She kept talking, telling Baba about the changes she was going to make to the house, about Stella's job, and even a bit about Rafe.

Sometime around her description of how they'd set up Lissa's old bedroom for Stella, Lissa noticed that Baba was gone, leaving a warmth behind, or maybe it was only the contrast to the sense of chill she brought.

Lissa wrapped up the doll and put it away.

She tied up her hair in a loose knot, glossed her lips, and went to the pub.

Thirteen.

JUNE 23.

FULL MOON.

The work was hard. He'd known that going in. He'd wanted it. But it was hard.

Nick's shovel stripped the skin from his right palm. His left hand, the one he shoved into the dirt a thousand times a day, had grains of dirt jammed up behind the fingernails. The sun raised crackling, bleeding burns on the tips of his ears and the nape of his neck. His boots blistered his feet raw. His planting bags, hanging from padded shoulder straps, rubbed welts into his thighs where they swung with his steps.

The roof of his mouth ached with dehydration until he learned to drink well before he felt thirsty. His right Achilles tendon seized up most mornings so that he fell on his first steps out of his tent as often as not.

"Aren't we supposed to have some kind of awesome healing powers?" Nick asked Gus, retaping his ankle with duct tape over his wool sock as they sat at the cache at the end of a day, waiting to be picked up by one of the crew ATVs.

"We do," she said. "Imagine how the regular people are feeling."

"I don't have to," Nick said. "I can hear them b.i.t.c.hing every night when I'm trying to sleep."

"Work harder," Gus said, completely unsympathetic. "Tire yourself out enough and you won't notice what anyone else is doing."

She stretched out her booted feet and cracked her back with a sigh of satisfaction. She wasn't in any better shape than Nick was-worse, probably, because as far as Nick could tell, she'd spent the last few years just hanging around getting drunk, not keeping up any kind of a regular fitness program. But she seemed fine with it, somehow. She meticulously bandaged any injuries that broke the skin and then covered them up with extra duct tape, but she didn't seem to care about anything else; she limped around like a drunken sailor for days after twisting her knee sliding down a trench, and she refused the foreman's offers to take her to town for an examination.

She was supposed to be some kind of role model for Nick, and sometimes he just wanted to smack her.

He leaned over and did just that, right upside the head, and then he laughed at the look she gave him.

"See?" Gus said. "If you were working harder, you'd be too tired to start s.h.i.t with me."

"Does that mean you're too tired to take it?" Nick said.

Gus pretended to think about it for a second, but Nick could see the grin starting on her face. She didn't even get all the way to her feet, just launched in and bowled Nick off his log seat. He got one arm mostly around her head and then half flipped her, only she grappled him along somehow so that they both rolled headlong into the rutted ATV track.

Nick spat out a mouthful of bark chips and roared out a laugh. He slammed Gus in the ribs with his knee, and she let go for a second, long enough for Nick to kip up and get into something more like a fighting stance. Then Gus was on him again, taking him right back down into the dirt.

"Our ride," Nick panted, grabbing Gus by the hair. "Quit it. I hear the ATV."

It was too late to pretend they hadn't been doing anything: the clear-cut offered long sight lines. Their foreman looked thunderous as he brought the ATV up to the cache. "We have a policy for this s.h.i.t," he said, glaring at Nick.

Nick glared right back. "f.u.c.k policy," he said.

"Sorry. We were just sparring," Gus said, her expression mildly apologetic but her hand pinching hard at Nick's backside. "We go to the same boxing gym at home."

"I don't care what kind of jujitsu you know. You don't speak to me that way," the foreman said to Nick, pointing. "Policies are there for a reason, and it's my job to keep you guys safe."

"Sorry," Nick bit out as Gus kept up the pressure. "Potty mouth, that's me."

"Oh?" the foreman said. "Well, try keeping a lid on it, or you'll be shipping out on the next town day. I don't want to pay workers' comp for some kind of bulls.h.i.t sporting injury, and I don't want to deal with any att.i.tude, either."

He dismounted from the ATV then to stow their shovels on the side rack, and while his back was turned, Gus wrapped her fingers around Nick's wrist and squeezed until Nick gasped. She didn't need to say anything. By the time the foreman looked back at them, Nick had his daypack on and his face as neutral as it was going to get.

Nick and Gus sat up on the back of the ATV, shoulder to shoulder, while the foreman stood up and steered over logs and slash and rutted mud. Gus looked over at Nick and mouthed, "Better?"

Nick nodded-of course he was going to say yes to that; he wasn't stupid-but he still felt angry energy p.r.i.c.kling over him, joining the chafe of dried sweat and the itch of mosquito bites. He looked back over his shoulder at today's work site.

They had not been able to fill in all the available trenches today, so they'd be coming back tomorrow, to the same depressing clear-cut bounded by depressing stands of scrubby, dense forest. Nick hadn't bothered to find out what kind of trees they even were, but there were another twenty-odd boxes of them waiting under a silver tarp for him and Gus to put in the ground.

He did feel a little better, he guessed, like he might be able to get to sleep after dinner. It was the later part of the nights that got bad, more often. He complained about the other workers, but it was even worse when they were all sleeping, when the wind dropped and the silence was the deepest and widest Nick had ever heard, hundreds of miles from the next closest human settlement, and the dark so heavy he couldn't tell whether his eyes were open or shut.

In those moments, he almost wanted to crawl out of his tent-f.u.c.k, out of his skin. Out of this wilderness and on to someplace different, someplace he'd never been.

JULY 14.

WAXING CRESCENT.

Smoke rode the prevailing wind to their camp, staining the sun dull red. By noon, all the tents were struck, the s.h.i.tters were filled in, and the radio pole lay lengthwise along the tree line. The cooks were disa.s.sembling the stoves on the patch of bare earth that had been the cook shack. Nick sat on his backpack, rolling a joint.

"Put that f.u.c.king thing away," Gus said without lifting her arm from over her eyes. She lay on the ground with her feet propped on her kit bag. "How d'you think these fires get started in the first place?"

"Everyone knows bears smoke in bed," Nick said, and he ran his tongue down the seam of the fragile paper. He tore a rectangle from the cover of the packet of Zig-Zags and rolled it into a cylinder to serve as a filter. Overhead, another water bomber roared by, slow and full, on its way to drop its quenching payload on the fire. Flights had been pa.s.sing all day: they looked like they held as much water as a swimming pool, Nick thought, but what was a swimming pool against the might of a fire that spanned a hundred hectares?

"-out of Pikangik.u.m," Gus was saying as the noise of the plane retreated. "I'd like to see that."

"Maybe we will."

"Nah," said one of the other crew members nearby. "They'll put us in a no-tell motel on the highway somewhere, and we'll spend all our f.u.c.king money at the peeler bar while we wait around."

"Or they'll draft us and give us p.i.s.s packs," said Gus.

"I vote for the motel," said the other guy.

"I dunno. Fighting fires sounds like fun," Nick said.

"Yeah, but you're hard-core," the other guy said with an eye roll. "Some of us actually like to relax."

"Hey, I like to relax," Nick said, holding up his joint.

"Whatever, dude."

"What do you mean, 'whatever'?" Nick demanded.

Gus reached over with the arm that wasn't covering her eyes and felt around until she got hold of his knee. "You are not f.u.c.king relaxed is what he meant," she said. "Sit tight. Once we get to the motel, you can smoke that thing and chill out."

Nick held the joint to his nose and inhaled the resinous scent of it. f.u.c.king fire ban. Who cared if the forest burned? People like him would just plant more of it.

He had that slip-sliding feeling that he wouldn't have felt that way before, but he had that feeling about a whole lot of things now, and why the h.e.l.l was Gus in his face all the time, anyway?

She was right up against him, blinking her bloodshot eyes a few inches from his own.

"Calm. Down." She breathed it against his ear and then backed off. "Nick, I feel like a peach. Do you feel like a peach?" She pulled her bowie knife from her boot and a peach from her daypack and started slicing, efficient sweeps of the blade through the thin skin.

Nick watched. She was right. He knew she was right. He just couldn't always keep the knowledge right up front where he needed it. He hypnotized himself on the motion of her hand. When she held out a slice on the blade of her knife, he took it in a grasp a bit too tight, and juice welled over his fingers where they bruised the flesh.

After another hour of waiting, the word came from the foremen: evacuation. Motel in town. They boarded the crew buses and rolled out, and Nick sat by a window with Gus between him and everyone else, and he turned his joint over and over in his fingers, waiting for the moment when he could set it alight.

It didn't come for hours. Hours of jouncing over pitted gravel roads, hours of vibrating out of his skin; but finally they were spilling off the bus, and Gus was inside getting them a room, and Nick could pace the perimeter of the parking lot until she told him where to go.

The motel room smelled of bleach and mildew. Nick stripped his filthy clothes, dumped them on the bathroom floor, and stood in the shower with his joint between his lips and a beer on the ledge of the tiny window.

"I'm going on a liquor run," Gus said from the other side of the shower curtain. "I'll pick you up some of that bourbon you like."

"Hurry it up," Nick said on an exhale of pot smoke. f.u.c.king finally.

"Don't do anything stupid," Gus said.

"Depends-do you think jerking off is stupid?" Nick said back, and he heard her snort of laughter before the bathroom door clicked shut.

He did that. He wasn't lying. He rubbed one out and then did it again, which was one of the more awesome things he'd discovered about his new nature. Got clean: scrubbed off the ground-in dirt of a long contract, four weeks marooned in the bush with only the rest of the crew for company. Ash caked over sweat and bug dope, salt crusted in his hair: all of it swirled down the drain, leaving a grubby ring in the tub. He finished his beer and padded dripping over the stained motel carpet to fetch another.

The shower went cold. Gus didn't come back.

Nick drank the third and final beer while pacing naked from one window to the other. It didn't take him very long. Gus had said to wait, but he got dressed instead in the cleanest things he still had-cargo pants and a wrinkled T-shirt from the bottom of his pack-and strode out to the motel balcony.

The air reeked of smoke, just as much as it had in their camp. He couldn't really see it, except in the red haze over the sun, but somehow, since his new nature had taken hold, scent had become important enough to him that it overrode his other senses. He could look at the late carmine sunset and see that it was pretty, but he could not ignore the smell of imminent harm. It fretted at the edges of his temper like blackfly bites.

He knocked on a few doors, looking for his crew. Someone shouted, "f.u.c.k off!" Someone else was having s.e.x. One door opened, and a girl he didn't like gave him a dizzy grin and asked if he wanted some mushroom tea.

He shook his head. "Seen Gus?"

"Your better half? Or are you the better half? Isn't she at the bar?" the girl said with that twist to her mouth that people always seemed to have when they were talking about Gus.

"Don't you f.u.c.king judge her," Nick said, fist clenching empty at his side as if he wasn't always judging Gus.

The girl laughed, not noticing his anger. Nick left her standing in the doorway and pounded down the iron stairs and across the parking lot to where a yellow-and-red plastic marquee advertised the One Spot, Liquor and Beer.

As he neared the door, he caught the scents of stale drink, trucker sweat, chips, and cigarettes, stronger and fouler for the weeks just spent in the bush, ash and all. He glanced back over his shoulder at the motel, and beyond it, the deep blue sky and the dark fringe of trees. That forest went on for more miles than Nick could imagine, broken only by logging roads, reservations, and bush camps, the ribbon of the Trans-Canada Highway and its string of lonely towns.

And the fire. The forest was broken by the fire. How many square miles now?

His feet, blistered and callused by weeks of work, still felt like running. He hesitated, on the brink of letting them.

Instead, he made them march up to the tavern door, and he made his hand reach out and open it, and inside the rank dimness he saw Gus, at the bar, palming matted hair out of her face and wrapping dirty fingers around a gla.s.s.

"I told you to wait," Gus said, her gaze flicking from Nick's wet hair to his clean shirt to his feet, which he'd left bare.

"I didn't feel like waiting," Nick said, hoping it didn't come out as hostile as he felt.

"Pull up a stool, then," Gus said. "I've got your bourbon in my pack, but they didn't have any of the stuff I like, so I stopped in for a refresher."

Knowing Gus, she probably meant two or three. Not that Nick could really blame her right now. She looked sad and old and kind of p.i.s.sed off, and if she felt half of what Nick did lately, she was a d.a.m.n saint for giving him the first shower and picking up bourbon, and he shouldn't complain about her taking a bit longer than he'd expected.

He still wanted to punch her in the face.

He slid up next to her, brandishing a fifty, all crumpled and warm from the pocket of his cargo pants, and even as his mouth watered for drink, he wondered once again how long he'd be able to keep on not leaving.

JULY 15.

WAXING CRESCENT.

Gus woke up with a sudden urgent kick, jerking her flannel shirt from around her head. It reeked of her own work sweat.

Her mouth tasted like bourbon. She smacked her lips together and threw off the motel coverlet. She could smell the water inside the pipes, chlorinated and stale. She turned it on cold and put her mouth to the tap.