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“She will be. She’s under lock and key.”

“I’m an aunt. I can’t wait to meet her children.”

I kiss the top of her head. “You focus on her and the kids; I’ll focus on killing Lochlan Murphy.”

She pulls back, looking up at me. “No. Other way around. After what Lochlan did to me, I get to be the one who kills him.”

I couldn’t be more in love with her. She’s strong and fierce, but also warm and nurturing. Everything I want in the mother of my children, and more.

“Okay. It’s all you, then.”

She kisses me again, then picks up her pack and puts it on. I close my pack and do the same. Once we both have our bandannas on, we head for the cave’s entrance.

When we step out into the light, ash particles are falling all around us like snow. It’s only going to get worse from here.

“I can’t feel anything,” Briar says, sounding relieved.

She hurries out of the rock formation, turning to smile at me. “Nothing! You did it.”

My small slice of her pain is gone, too. I just feel my connection to the rocks around us and beneath our feet, and a faint connection to a pack of wolves. They must be far away.

I still have a complicated mix of feelings for Dr. Randall McClain. But I’m grateful his idea worked on Briar. He thought highly of her, and I know he’d be glad we got some small measure of good from everything that’s happened: we have each other.

27

“I hereby order every jail and prison inmate in New America be sent to the front lines of the wildfire fight. We’ve fed and housed them long enough. It’s time for them to earn their keep.” – decree from New America President Soren Whitman

Amira

Yipping coyotes and hooting owls are serenading me tonight, the slice of normalcy grounding me.

Evander pushed himself hard, but he’s still healing, so he had to stop and rest. We’re spending the night in an abandoned barn, where I’m sitting with my back to a brittle bale of straw, him lying on his side with his head in my lap.

“You called me sunflower.” I rub my palm over his back, feeling his scars through his T-shirt.

He hums, surprised. “Did I? I noticed it when we passed a field of them a while back. Your eyes have all the shades of a sunflower. You’re also as impossible to look away from as they are.”

I stare at the barn’s closed doors, wishing we could open them. It’s a clear night and the stars are beautiful. It’s too cold, though.

“Did you know sunflower seeds grow into interlocking spirals that follow the Fibonacci sequence?” I ask.

“Not only didn’t I know that, but I don’t know what the Fibonacci sequence is.”

He’s got a hand on my knee. I wonder if he’s feeling like me—wound tighter but also more open and relaxed after our kiss.

I want so much more. But it’s nice not having to be beside him every minute and not knowing if he wants me as much as I want him.

“It’s a list of numbers where each one is the sum of the two numbers before it. It’s named after Leonardo of Pisa, an Italian mathematician.”

“Your mind amazes me. And your ability to remember things out of nowhere.”

My lips pull up in a small smile. “When I was growing up, books were my best friends. We went back and forth between Heliopolis and New York, and it was hard to have close friends.”

“I think you’re underselling yourself. I’ve read a lot of books, but I can’t remember things from them the way you do.”

We always talk about me, but I want to know more about him.

“What was it like being raised by your grandparents?”