Page 41 of Faultline

"I want you to teach me what to look for."

The corner of his mouth holds. "Later."

One word. A promise and a command packed into two syllables, and the rough bottom of his voice sends a current through my legs that has nothing to do with the switchbacks. I put that aside for when we're not driving toward someone else's disaster.

The sky is graying at the edges when we turn south off the county highway onto a logging road I haven't been on before. I see the evidence before the property comes into view. A haze hanging low in the trees, drifting across the road in thin bands that catch the headlights and turn them yellow. Then ash. Fine gray flakes landing on the windshield, collecting in the wiper troughs, dusting the hood of the truck like the first snow of a season that's arriving wrong.

Liam's jaw tightens when we round the last turn.

The Anderson homestead is a footprint. Foundation walls, charred framing, the skeleton of a chimney standing alone against the early light like a headstone for the house that was built around it.

The barn is the same, reduced to blackened posts and a tin roof that buckled inward from heat. Smoke still rises from the debris in thin columns that don't move because the air is too cold and too still to carry them.

The heat reaches the truck before I open the door. Even hours after the fire burned itself out, the foundation radiates warmth that pushes through the cold air in visible waves.

The gravel crunches underfoot when I step down, and the sound is wrong. Too soft. Ash has settled over everything, turning the driveway into a gray landscape that records every boot print.

Carl's volunteer crew is spread across the property with shovels and hand lines, working the perimeter where the burn stopped. Working is generous. They're standing watch over a fire that's already done everything it was intended to do.

Two of them lean on their shovels near the barn, faces lit orange by embers still glowing deep in the collapsed framing. A third sits on the tailgate of the volunteer truck with his gloves off, staring at the debris field like he's been here since the middle of the night and run out of useful things to do.

The timber is untouched.

I walk toward the house foundation. The heat intensifies with each step. The concrete slab is visible through the debris, cracked and discolored by temperatures that turned the interior into a kiln.

I can see the floor plan in the ruins. The kitchen on the north side, identifiable by the cast iron stove that survived because cast iron doesn't care about fire. A sink faucet stands alone on a copper pipe, the basin gone, the counter gone, the wall that held it gone. Near what was the front door, a cluster of wire coils marks where a couch sat. The fabric, the cushions, the frame, all consumed. The springs remain, twisted by heat into shapes that will never hold anyone again.

At the edge of the foundation, a ceramic coffee mug sits on a section of countertop that collapsed outward when the wall fell. The mug is intact. The glaze is cracked from heat, but the handle is whole. A dark ring stains the interior where coffee sat for so long it became permanent.

Someone's morning cup. Someone's kitchen routine. Sitting in the wreckage with the patience of an object that doesn't understand it survived.

I've walked through ransacked apartments. I've cataloged the aftermath of men who punish women by destroying their possessions, their sanctuaries, their proof of existing. This is the same violation, performed by a corporation instead of a fist, and the precision makes it worse. A man in a rage breaks what he can reach. Whoever did this chose exactly what to destroy and exactly what to leave standing.

The tree line stands well beyond the nearest structure, and the forest is green and unburned on every side. No scorched undergrowth. No singed canopy. No heat damage on the closest trunks.

A house fire that levels two buildings and stops itself before touching a single tree.

Liam is already walking the edge of the char. His eyes track the ground with a focus I've only seen him give his own property, reading the terrain for evidence the fire couldn't erase.

He crouches near the foundation of the barn and studies something in the char, his forearms braced on his thighs, the tendons in his hands visible as he sifts through debris.

Rhys arrives in the cruiser, Marc in the passenger seat. They park behind Carl's truck and walk the scene without speaking, the silence of men cataloging damage they've been trained to process before they react to it.

"Andersons?" Rhys asks Carl.

"In Palmer. Visiting their daughter for the week."

Carl's voice carries its usual gymnasium volume, but the energy underneath is different. He keeps glancing at the tree line and then back at the burn boundary, and I can tell he's been doing this since he arrived. The fire is bothering him, and he doesn't have the vocabulary for it yet.

"Convenient timing," Marc says.

"Not a coincidence," I say. Both men look at me. "Cascade would have known the property was empty. They've been tracking movement in this area for weeks. Hank told Liam the Andersons reported someone walking their timber line. If they had the surveillance infrastructure to build an observation post on Liam's ridge, they had it here too."

Rhys absorbs this without expression. Marc writes something in his notebook.

Liam walks back from the barn foundation and stops beside me. His shoulder touches mine, and the contact isn't casual. He's positioning himself between me and the open ground, an orientation so instinctive he probably doesn't register that he's done it.

I register it. I register everything about how this man arranges himself around me now, the scaffolding of protection he builds without thinking. His body between mine and the open ground pulls at something low in my stomach that I'm not willing to examine while standing in ash. I let him do it because fighting it would cost more than it's worth, and because the part of me that should object went quiet the first time his weight settled over me in the dark.