The plane smelled of hot oil and pine resin, and the floor vibrated under my boots hard enough to rattle my teeth. I had my eyes closed, but I could feel the ridge coming, the way the air went thin and bitter in the back of my throat. Fire has a weight. You learn it after enough seasons. It presses on the inside of the cabin door like something trying to get in. Ruth's voice came through the headset, flat and calm. "Two minutes. Check your gear." I checked. I always checked. Chute, reserve, helmet, gloves, the strap across my chest that had saved my life twice. Across from me, Wren was grinning at nothing in particular, her honey-brown hair pinned up under her helmet and a smudge of soot already on her cheek. She was twenty-three and had never learned to be afraid of the right things. "You look like you're going to a funeral," she said. "I look like I'm going to work." "Same face." The door opened. Heat came in like a hand across my mouth. Below us the Bitterroot Valley spread out in ridges of dark pine and smoke, and the fire was a long orange scar running up the eastern slope, eating the timber in slow bites. I leaned out and looked down, and the world tilted the way it always did before a jump, that moment when your body understands that it is about to fall a very long way and your mind has to argue with it. Then I caught the scent. It hit me under the smoke, under the diesel and the pine and the burned sap. Something warm and clean, like cedar split open in the sun, with a low note underneath that made my wolf come awake in a single hard surge. My hands went tight on the door frame. I had smelled a lot of things in my life. I had never had a smell go through me like a hand pulling a rope. "Ivy." Ruth again. "You're up." I jumped. The fall is the best part, and I have never told anyone that. For eight seconds there is no pack, no rank, no mark on your wrist that burns when the moon gets fat. There is only the wind screaming past your helmet and the ground coming up like a promise. I pulled the cord and the chute cracked open above me and the whole world went quiet. That was when I saw him. He stood on the ridge below, one boot up on a burned stump, a radio in his hand and a fire shelter strapped to his back. Bright golden blond hair swept to the side, catching the red light of the fire, and when he turned his face up to watch me come down, I saw the grey of his eyes from sixty feet away. Lean. Graceful in the way a wolf is graceful when it has not yet decided whether to run. He was not looking at the fire. He was looking at me. I landed hard and rolled and came up on one knee in the ash, and he was already there, one hand out. I took it. The spark ran from his palm into mine and up my arm and settled somewhere under my ribs, and I heard his breath catch, just once, before he let go of me like my hand had burned him. "You're early," he said. "I'm exactly on time." "The plane was supposed to drop at the north line." He looked past me at the smoke, and his jaw worked. "You're on the south line. That's a mile of fire between you and where you're supposed to be." I pulled off my helmet and shook my hair out of my face. "The wind shifted. The north line is going to roll into the creek and die. The south line is where the fuel is." I pointed. "Give it an hour and it will be over that ridge and into the valley, and then you'll have a real fire instead of a convenient one." He studied me. Up close the firelight made his skin look warmer than it probably was, sun-kissed and smooth across the cheekbones, and his eyes were the exact grey of a sky before hail. He was taller than me by a head and a half, and I hate that I noticed. "Who are you?" he said. "Ivy. New transfer. Ruth hired me last week." "Ruth didn't tell me." "Ruth doesn't tell anyone anything. It's her best quality." Something moved at the corner of his mouth, and then it was gone. He turned away and raised his radio. "Crew, this is Dex. We have a jumper on the south line. I want two sawyers and a hose pack up here now, and I want the north line left alone." Dex. The name landed in my chest like a stone in still water. I knew that name. Every wolf in the Bitterroot knew that name. Alpha of the Ravager Pack, keeper of the jump base, the man who had held this valley against the council for six years. He turned back to me. The radio hung from his hand. "You put a lot of confidence in a wind shift." "The smoke doesn't lie. It's telling you where it's going." "It's telling me where it's been." I opened my mouth to answer and the wind changed again, hard, and the fire on the south line stood up and came at us in a wall. The heat hit my face and I was moving before I thought, one hand on his chest pushing him back toward the rock shelf, the other grabbing for the radio to call the crew off the line. He caught my wrist. His fingers closed over the mark on the inside of it, and it flared hot, hotter than the fire, and I made a sound I have never made in my life. He felt it. I know he felt it, because he went still, and his eyes dropped to my wrist, and then to my face, and the grey in them had gone dark. "What is that," he said. "Nothing." "That's not nothing." The fire roared up the slope and we ran, and the rest of it was noise and ash and Ruth shouting over the radio and Wren laughing like a maniac while she dragged a hose. By the time we had the south line cut and the danger gone, the sun was down behind the western ridge and the smoke had turned the whole sky the color of a bruise. Dex found me at the water truck. He had washed the ash off his face and his hair was wet and pushed back, and he looked at me for a long moment before he spoke. "You were right about the wind," he said. "I usually am." "Don't do that again." "Do what?" "Put your hand on me." His voice was low and even and it did not sound like a warning. It sounded like a man reading out a sentence he did not like. "Whatever happened out there, whatever you felt, it doesn't happen here. Not on my base. Do you understand me?" I looked up at him. The water truck ticked as it cooled. Somewhere behind us Wren was arguing with a sawyer about dinner, and the fire was a red line on the dark ridge, and the mark on my wrist was still warm. "I understand you," I said. He nodded and turned away, and I stood there with my heart going like a jump door and my wolf pacing behind my ribs, and I knew, the way you know a wind shift before the smoke moves, that this valley was going to cost me something. Then he stopped. He did not turn around. "Ivy." "What." "Whose mark is that on your wrist?" The water truck ticked. The fire hissed. I did not answer, and after a moment he walked on into the dark, and I stood in the ash with my hand closed over the one thing I had spent my whole life hiding.

The base office had one window and a coffee machine that had not been cleaned since the last century. Dex sat behind a metal desk with a stack of incident reports on it and a pen he kept turning between his fingers. I stood in front of the desk because he had not offered me a chair. "You're fired," he said. I had been expecting it since the water truck. That did not make it land any softer. "For what?" "Failing to follow the drop order." "The drop order was wrong. The north line was already dead when I got out of the plane. You saw the wind shift same as I did." "I saw a jumper decide her own line without clearing it with the crew on the ground." He set the pen down. "That's how people die." "Nobody died. Fire me for it and the next crew chief who reads this report is going to laugh at you." He leaned back. The office lamp caught the side of his face and made the grey of his eyes look almost silver. Bright golden blond hair, swept back from his forehead and still damp at the edges. The second thing you noticed was how still he could get. "You were on my line for one fire," he said. "One. And in that one fire you touched me." My ears went hot. "I pushed you out of the way of a wall of flame. That's not touching. That's doing my job." "You know what I mean." He came around the desk and stopped a foot away, close enough that I could smell the soap on his skin, and under it that cedar scent, and my wolf rolled over inside me like a dog showing its belly. "It doesn't happen here. I told you that on the ridge. You don't get to come onto my base and pull something out of me that I've spent six years keeping down." "I didn't pull anything. It was there before I landed." He flinched. Just a small thing, a tightening around the mouth, but I saw it. "Get your gear," he said. "Ruth will drive you down to the highway. There's a bus in Hamilton at six." "No." "Excuse me?" "I said no." I crossed my arms because my hands had started to shake. "You want to fire me because I made you feel something you didn't plan for, that's your business. But I am not getting on a bus because you're scared of your own skin." The office went quiet. Out in the yard a saw coughed and died, and someone laughed, and I could hear the crew muttering around the burn barrels. "You think I'm scared," he said. "I think you're a man who runs a fire base on a wolf pack's land and lies to the council about how many wolves are on it. You tell me what that is if it isn't scared." I do not know why I said it. It came out of me the way the wind shift had, sudden and sure, and the moment it was in the air I knew I had made a mistake. Dex went white around the eyes. He stepped in, and his hand came up and stopped before it touched me. "Who told you that," he said. "Nobody told me anything. I've been on three bases in four years. Your numbers don't add up and your pack is twice the size you tell the council it is. I don't care about your silver or your politics or which Alpha's boots you stepped into. I care about jumping. Ruth says you're short two." He stared at me. The muscle in his jaw moved once. "You don't know what you're talking about," he said, and it was not a denial. It was a warning. "Then fire me for the drop order and not for the rest of it. Put it in the file and I'll sign it. But you look me in the eye and tell me the real reason first." He walked to the window. His back was straight and the tension in his neck was plain to see. "You smelled like cedar," he said. "On the ridge. Before you landed. I smelled you from sixty feet up in the air with the whole valley on fire and I couldn't hear my own radio for three seconds." He turned his head just enough to look at me. "You know what that means." I did know. Every wolf knows. There is a story they tell you when you are small, about the one scent in the world that will find you no matter how far you run. I had spent my whole life telling myself it was a story. "It means nothing," I said. "It's a smell. It's a fire season with the worst burn in a decade coming at us. It means nothing." "It means you're my mate." The word sat in the room between us. My wolf howled, long and low, because she had known it since the ridge and I had been shoving her down. I clenched my fists until my nails bit. "I'm not your anything. You fired me, remember." "I fired you because I can't have a mate on this base. Not with the council sniffing around and the pack half starved. You think I want to send you away? I have never had to look at a woman I just met and tell her to get on a bus." "Then don't." "Get your gear, Ivy." I did not move. He came back around the desk, picked up the pen, wrote something on a form and signed it, then held it out. His hand was steady. Mine was not. "That's a seasonal contract," he said. "Three months. Probation. You jump what I tell you to jump and you keep whatever is going on inside your chest where I can't see it. You break one rule, one, and you're gone before the plane lands. Do you understand me?" I took the paper. His fingers brushed mine and the spark went up my arm again and we both pretended it had not happened. "Why?" I said. "Because I need a jumper. And because if I put you on that bus I'll spend the whole season wondering where you went." He turned away before I could answer. The door opened behind me and Cora stepped in, short black hair wet from the shower, a towel over her shoulder, and she looked from me to Dex and back again and her eyes narrowed. "Everything settled?" she said. "Everything's settled," Dex said. "Ivy's on probation. Put her on the north rotation." Cora did not like that. I could see it in the way she folded her arms and in the long slow look she gave me. "North rotation's full," she said. "I had Wren on it." "Then move Wren. Ivy jumps north." Cora held my gaze one second too long. Then she smiled, and it was not a warm smile. "Sure," she said. "Welcome to the Ravagers, Ivy. Try not to get anybody killed." She walked out, and the door swung shut behind her, and I stood there with a contract in my hand and the mark on my wrist prickling like a fresh burn. Dex had not asked about the mark again. That was the thing I could not stop thinking about. An Alpha who wanted rid of me had asked one question on the ridge and then let it go. The door opened a second time. Cora stuck her head back in. "One thing," she said. "The council's man is coming up from Denver day after tomorrow. He wants to inspect the base." Dex did not turn around. "Which council man?" "Marcus." Cora said the name the way you say the name of a storm that has already taken your roof off. "He says it's routine. He says he's bringing his own people." Dex's hand closed slowly around the edge of the windowsill. I saw his knuckles go white, and I heard the change in his breath, and I knew, the way I knew the fire was going to roll, that whatever was coming up that highway was not routine and not a surprise. Cora pulled the door shut. The office clock ticked. Dex stood at the window for a long time without saying anything, and then he spoke without looking at me. "Go get some sleep," he said. "And Ivy. If Marcus asks you anything about that mark on your wrist, you tell him it's a burn from a cookstove." I looked down at the mark. It had been warm all evening, and now, in the lamplight, I could swear I saw the thin line of it glowing faintly under my skin, like silver wire holding a fire inside a lantern.

Ruth's office was the equipment shed, and she did not pretend otherwise. A workbench ran along one wall, covered in coils of rope and a broken chainsaw she had been meaning to fix since spring. She sat on an upturned crate with a mug of coffee in one hand and my contract in the other, and she read it slowly, with her mouth turned down. "He put you on probation," she said. "He put me on probation." "Three months. And he wrote 'supervised jump status' in his own hand. Dex hates writing in his own hand." She looked up over the rim of her mug. Her hair was grey-white and cut short, and her hazel eyes had a way of landing on you like a hand on a shoulder. "You scared him." "I didn't do anything." "You jumped a line he didn't tell you to jump. That's enough to scare any Alpha." She set the contract down. "Sit. You're making the shed look untidy." I sat on a crate across from her. The shed smelled of gas and leather and old smoke, and through the open door I could see the crew hauling hose up to the drying rack. Wren was out there in her soot-stained yellows, arguing with a sawyer twice her size. "Here's the thing," Ruth said. "I hired you because I need a jumper and because your record is the best I've seen in nine years. I did not hire you because Dex needs a mate. He doesn't want one. You'd do well to remember that." "I'm not looking for a mate." "Good. Keep not looking." She tapped the contract. "You'll bunk in the east cabin with Wren and two of the sawyers. You eat at the mess. You don't go past the creek line without telling me, and you don't go near the pack house unless Dex says so. Those are my rules. Dex's rules are longer and stupider, and you'll learn them soon enough." I nodded. Ruth's eyes dropped to my hands in my lap. I had them folded, and my sleeve had ridden up, and the mark on the inside of my wrist was showing. She looked at it for a long time. "That's a funny burn," she said. "Cookstove." "Mm." She took another drink and did not look away from it. "Cookstoves usually leave a shape like a splash or a stripe. That one is a crescent with a line through the middle. You could set a compass to that curve." I pulled my sleeve down. "Base has a lot of cookstoves." Ruth set her mug down with a small click. "Ivy. I'm going to say one thing and then stop saying it. Whatever that is on your wrist, keep it covered until Marcus comes and goes. He's a man who notices things, and he has a long memory for old markings." My stomach turned over. "Why would the council care about a burn?" "Because the council cares about everything." She stood and handed me the contract and a set of keys on a wire ring. "East cabin. Bottom bunk. Wren snores." I took the keys. One of them had a strip of red tape on it. "Ruth. What happened to the last jumper?" She was already turning back to her workbench. "What makes you think there was a last jumper?" "The board on the wall. Four names, and one of them is scratched out." Ruth picked up the broken chainsaw and set it down again without looking at me. "That name is scratched out because the jumper left. That's all. Go get your bunk before Wren takes the good one." The east cabin had four bunks, one window and a woodstove somebody had painted blue for reasons no one could explain. Wren was already there, sitting cross-legged on the top bunk with a sock in her hand and her honey-brown hair loose down her back, and when I came in she threw the sock at me. "Welcome to the palace," she said. "The stove works if you hit it. The shower works if you don't. Don't sit on the third bunk, the leg is broken and the last guy who did it is still complaining about his back." I caught the sock and threw it back. "Which bunk is mine?" "Bottom, by the window. I saved it because the sawyers snore like a logging truck and you look like a woman who needs her sleep." She hopped down and landed light on her feet. "Also because you jumped the south line and everybody's been talking about it all day. I want to hear the story." "There's no story. I read the wind and I jumped." "That's the whole story? That's boring. You're supposed to say something dramatic like 'the fire spoke to me.'" "The fire doesn't speak. The smoke does. It tells you where it's going before it goes." Wren laughed, loud and unguarded, and it made the cabin feel less like a shed with a stove in it. "I like you. You're weird. My brother hates weird." "Your brother fired me." "My brother fires everybody. He fired the last cook for burning the porridge. He fired a sawyer for leaving the gas cap off a can. He's got this idea that if he controls every little thing, nothing bad will happen to the pack." She shrugged. "It doesn't work. Bad things happen anyway." I sat down on my bunk. The window above it looked out at the creek and the dark tree line and, beyond that, the pack house with its lights on. "Wren. Cora's been Beta since before you were born?" "Yeah. She was my father's Beta too." Wren's voice changed a little, and she picked up a boot and started lacing it. "She's loyal. She's just not very nice about it." "She doesn't like me." "She doesn't like anybody new. Give her a season and she'll come around, or she'll find a way to make you leave. It's a coin toss, honestly." I looked out the window again. Cora stood at the corner of the pack house with her phone to her ear, her short black hair dark against the pale siding, nodding at whatever she was hearing. Then she turned her head, and her eyes found my window, and she looked at me for a long moment before she lowered the phone and walked into the trees. The mark on my wrist flared hot. I hissed and pulled my sleeve up, and Wren turned around at the sound. "What?" "Nothing. The stove." But it was not the stove. The mark was glowing, faintly, a thin line of silver light under my skin, and as I watched it brightened once and faded, as though something out in the dark had called to it and it had answered. Wren was staring at my wrist. Her mouth was open. "What is that?" she said. "Nothing." "That's not nothing. I've seen that before." She sat down slowly on the edge of the bunk across from me. "Not on a person. In a book. My father had a book." The cabin door swung open. Cora stood in it with the last of the evening light behind her and her arms folded. "Ruth wants you at the mess," she said to Wren. Her eyes slid to me. "Not you. You stay." Wren looked from me to Cora and back. "Cora, she just got here. What's the problem?" "The problem is that the council's man arrives in two days, and I have a jumper on this base with a strange mark and a stranger record, and no one in the pack has ever heard her name." Cora stepped inside and let the door swing shut. "So I'm going to ask you some questions, Ivy. This time you're going to give me real answers." I stood up. The mark on my wrist was still warm under my sleeve. "Ask them," I said. Cora smiled, and I could not tell whether it was kindness or something colder. "Where were you born?" she said. "And who was your father?" I opened my mouth to answer, and the door swung open again, and Dex stood in the doorway with his jaw set and his eyes on Cora and his voice low and hard. "Leave her alone," he said. "She's mine to deal with."