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Jodie took the paper and forced herself back into the work. “What’ve we got?”

“Confirming that sixteen in that last group. Three mares with foals. One stallion.”

Jodie ticked the sixteen off against the morning’s hundred and seven on her master list, then glanced toward the sorting pens. With the observation area pushed farther back, she couldn’t see nearly as much as she had yesterday. Half the time she was relying on radio reports and whichever volunteer had managed to catch a marking before a horse disappeared into the mix.

The wind gusted and the map snapped hard against the table beneath her hands.

Jodie grabbed for it just as another gust slammed through the holding area. Dust blew sideways. Her hair whipped across her face, and somewhere behind her an empty feed tub went tumbling across the ground.

The horses reacted all at once.

Two hundred heads came up. Several animals crowded away from the western fence, setting off another wave behind them until bodies pressed and shifted through the pens. Jet screamed from the stallion enclosure.

“Oh, shit.”

Jodie grabbed the loose papers before the wind could take them and shoved them beneath the clipboard. The wind came up again and the smoke changed direction. For most of the morning the smoke had hung over the Basin, thick and miserable but almost motionless. Now it streamed past them, thick enough to erase the hills beyond the pens.

It doesn’t come on gradually.

Across the staging area, Harold had already raised his radio. Dana came around the side of an agency truck with hers pressed to one ear. She shouted something, listened, then turned toward Harold. Whatever she said made him look west.

They know it’s coming.

The panels rattled. The horses surged again.

Goblin came out from under the table and stood against her leg, nose up, working the air.

Jodie looked toward the road, searching automatically for Mac, but he was somewhere between Hank’s and Virgil’s, checking trailers and access. She wanted him here with an intensity that surprised her.

You saw him an hour ago and he was fine.

Harold raised his voice over the wind.

“Everybody listen up!”

People stopped where they were.

“We’ve been moved to pre-evacuation. Fire behavior has increased and the eastern flank is moving faster than projected.” He waited as another radio transmission crackled through. “Gather operations are suspended effective immediately.”

A bitter laugh almost escaped Jodie. How generous.

“Nobody starts moving animals on their own,” Harold continued. “BLM and incident command are coordinating transport and destinations now. The horses stay under Bureau control until they’re assigned to a load. Volunteers, stay out of the way.”

There it was. The problem she’d been staring at since sunrise had officially become an emergency.

Two hundred horses.

Willow looked toward the temporary holding pens. “Do they even have enough trailers?”

“No,” Jodie said. She didn’t have to check.

“So they’re all fucked.”

A truck horn sounded somewhere behind them. There had been vehicles coming and going all morning—agency trucks, feed deliveries, people moving between Hank’s and Virgil’s.

But then another horn answered. Willow turned. Jodie followed her gaze.

A line of trucks appeared through the smoke on the access road. For one ridiculous second, her chest hurt.