Chapter 9: Maren Lough, Alone with Her Father's Ghost

The fire was the size of a fist.

Maren had built it that way deliberately—small enough that the heat signature would read as residual warmth on the thermal sensors rather than active camp, large enough to boil water in under eight minutes. She had tested this once, in her backyard in Tacoma, with a stopwatch and a camping store pot she'd bought secondhand and her father's old field guide propped open against a rock. She had been fourteen. She had been preparing for three years by then, though she hadn't told anyone, because telling anyone would have required explaining why, and the why was the one thing she had never been able to say in a way that didn't sound like grief.

She was not grieving. She was learning the mechanism.