Page 23 of Fated, Allegedly

"Noted."

She props up on an elbow. The blanket goes with her, mostly. "Here's what I want to say before we're out that door. Whatever this is now, you didn't get it for free and neither did I. We're past fate, Nash. Fate got us in the same room in April. Everything since has been ours."

My hand is flat on her back and I hold her there.

"I've waited years to hear somebody say that."

"You waited four weeks. Don't be dramatic."

"I was dramatic long before you got here."

She laughs into my collarbone, and for about four minutes the world is a shack and a stove and nothing else.

Then Caleb's voice comes up the drainage, calling my name from a hundred yards out, which is a courtesy and also a warning, and by his tone I know before he reaches the door.

He's been running all night. His hands are cut. He stands on the step and doesn't come in.

"Bracken's gone," he says. "Nash, burned out, three in the morning. Loon River hit at the same hour, and somebody put a cordon on the Marrow Creek road and started taking vehicles apart. Same clock, three sites, ninety miles between them."

Erin's already pulling her boots on. I feel the floor of my life shift and settle into new ground.

"That's not security anymore," I say. "That's a campaign."

15

ERIN

The evacuation runs on paper, and nobody in this valley has ever needed paper before. That's how I end up on the tailgate of my truck at dawn with a clipboard and Isla beside me, building the first census the Stillwater Pack has ever written down. The Bracken families come in on a hay truck at seven. Marrow Creek starts arriving in ones and twos on foot by nine, because their road has a cordon on it and they've walked out over the ridge at night.

"Names, ages, and who you came with," I tell Isla. "Then the missing list, with last known location. That one gets harder to build every hour we wait, so we do it first."

"They won't like being counted."

"They'll like being fed. I can't feed people I can't count."

She catches on fast and starts writing in her teacher's handwriting while I do the math on an envelope. Grace reiterates how much a wolf eats in a day. There are a hundred and thirty-nine people in this valley by noon. I take the numbers to Owen and watch his face do the same math mine did.

"Nine days for sixty-one," he says. "Four for this. Three if it turns cold."

He doesn't argue and he doesn't reassure me. He takes the truck keys, drives two counties out to a farm supply where nobody knows his face, and comes back at midnight with rice and flour and eleven hundred pounds of dog food that I am told, firmly, we do not discuss.

The next afternoon, at two Caleb takes wolves back over the ridge to Marrow Creek, and I finally understand what I'm living among.

There are still people trapped behind that cordon. None of them are Stillwater. Four are from a family that hasn't spoken to this pack since a fight over water rights in 1948, and Hazel confirms this while knitting, with relish. Nash lays out the run in the yard, approach, timing, the two places where it goes wrong, and then he says the part that stops my heart.

"Anybody who doesn't want this one, step back now. No shame in it. There's men on that road with rifles and dogs."

Nobody steps back. Not one.

They come home at four the next morning with fourteen strangers and Wyatt with a dog bite through his calf, and the first thing Wyatt says, lying on Grace's table while she flushes the wound, is "Did we get the grandmother? Somebody tell me we got the grandmother."

I stand in the doorway with my clipboard and I don't trust my voice at all. Amelia calls at seven and I take it out by the woodpile.

"There's a post," she says. "Great Lakes station, deputy lead on whitefish recovery, three years funded, September start. They asked for you by name, Erin. This is the ladder back. This is the exact thing you've been clawing for since the grant went under."

"How long do I have?"

"They'd have taken yes yesterday. I bought you two weeks." Her voice drops out of its usual gear. "Whatever's happening out there, take the win and come back inside."