Page 44 of Faultline

I turn my head enough to find his eyes. "Your property is north of here. And you're the biggest holdout in the valley."

He doesn't answer. He doesn't need to. His hand stays on my back, and the pressure doesn't ease.

I look at the standing timber, the untouched forest, the green canopy that Cascade protected while they reduced everything beneath it to carbon. The people who lived here built a life inside a landscape they thought they understood.

Cascade looked at the same landscape and saw a resource map. People in the way. Houses that didn't matter. Timber worth inventorying and a mountain with a price tag attached.

The timber stands. The mountain stands. Cascade just told Whitewater Junction exactly what it's willing to burn to get to what's underneath.

13

LIAM

The ash from the Anderson place is still on my boots when I park outside Agnes Croft's house the next morning. I didn't clean them. Don't think about it until I'm standing on her porch and the gray residue from someone else's life is ground into the treads beneath me.

Agnes lives in the house her husband built at the south end of town, set back from the road by a stand of paper birch. The place is small, white clapboard, maintained with stubborn precision, not a shingle out of place or a board unpainted. A single rocking chair faces the road, and the view from it covers the intersection, the post office, and the parking lot of the Ridgeline Café, which means Agnes Croft has been monitoring the social pulse of Whitewater Junction from this porch for decades.

The door opens before I knock. She's standing in the frame with a coffee cup in one hand and the expression of someone who expected me yesterday.

"Liam." She steps aside. "You look like you've been walking through trouble."

"I've been walking through ash."

"Same thing, around here." She leads me through the front room. The house is orderly in the way that very old, very disciplined people keep things, every surface holding exactly what belongs on it and nothing more. Photographs line the hallway. Her husband in Army dress. Jonah as a boy, gap-toothed and grinning on a dock with a fish bigger than his arm. A framed print of the original survey party, 1902, the same photograph that hangs in the community hall.

She gestures me into the kitchen. "Sit. Coffee's made."

I sit. The kitchen table is solid wood, scarred by decades of use, and the chair creaks under my weight with the comfortable protest of furniture that's held bigger men. Agnes pours a second cup and sets it in front of me. Black. She didn't ask.

"The Anderson fire," she says. It isn't a question.

"You heard."

"The whole valley heard. Carl's crew was on that road before midnight, and by sunrise every phone in town had rung twice." She sits across from me, lowering herself into the chair with care but no concession. Bones that demand respect. Will that refuses to grant it. "Professional job?"

"Professional enough that the wildland fire investigator recognized the signature."

Agnes's eyes sharpen. They're gray, pale as creek water in winter, and they carry the hard focus of eighty-some years of paying attention. "The Oakes boy. Brody."

"You know him?"

"I know everybody who works in this valley and most of their reasons for being here." Agnes sips her coffee. "That boy transferred in after losing two crew members in a fire outside Fairbanks. The kind of fire that's supposed to be natural and isn't. Volunteered for a posting nobody else wanted in a district nobody fights over." Her gaze settles on me. "He's here because he's running from Fairbanks. You're at my table because you're running toward something. Tell me what."

I set down the coffee. "I need the old records, Agnes. Territorial era. Anything about mineral surveys or mining claims in this section. Before statehood."

Agnes doesn't react immediately. She holds the cup between her hands and takes her time with the silence, the way she does with everything. Patient. Measuring.

"Why?" she asks.

"Because Cascade is paying above-market rates for land that isn't worth what they're offering. Because every deed they've acquired includes full subsurface rights. Because the corridor they're assembling runs from the highway to the ridgeline and my property sits in the middle of it, and no amount of timber is worth what they've already spent." I lean forward. "They're not buying the surface, Agnes. They're buying what's underneath."

She sets the cup down. The ceramic touches the table without sound.

"Come with me," she says.

She leads me down the hallway past the photographs, past a linen closet, to a door at the back of the house that opens onto a narrow staircase descending to a cellar. The steps are wooden, worn smooth in the centers, and Agnes takes them one at a time with her hand on the railing and her spine straight. I follow. The cellar is dry, insulated, lit by a single overhead bulb that Agnes pulls on with a cord.

The room is full of filing cabinets. Heavy, fireproof, the kind that government offices used before digital records turned filing into a metaphor. Four of them, standing shoulder to shoulder against the far wall, each drawer labeled in handwriting I don't recognize.