling her—and there was something—he needed to get the hell out of these mountains and back to his family. She wondered if he had run away from them. That would explain the full pack and the hesitant answers. It was none of her business. All she had to do was make sure he got to safety. A more active role than she’d expected to have this summer.
She reached the top of the cab and turned on the overhead lights and waited while he made his way up. She’d been going slow but he still had fallen well behind. Even when the lights went on in the cab, he didn’t look up from his boots. Step, step, pause. Step, step, pause. Never glancing up or to the sides.
“Here we are,” she said. “My little kingdom. Where did you come from? Do you know the name of the campsite, or a landmark? I’ll need to offer instructions to find your family.”
Again, that strange expression overtook him. As if he didn’t have an answer ready and needed time to consider before offering one. It wasn’t a deceptive look, just uncertain.
“Who do you call on the radio?” he said.
“People who can help.”
“Right. But…who, exactly? Police?”
“Are you worried about the police?”
“No,” the boy said.
“Do you
need
the police?”
“It’s just…I’m curious. I need to know, that’s all.”
“What do you need to know?”
“Who
exactly
answers the radio?”
“Dispatch for firefighters. But from there, they’ll call whoever you need.”
He frowned. “Firefighters.”
“Yes.”
“Who can hear what they say?”
“Pardon?”
“Is it just…is it two-way communication?”
“Two-way communication?” she echoed. “I’m not sure that I follow.”
“Can other people hear what you say? Like, is it just you and another person, the way it would be on a phone? Or can other people listen? On other radios?”
“Hon,” she said, “you need to tell me what the real problem is here. Okay?”
He didn’t answer.
“Where did you really come from?” she said.
He let his eyes drift away from hers. They settled on the Osborne. He wandered over to it and stared at the map, silent, then leaned down, investigating it.
Autistic, maybe,
she thought.
Or—what’s that other condition? When a kid is really smart but you ask him a normal question and he ignores it? Whatever that condition is, this kid has it.
“If you don’t remember, that’s okay. I’ll just need to explain what—”
“I’d say we were right…there.” He had his index finger on the topographic map. She was too intrigued by him now to just repeat the question, so instead she went to his side and looked at where he was pointing.
“That’s nine thousand feet there,” he said. “And we were one ridge down, in this area that flattened out, and we had the slope at our back. You can see that? The way the line bends, it shows you that there’s a flat area there. It’s not as steep as what’s around it, you see?”
He looked up at her, curious to know if she understood.
“Yeah,” she said. “I can see it.”
“Well, that’s where we were camped. We’re working on orienteering, and I saw the smoke and figured out where we were…and then…then, later, when you put the light on, I saw this place. That was probably an hour ago? You’d be surprised how well the light carries, with this thing being so tall. But once I saw it, I remembered what it was. Or what it probably was. When you turned it off, I got kind of worried that I’d imagined it. I mean, it got so dark so fast, it was like it was never there. But I had the angle right, I mean the bearing, it’s called a bearing, and so I just…I just kept walking.”
He was beginning to ramble now, and his hands had started to shake. For the first time, he looked troubled. More than troubled. He looked terrified.
“Walking away from what?” Hannah said. “What has you so scared?”
“I don’t know. Listen, I need you to do me a favor.”
Here we go,
she thought.
Here’s where it gets interesting.
“Call for help,” she said. “Yeah, I’m on it.”
“No. No, please don’t do that. If you could just…give me a little while to think.”