Page 1 of No Hope of Rescue

Chapter One

Brock Weston

“Come on, Brock, pleeease!”

My seventeen-year-old baby sister, Codie, is determined to take the Whitefox out on the trail. It’s a four-seat snowmobile with a fiberglass hood and flashing blue emergency lights. We use it working search and rescue, and it’s the newest, shiniest, inanimate addition to our team.

I grin and shake my head, continuing to methodically load my daypack with supplies.

She persists. “Oh, come on! It’s just sitting out there.” She gestures to the floor-to-ceiling glass windows of my friend’s cabin. Just beyond, sits the silver vehicle. “No one’s using it. It’s miles from headquarters.”

“Headquarters” is a loose term. Right now, “headquarters” is my two-bedroom house at my family’s compound at the edge of Echo Falls. I know she’s throwing me a bone. The Whitefox is sweet, and Codie is trying to be sweeter so she can get behind the handlebars.

“We’re hiking after, remember?”

“We could take Savi, though,” she says, rubbing the large knobby head of my shepherd. Savannah’s tongue hangs out for a moment as if she’s contemplating some strategy, and then she licks Codie’s hand in comradery.

“See? Savi wants to go.”

I shake my head again. “Devon and Luke are coming in first thing tomorrow, before sunrise, and I’ll have to go grab them at the bottom of the mountain. I don’t want to have clean it off.” I rub Savi’s head. “You can guard the fort, girl.”

Codie makes a face. “You’re so old,” she says, and though she’s pretending to be mad, some of that annoyance is real. About twenty percent. I’ll take it. It’s my own 80/20 rule, and I apply it to almost anything. As long as eighty percent of the time something is right or bearable, then I can put up with twenty percent being wrong or uncomfortable.

It’s a handy gauge.

She fake whines. “Why do they have to come so early?”

Savi’s given up trying to get attention and curls on the floor by Codie’s feet.

“Oh, you mean in the dark? Well, let’s see, they’re flying in from Maine, right after Christmas, and flights are kinda expensive right now. Second, this is their cabin, and you are staying here for free. Third, they want to see you.”

“I don’t think I even remember them.” She grins. Such a lie.

I pause for a moment, making a mental note to check water bottles before I stuff them in. “It’s been three years since they saw you, and they know you have to get back to college in two weeks.”

Codie is smart and driven—nothing like I was at eighteen. She’s just finished her first semester at University of Colorado Boulder.

“They were here in October.” She’s still at it.

“You weren’t,” I say and point to her pack. She’s barely started loading. Even if she had been available, a meeting would have been impossible. They lent the cabin to Colton Security and hid a witness, Tory, while she was recovering from an attack. Jackson Dawes and Tory Sparrow spent nearly a month here, and the first week, Devon Russo and Luke Walker stayed with them. They were working—Codie was in school.

Devon, Luke, and I met serving as smokejumpers across four western states. The work is hard, relentless, and our ranks were filled with stories of peril and grief. I met Luke during a grassland fire, and we both barely escaped with our lives. Luke and Devon met when he pulled Devon from a fire-bomb of pines west of Echo Mountain. After they married, they lost a close friend. Both quit their unit and moved back east—just not at the same time. Luke thought he’d lost her, and then his health went. Luckily, they found each other again.

I quit a year later, after Devon had left. I had volunteered for search and rescue as a teenager and in college, but it never occurred to me to start my own business. A couple of years ago, Riley Delgado showed up at Purple Moon Bar, pissed off she hadn’t passed her paramedic exam with a perfect score. She was a friend, another smokejumper who was getting ready to quit. My brothers—Carter, Ryan, and Jace—were there too.

That night, after several rounds, someone dusted off the bright idea of starting a search and rescue team. The four of us guys had kicked the idea around for about a year, but Riley dragged us into the weeds and got down to details. By one that morning, she’d searched grant apps on her phone and found contract jobs for bid.

Impressive.

When I crawled into bed early that morning, I told Crystal, my fiancée, that I thought Riley needed to lighten up on herself. Maybe she needed to learn the 80/20 rule. She’s always been about the 100%.

“Hey, old man,” Codie says, snapping her fingers. She must have caught something in my expression.

“Sorry. I’m sorry.”

Returning from my thoughts to a world with no Crystal is never easy. I try to make my voice sound normal. “You’re good. You almost done?”

Her pack looks full, but I didn’t check what she crammed in there.