Page 49 of Faultline

His jaw works once. Then he nods and heads for the truck.

I call Carl from the passenger seat while Liam takes the gravel road toward the staging area too fast for the headlights to keep up. The truck bounces through a rut hard enough to lift me off the seat, and I brace one hand on the dash while Carl's phone rings.

He answers groggy and alert in the same breath. Volunteer fire chiefs don't sleep the way other people sleep.

"Fire on the Stoddard property," I say. "Equipment shed and staging area. We're en route."

"How big?"

I look through the windshield. The glow above the tree line has widened since we left the cabin. "Getting bigger."

"I'm rolling. Fast as I can." He hangs up.

I call Rhys next. He answers on the first ring because Rhys never truly sleeps anymore. "Stoddard property. Structure fire. After everything that happened at the Andersons, I don't think this is coincidence."

The silence on the other end lasts exactly one beat. "On my way."

Liam rounds the last curve and the staging area opens up below us through the gap in the canopy, and what I see stops the air in my chest.

The equipment shed is gone. Fully involved, the walls collapsed inward, the roof sagging under the weight of its own destruction. Flames pour upward through the gaps in the tin and throw sparks into the canopy overhead.

The timber staging platform beside it is burning from both ends, the stacked lumber catching in a progression that moves too evenly to be accidental.

The pattern looks the same. Engineered containment. The same precision that turned the Anderson homestead into a demonstration.

Except the containment isn't holding.

The birch screen between the staging area and the cabin has caught. The lower trunks are wrapped in flame, the papery bark peeling and igniting in sheets that curl upward and throw burning fragments into the spruce beyond.

The fire is jumping from structure to forest, and the tree line north of the cabin is starting to glow at its base.

"It's spreading," I say. "The containment failed. The Anderson fire stayed inside its lines. This one didn't."

"I see it." Liam kills the engine and is out of the truck with the chainsaw before the tires stop. He doesn't run toward the shed. He runs toward the tree line.

"Of course you're running toward the fire," I say to the empty cab. "Of course you are."

I've seen men in crisis. I've sat across from people falling apart in real time, and I've learned to read the difference between panic and purpose.

Liam isn't falling apart. He's working a problem that has a solution, and the solution lives in the terrain he knows better than anyone alive.

He hits the tree line at the north edge where the fire hasn't reached yet and drops the chainsaw into a young spruce at chest height. The saw screams. The tree falls in the direction he planned, away from the cabin, and he's already stepping to the next one before the trunk settles. He cuts a second, a third, dropping them in a line that creates a gap between the burning birch and the unburned spruce.

A fuel break. He's cutting a fuel break by hand.

The fire keeps coming. The birch screen is fully involved now, and the heat pushes against me from across the clearing. Embers drift through the dark like inverse snowflakes, landing on everything that isn't already burning and testing it for weakness.

Liam works the saw with the economy of decades in the timber and years assessing terrain under fire. He's not thinking. He's executing. Every cut is placed to deny the fire fuel, to widen the gap between what's burning and what isn't.

The fire reaches the drainage culvert that runs below the service road. The dry brush in the culvert catches, and suddenly the flames have a highway running directly toward the cabin.

Liam sees it. He drops the chainsaw and sprints for the service road above the culvert. I lose him in the smoke.

A few seconds, maybe less, but each one stretches long enough to hold a lifetime I didn't know I was building.

Then he reappears at the road's edge with a shovel from the truck bed, driving the blade into the compacted gravel.

He's burying the culvert. Shoveling gravel from the road shoulder into the burning brush below, choking the fire's path with dirt and stone. The muscles in his back strain against the flannel as he works with a speed that turns the shovel into a weapon against the terrain itself.