“I kissed someone on my team. At the holiday party.”
He shrugs without slowing. I can’t tell if he’s downplaying it to get under my skin or if he really doesn’t get it.
“It’s a big deal,” I say, raising my voice between the sharp inhales required to keep up. “No dating, no kissing, nothing with anyone on your team. Ever. I know that. I messed up. But they slashed my pay almost in half.”
He finally stops and looks back, grin wide. “Bet you go to the gym so people want to work with the good-looking guy.”
“Did you hear anything I just said? And studies show working out boosts productivity by fifteen percent.”
“Oooh!” He faces the trees and bellows, pumping his fists as he powers up the hill. “Theresponsiblechoice! Look at him, folks, squishing life into an even smaller, sadder little box!”
“Maybe I’ll ask Alistair to sponsor my life,” I mutter.
“What life?”
He has no idea how prepared I am for that question. Money buys time. Time is the only resource that matters, and I am not going to waste mine.
I pull out my phone.
“Your answer’s in there?” he snipes, as I thumb through files, searching for the tab I never show anyone.
“I have a whole list of things I’ll do once I’m free.”
“Of course you do.”
“A happy life doesn’t happen by accident,” I say, the phrase lifted from some FIRE podcast but no less true for it. “I’m designing my future. I’m actually thinking about what I want.”
“I’m not worried about how much time you spend thinking aboutyourself. I’m worried about how little time you spend actually living.”
My spreadsheet won’t load. The little wheel just spins and spins and spins.
“There’s no service,” I say.
“I feel bad for you,” he answers.
“I mean for Jenny. For the map. For the whole ‘actively being chased by fire’ situation, not because I can’t pull up some stupid list.”
“So you agree your list is stupid,” he says, cresting the hill and turning with his hands on his head, finally breathing hard.
I don’t have the air, the energy, or the patience to answer. I drag myself up beside him, lungs burning, and look out over the next stretch of empty road with nothing but dry trees and dry grass.
“Which way?” he asks, already annoyed by how long it’s taking me to breathe.
I hold up my phone. “No service. No map.”
“Then,” he sucks in a breath, “screenshots. Which way?”
The sign at the T-intersection reads HUMBUG SUMMIT ROAD. The new road is wider than the one we just climbed, but still unpaved, cutting across the mountain with a drop-off to the valley on one side and a steep, tree-covered incline on the other.
My screenshot shows Humbug Summit runs north–south. Left and right look identical, one of them leading straight into the fire. If we could see the sky through the trees, I’m sure there’d be a column of smoke making the choice obvious.
“Uh.” I flip my phone, but the screenshot rotates with the screen, the little compass icon now useless in a frozen image.
Kael snatches it. “Left,” he says immediately. “Then it’s a straight shot to a cemetery where we can bury your cold, dead heart.”
He shoves the phone back at me. Inskip Pioneer Cemetery is the first landmark between us and Paradise.
“Were you really a Boy Scout?” I ask, trying not to sound too impressed while I swallow the humiliation of my post-FIRE bucket list failing to load.
