But there are mornings I walk this land and feel the company the same way I feel the trees and the cold, like something that grew here because it was supposed to, and I don't know what it looks like to hand that to a fund.
"We're not going to settle this on a trail," I say.
Jace turns partway, enough to make the point. "I didn't realize we were settling it at all."
I put myself between the argument and where it's heading. "Both of you have points worth hearing. Neither of you is getting heard right now."
Silence. A raven calls from somewhere in the eastern trees and goes quiet.
Jace faces forward and starts walking again.
Owen says nothing. The argument will keep until tonight.
The trail rises, the ground hardening as the canopy thickens and shades the snow from any daytime softening. My lungs work in the cold. The boots hold.
I built a different kind of life before this one. A decade in the Marine Corps, Force Reconnaissance. You learn things in that work that don't unlatch when you're done with it. How to read a room before you're fully through the door. How to move without declaring yourself. How to hold your own noise downlow enough that the world forgets you're in it. I'm still running all of it, fourteen years out of uniform, still reading tree lines and approaches and the specific quality of quiet that precedes the thing that breaks it.
Which is why I hear it before Jace or Owen do.
High. Sharp. Gone.
I stop walking.
Jace and Owen stop a half-second later, heads lifting.
The woods absorb it completely. Nothing moves. A spruce somewhere above us drops its snow load and the soft collapse is the only sound for a long moment.
I know what animals sound like in these trees. Elk, mule deer, the occasional mountain lion calling from the ridge. I've heard wind work through the canyon breaks to the north and produce sounds that would make a civilian's skin cold. Years of operating in environments where misidentifying a sound got people killed trained me to sit with ambiguity until I had enough information.
Then it comes again.
Higher pitched. Shorter. A woman's scream.
"Mrs. Smith's place," Jace says.
"She hasn't been there since she moved to Florida, two years ago." Owen says. "And the January storm did real damage. The place is barely standing."
We're already moving.
The cabin sits in its clearing two hundred yards off the main trail. I haven't come this close to it in months, and Owen wasn't wrong. The north side shows serious structural failure. The porch boards are rotted through in several places.
But the chimney is working. Thin grey smoke, consistent draw, the kind that comes from a managed fire.
I stop at the perimeter and look at the ground.
Multiple passes around the cabin's exterior, close to the walls, both directions. The pattern of someone who walked theperimeter more than once, checking something. No tire tracks on the access road. No vehicle parked anywhere I can see.
Whoever made those prints hiked in.
"Squatter," I say. It's the cleanest read. Empty cabin, remote enough that no one checks it through winter. Someone found it and moved in.
I go to the front door and try the handle. Locked.
Jace and Owen are on either side of me. The conversation we're not having is simple: a woman screamed in a locked cabin.
The scream comes again. From inside.
I step back, shift my weight, and put my boot into the door beside the lock. The frame cracks and gives. The door swings hard into the interior wall and we go through fast, the cold air following us in.
