Page 16 of Fated, Allegedly

"You've got that backwards, and you've had it backwards since you were nineteen and afraid of your own instincts," she says. "The bond didn't choose for you. It recognized. There's a difference, and if you don't believe me, look at what it recognized. She spent four hours today on a deer that will never thank her. She asked your father for a cheek swab and then asked what he'd want her to do with the result. Fate didn't build that. She did. Long before she ever came here."

I stand with a dish towel in my hand and I can't find one word.

"Tell her," my mother says. "Not tonight, not while she's still bruised. But soon, and honestly, and with the door left open. That's all any of us get."

Erin is on the dock that evening with a headlamp and a plastic tray, running a hand lens over the last core.

"The sheen's gone," she says without turning around. "Days out of the ground and it's just siltstone now. Which means it was a labile property, which means it was probably active, and I have absolutely nowhere to file that."

"You'll get there."

"I will." She shuts off the lamp. The reservoir is obsidian colored and gigantic and the sky's doing its full ridiculous business overhead. "Nash. I've been trying all day to work out why this place doesn't scare me and I think I've got it. Nobody here has asked me for a single thing. Not one. Not silence, not data, not gratitude." Her voice thins out. "Everywhere I have ever worked, came with an invoice. I keep waiting for yours."

"There isn't one."

"There's always one."

"Not here." I sit beside her, close enough that our shoulders touch, and I leave it at that. "There are some things I owe you an explanation for. About why I've been the person turning up ten seconds early since you arrived."

Erin doesn't move away. "Then tell me. When you're ready."

"Soon," I say. "I promise you soon."

11

ERIN

Wyatt bangs on my door in the early morning with a headlamp already on his forehead and the expression of a golden retriever who has found a body.

"Patrol's going out," he says. "Caleb says you can come if you can be ready in six minutes and if you promise not to fall in anything."

"What happened?"

"One of the drowned-timber families didn't answer the check-in last night. Two adults, one juvenile." His grin has fallen off. "That's never happened. They always answer."

I'm ready in five minutes, and we take the boat up the shore with the engine off for the last half mile, poling through the dead spruce with Caleb on the bow and Nash working the stern. Nobody talks. The drowned timber at this hour is the loneliest place I've ever been, dark water, gray snags, no birds, and the strange dampening of sound that comes when trees stand in six feet of water and refuse to fall over.

The lodge is on a hummock at the back of the bay. I didn't notice it was a lodge until Caleb pointed, and now I can't unsee it: a dome of woven willow and mud, four feet high, worked so cleanly into the bank that I've probably photographed it from a hundred yards and logged it as a beaver structure.

The entrance has been cut open. Not chewed. Cut, with a blade, top to bottom, and there's a semicircle of mud outside the opening pressed flat by knees. Two sets, somebody knelt here and worked. Nash goes in first, and comes out fast.

"Empty," he says. "All three."

I get down in the mud with my headlamp on red and go over the ground the only way I know how, in a grid, talking into my recorder. It takes twenty minutes to find a cable anchor screwed into a spruce root at water level and it makes me sick.

It's the same industrial cable as the yearling's snare. There's a hard plastic cap off a syringe, veterinary gauge, big enough for a large animal. There are two puncture wounds in the mud where a bipod stood. And forty feet away, snagged in a willow fork, there's a strip of dark webbing about the size of my palm, torn at one end, still faintly flexible.

"Nash." My voice comes out wrong. "This is a capture operation. Sedation, restraint, extraction to a boat. This is exactly how I'd take a bear out of a den if I wanted it alive and undamaged."

"How long?"

"Mud's still holding shape at the knee prints. Under twenty hours."

Caleb swears with real feeling. Wyatt has gone very quiet in a way I haven't seen from him before. We find the rest of it on the way back, because Nash stops the boat where there is nothing to stop for and puts his hand up.

"Smell that?"

I don't straight away, but then, faintly, I do: brine and diesel and cold rock, the exact signature that came off the ventilation cowl in the swale. It's coming out of the water.