"They are."
"They're quiet though. Like, real quiet. Most crews I've worked with, you get guys who joke around, give each other shit, play music during lunch. These folks don't do any of that. They just..." He trailed off, searching for the word.
"Work," I finished for him.
"Yeah. Just work. All day. Like machines." He shifted his weight. "Is that normal? For H-2A crews?"
I looked at him. Twenty-three and perceptive—a combination that could either keep him safe or get him hurt depending on how the next few weeks unfolded.
"Keep an eye on them for me," I told him instead of answering. "If the guy from High Basin shows up—the field rep, clean boots—you call me immediately. Don't let him take anyone off the property. Don't let him talk to the workers without you present. Can you do that?"
Danny's expression shifted. The easygoing ranch kid recalibrating into something more alert. "Yeah. Yeah, I can do that." A pause. "Logan, is something?—"
"Just watch. That's all I'm asking. Watch and call."
He nodded again, slower this time, and I could see the questions forming behind his eyes. I left before they broke.
The F-250 started on the first turn. The old blue Ford backed out of the gravel drive with a familiar rattle, the tires crunching, the dogs watching from the porch. Compass stood at the top of the steps with her one ear forward and her eyes locked on the truck. I'd never left her for more than a day. The heeler who'd been abandoned once, watching the one person who'd never abandoned her drive away.
"I'll be back," I told her through the open window.
The ranch shrank in the rearview mirror. The barn, the bunkhouses, the main house, the fences stretching out in every direction. The north acreage was invisible from this angle, the building hidden behind the roll of the hills, but I could feel it there—present, waiting, like a bruise I hadn't pressed yet.
I turned south onto the county road. The highway waited ten miles ahead, and beyond the highway, five hours of open road through the mountain passes of western Montana and into eastern Idaho.
At the end of that road was a bar, and inside, a man I hadn't seen in what felt like an eternity. Dark eyes, fast hands, a bodybuilt for speed and a mind that had never met a problem it couldn't cut through.
The highway opened ahead—flat and straight and long, the morning light climbing the sky behind me and painting the rearview mirror gold.
My hands were steady on the wheel. The rest of me wasn't.
4
REKINDLING FLAMES
BLADE
Ghost didn't want to leave.
I could see it in the way he sat on his bike at the junction where the county road split north and south. Visor up. His young face set with the stubbornness of a man who'd been told to do something he disagreed with and was searching for a way to argue without technically arguing. The morning sun hit the chrome of his Harley and threw light across the dirt in sharp white lines. Behind us, two days of desert and scrub. A trail that had led northeast across empty country, footprints in the dust giving way to tire tracks on a gravel road that disappeared into Montana.
"Brief Hawk," I told him. "Everything we found. The footprints heading northeast, the tire tracks on the gravel access road, the direction of travel. Tell him I think the origin point is somewhere in central Montana, probably a rural property, probably agricultural. Tell him I'm sorry but I have business up here that could be connected."
"Connected how?" Ghost's fingers were drumming against the tank of his bike, the restless energy vibrating through him the way it always did—a young man who'd survived a war he was still processing and channeled the residual adrenaline into motion.
"I don't know yet. Could be tied to the bodies. Could be tied to the Wolves. Could be both. It's speculation until I have more."
"You shouldn't go alone. Hawk's going to lose it when I show up without you."
"Hawk will understand. And I'm not doing anything risky. I'm meeting someone. Talking. That's all."
Ghost studied me through his visor with the expression of a person who knew he was being managed and resented it but lacked the rank to do anything about it. "Who are you meeting?"
"Someone I trust."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the one you're getting." I pulled my visor down. "Ride safe, Ghost. Stay on the main highways. Don't stop for anything between here and Henderson."
