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"Casserole," I agree, equally faintly, and neither of us explains our own code word, and that's when his jacket makes the three ascending tones. Twice.

Not a channel test.

I watch him take it. I've gotten good at reading the calls now — the marina consults, the case-group check-ins, Ferro's daily — and I know before he says a word that this is none of them. His shoulders square off. His voice drops to the register that moves furniture. "How many structures? ... Occupied? ... No, I know the complex. Tell Alden I'm rolling."

He ends the call and stands there for one second with his eyes shut, and I already hate whatever he's about to say.

"There's a fire in a storage complex outside Margaretville. Three units up, wind pushing it at the neighboring buildings, and the county investigator's asking for me because—" the flat voice snags, just barely, "—the origin pattern looks like ours. Bigger. He's gone bigger, and it's twenty-six miles from your barn, Sloane, so this is the good version⁠—"

"Go." I'm already pushing his kit bag into his hands, already doing the math I'll be doing all night: eight days to launch, our guy graduating, twenty-six miles. "GO. Catch him. That's the whole plan now, right? He's out there showing off for you⁠—"

"Ferro's rotation still runs here tonight. Cameras are live, gate list is with Danielle, you keep your phone⁠—"

"ON. Yes. Loud. I promise. Brady—" and he stops, half-turned, framed in my barn door exactly the way he was three weeks ago, backlit, except now everything about it hurts in the opposite direction. He comes back and kisses me — fast, fierce, absolutely non-compliant with the flannel protocol, Danielle and two customers right there, and I could not possibly care less.

"Back before the launch," he says, forehead to mine. "That's a deliverable."

"You've never missed one. You told me so. Extremely smugly."

"Text me when you lock up."

And then he's gone, truck spraying gravel, taillights toward Margaretville and the smoke I can almost imagine on the ridgeline, and I stand in my doorway with Danielle at my shoulder and the pass certificate glowing on the tablet and my heart in two counties.

I lock up at eight. I text him. Locked. Cameras on. Deputies fed and candled. Come home.

It's eleven forty before my phone buzzes back, and it's a photo — floodlights, a blackened wall of storage units steaming behind caution tape — and three words that keep me staring at the ceiling until two:

I put the phone face-down on the quilt. I pick it back up. I read it again, like the words might have improved.

Wick relocates from the foot of the bed to my sternum, nine pounds of deadweight conviction, and stares at me until I put the phone on the nightstand.

"He's twenty-six miles away," I tell him. "The cameras are green. The rotation logged at midnight. The man texts like a security bulletin, and I have never been so in love with anyone in my life."

Wick purrs like a small engine, unbothered, and eventually I sleep, and I dream of nothing at all, which the next week will make feel like a luxury I didn't appreciate.

It's him. Hunting.

Chapter 13

Brady

Hunting is the right word, and for three days, so am I.

The Margaretville scene gives us more than the other six combined, because bigger means sloppier. He used more fuel this time — a gallon at least, poured along the base of three units — and volume is confidence, and confidence is fingerprints, figuratively and then, on the second day, literally: a partial on a fuel can dumped in a culvert half a mile downwind, wiped fast but not well. The can's a brand sold at two stores in the county. The boot tread in the culvert mud matches the trailhead. Matches Sloane's north fence.

I sleep four hours in seventy-two, in a motel that smells like 1987, and I work the thing the way I told her patterns work: as a question asked enough times.

Who gets to a fire scene without being questioned? Who watches, every time, from inside the tape line where nobody looks — because everybody's looking out at the crowd?

Sloane and I talk every night at eleven, me flat on a motel bed with the case file fanned across the other pillow, her in her kitchen with Wick auditing the call from the refrigerator. She gives me the launch reports — wristbands rectified, Wes arriving Wednesday, Bev's sister requesting "a meet and greet with the musk man," absolutely not — and I give her the sanitized case, and then somewhere around 11:20 the business of the day runs out and it's just us, two hours apart, breathing into phones like teenagers.

"Say the thing," she demanded, the second night. "The thing you say instead of goodnight. The perimeter thing."

"Cameras green. Rotation logged. Doors locked?"

"Doors locked," she said, and I could hear the smile arrive. "God help me, it works better than poetry. Goodnight, mountain man. Catch him fast and come home."

Home. She deployed the word like it was nothing. That night I lay awake in a room that smelled like 1987 and handled the word like evidence — turned it over, photographed it from every angle, filed it somewhere it wouldn't stop mattering.