She got off the Road King and stood beside it, and her hands were shaking very slightly, not from fear. She identified this carefully, but from the sustained adrenaline of 20 minutes of managed tension. She pressed her hands flat on the tank until they stopped. Silas came to stand beside her.

"He'll be back," she said. "Not tonight," he said. The AG call changes everything. He knows the referral has a number.

He knows the duty officer has his name. Anything he does before his lawyers know what he's facing is he's not rational right now. She said, "You know that a man who sent photographs of an old woman's tree to a target and wrote a note about fire is not running the same calculation that Harrow's lawyers are running." Silas was quiet. "He's going to do something personal," she said.

Something that doesn't run through Harrow the same way the envelope didn't. He's going to come at something that matters to me because that's the language he's been speaking since the beginning. Eleanor's house, Silas said. She looked at him.

You see, he's already been to the property, Silas said. He knows the layout. He knows the pecan tree. He knows what the house looks like at night.

He paused. He drove away from here, but he didn't drive toward anywhere that has a lawyer or a strategy. He drove south. The house is south.

She was already moving toward her truck. Silas said, Take Crane. There's no time. Take Crane, he said again. Not a request, not a command, either.

Something between them, the language they developed over weeks of building this thing together. A specific weight in two words. You're not driving out there alone. She looked at Crane, who was already picking up his helmet from the bench. I'm faster on the bike, Crane said.

"Then go," she said. He went. She was in the truck with the engine running before Crane had his Road Glide out of the bay, and she watched in the mirror as his headlight came on and swung toward the county road. And she pulled out after it, and the gravel road went under her fast, and the trees went past, and the county road opened up, and she hit it hard, going south with Crane's single headlight in her mirror, and the cold and the dark, and the 12 mi between the shop and Eleanor's house, unrolling ahead of her at a speed that was not safe, and that she did not moderate.

Her phone was on the seat. She picked it up, looked at it for a second, driving with one hand, and called Eleanor's number. It rang four times. Five.

Eleanor picked up on the sixth. Ria, are you in the shop room? Ria said. I'm in the shop room.

Eleanor said. Rex is outside the door. She exhaled. Stay there.

Don't open the door for anyone but me or Silas. All right, Eleanor said. And then, "Where are you going?" She looked at the road ahead. The headlights cut into the dark and the county road went straight and empty. and the 12 mi felt like a distance she needed to close in the next 60 seconds.

"Home," she said. She ended the call and pressed harder on the accelerator, and Crane's headlight stayed in her mirror, and the dark on either side of the road was total, and the cold was coming through every gap in the truck's weather stripping, and she drove. 7 mi out, she saw it. Not a vehicle, a light.

Orange and wrong in the specific way that orange light was always wrong at 2:00 in the morning. Not a porch light, not a street light, not anything that belonged in the dark in that place at that hour. She knew what it was before she knew what she was going to do about it. And both pieces of knowledge arrived at the same moment, the pecan tree.

The note had said, A fire doesn't care what it burns. She hit the radio on the truck's dash and found the channel she'd used for the perimeter shifts. Decker, she said. County Road South, 7 mi out. There's a fire at the property.

Call it in. Decker's voice came back immediately. Already seeing it on the county alert system. Fire department is being paged. How far out?

12 minutes minimum. 12 minutes. She was 3 minutes out at this speed. crane behind her, his road glide capable of more than her truck on a straight road, his headlight getting larger in the mirror as he pushed it. 2 minutes.

She could see it clearly now. Not the house, the tree, the old pecan at the side of the yard, the one Eleanor had touched on the way out, the one her grandfather had planted the year her mother was born, burning from its lower branches up, a clean, deliberate fire that had been started rather than found. The house behind it was dark. The house was not on fire.

And she understood that this was a message that was still in the process of being sent. Not to destroy, not yet, but to demonstrate capability. To show her what the next step looked like. She pulled into the driveway and before the truck stopped fully, she was out of it.

Door open, feet on the gravel her grandfather had laid, and the heat of the fire reached her from 40 ft away, and the smoke was in her eyes immediately, and she looked at the tree. her grandfather's tree, its branches moving with the fire's own convection, the bark blackening from the base. And she looked at the house, and the house was untouched. And she looked at the yard, and the yard was empty. Crane's Road Glide came in behind her truck, and he was off the bike in two movements and had a fire extinguisher from his saddle bag.

She registered this with the part of her brain that was still cataloging, and he was moving toward the tree. Then she heard the vehicle, not on the county road, from the back of the property. An engine starting, not a truck this time, something smaller, something that had been parked behind the house while the fire burned in the front yard, and the sound of it pulling away through the field behind the property, through the gap in the back fence that her grandfather had always meant to fix, going south through the field toward the far road.