Page 29 of Property of Prophet

Then I lie down, listen to the cabin hold its quiet around the three of us and let that be enough.

Chapter Ten

––––––––

Lily

The barometer is dropping.

Not slowly or the gentle, unremarkable fall of ordinary weather pressure. A full drop, the kind that makes my ears ache and sets Bear pacing before I’ve even crossed to the window. I tap the instrument twice with one finger, the way my father taught me, because you always tap it twice before you believe what it’s telling you. It doesn’t change. If anything, it drops another fraction while I watch.

I check the shortwave, write the numbers down, then check it again an hour later.

We have twelve hours, maybe less.

“We need to move,” I tell Prophet when he comes in from the water hole with the morning buckets. “Storm’s coming. Not a regular storm.”

He sets the buckets down and looks at me. He doesn’t ask how bad, doesn’t ask how I know. He says, “Tell me what you need.”

“Wood first. Then the generator. I need to check the transfer switch and the window seams before dark.”

He picks up the axe.

Twelve hours of hard work follow, the focused, particular kind that happens when two people have stopped negotiating about who does what and started moving in the same direction without talking about it. He carries eighty-pound loads of split rounds while I check the generator, oil level, fuel, the transfer switch, and the load capacity against what we’ll actually burn if something fails. He stacks inside exactly the way I showed him weeks ago, bark-side up, each course angled to shed melt, without being reminded. I check the windows, pushing rags into the gaps where the frames have shrunk in the cold and run my hand along every sill, looking for air movement.

I find air at the north-facing window above the table. I press the rag in tighter, and my hand stills for a second, because five years in this cabin, I have done this check alone every winter, kneeling on this same chair, pressing my palm against the same gap, and it has never felt like a thing that needed a second person. Now it does. Or I want it to, which is close enough to the same thing to be unsettling.

“Anything?” he asks, from behind me.

“Sorted.” I step down from the chair.

By the time the first real gust hits the north wall at noon, rattling the cabin down to its foundation, we have enough wood inside for four days and a generator with a full tank of fuel.

He stands at the window beside me and watches the world disappear.

“This normal?” he asks.

“For Alaska? Yes.” I watch the tree line vanish into white. “For you to still be here when it starts? No.”

Prophet doesn’t say anything to that. He watches the snow drive horizontally across the clearing, solid as a wall, until the clearing itself is gone, and there’s nothing outside the glass but white moving fast and the dark shapes of the nearest spruce, barely visible, bending hard under sustained eighty-mile-an-hour wind that makes the cabin flex and creak like a living thing.

Bear wedges himself against the stove and doesn’t move for the rest of the afternoon.

On the first evening, Prophet gets a lesson in cribbage because sitting in silence while the storm tries to dismantle the roof feels like a form of slow madness, and keeping my hands busy stops my thoughts from wandering places they shouldn’t.

“This doesn’t make sense,” he says, frowning at his hand of cards.

“It will.”

“You said that twenty minutes ago.”

“It took me longer than twenty minutes.”

He looks up from the cards. “Did it?”

“No,” I admit.

Something shifts at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile, but the shadow of where one might go if he decided to let it. He looks back down at the cards and starts to count. He gets it wrong on the first game, less wrong on the second, and on the third game, he wins by eleven and sits back with his arms folded and his face perfectly, infuriatingly composed.