To my surprise, she turned away, walked over to the corner of the yard, and looked out toward the back property. She began to whine.
I didn’t have time to deal with a dog having a temper tantrum, but I had to admit I wasn’t expecting this sort of behavior from her. It was completely out of character.
The fire had reached the center of the barn, and the team was running out of time to get the remaining animals clear. Every hand mattered. I could hear sirens in the distance.
I started back toward the flames, but Tova ran over to me one more time, again pushing me in the direction she’d been staring at in the yard. I looked that way but couldn’t see anything but darkness.
But this dog had been trained by Lark. She had been inside the house all evening while whatever happened to Lark happened, and damn it, she was probably smarter than I was.
She was trying to tell me something.
I followed her.
Immediately, she stopped pushing at me and led, now that I was doing what she wanted me to do. I moved along the south boundary toward the back of the property, the same access road the drug runners had used.
Tova moved steadily, not running but urgent. She knew where she was going. She kept looking over her shoulder to make sure I was still with her.
The access road curved through the tree line. The fire lit the canopy behind us. Ahead was dark.
I saw it before I understood it.
A vehicle off the road, on its roof, crumpled and resting in the grass at the edge of the tree line. The windshield was shattered, and metal was twisted and bent in ways that metal should never bend. Nothing inside was moving.
Smoke hung in the air around it. The firelight from the barn caught on the exposed undercarriage, on broken glass, on chrome that threw the light back in fragments. The air carried the smell of burning timber and hot metal and…
The convoy and the IED. The vehicle that had been whole and then wasn’t. Sergeant Pruitt, whom I had pulled at, reached for, dug at the crumpled door until my hands bled, and couldn’t get to in time. The one who didn’t make it.
Every detail mapped onto every other detail, and my brain did what it had always done.
The access road dissolved. The dirt under my boots shifted and wasn’t Montana dirt anymore; it was convoy road, hard-packed and foreign, and the smoke was the column that hadclimbed the sky straight and wrong after the IED tore through the second vehicle.
The wrecked car was the Humvee that had folded inward with a man still inside. The distant roar of the burning barn stretched and compressed into something concussive, something that punched my chest and left my ears ringing, and the light was coming from an angle that did not exist on this continent.
The ground tried to take me. I could feel it pulling, the decade between here and there collapsing until both places existed at once, layered on top of each other, and I was standing in the convoy and on the access road, and the vehicle in front of me was destroyed and the person inside was still, and I already knew how this ended because I had lived through it and carried it every day since.
My legs locked. My knees went rigid and my hands seized at my sides and my breathing broke into something shallow and fast that couldn’t fill my lungs. I was standing ten feet from the car, and I could not close the distance because my body had decided that the convoy had already taught me what happened next and there was no reason to reach the door again.
The burning metal, the body I couldn’t reach, the ending I already knew.
Tova was against my leg. Her weight, her warmth, her shoulder pressed into me with the same pressure she used when she pulled me out of the dark. I could feel the dog and I could feel the convoy, and both were fighting for the same space inside my skull and the convoy was winning.
But the person inside that car was Lark.
She wasn’t a memory or a ghost. She wasn’t Reid, wasn’t Sergeant Pruitt. She wasLark.
Little bird.
I would not lose someone else because my mind took me somewhere I wasn’t.
The convoy didn’t let go. It didn’t break or dissolve or release me like some sort of movie. It stayed, screaming from every direction, trying to fold me into a memory I could not survive again.
My hands were shaking and my vision was split between two countries and the smoke in my lungs was smoke from two fires a decade apart, and my brain was insisting that this had already happened and I already knew the ending.
No.
I unlocked my knees. I forced my right foot forward and it landed on ground that was trying to be somewhere else, and then my left, and every step was a war against ten years of wiring that said I was too late, that the door was too crumpled, that the person inside was already gone.
I was not too late.
