Page 14 of Smoky Lake

“To be honest, it’s probably easier to communicate with them than it is with you lot.” The older soldier shook his head in disgust.

Bear spoke up then. “How about you leave us a number to call if we see someone come for that Sentra?”

“We’ll take what we can get,” the older one muttered, and marched across to the bar, where he planted a business card on the scuffed wood.

“Either of you thirsty? It’s on the house, for your trouble.”

Please say no, please say no, Ani chanted internally. She didn’t trust herself not to burst out with a full confession if they stayed much longer.

You didn’t do anything wrong, she reminded herself yet again. Yes, you did. You hid information from members of the United States military. Was that a crime? She knew it was a crime to lie to the FBI, but what about soldiers in fatigues?

And what about the Posse Comitatus act? She vaguely remembered it from high school civics. It meant that the U.S. Military wasn’t allowed to operate on US soil. Why were these guys involved in whatever this was? Were there exceptions to that law? Or did it only apply to open warfare? As soon as she got a chance, she’d look it up. Maybe that would provide a clue as to what they were doing here.

Luckily, the soldiers passed on the offer of a drink, and a few moments later they disappeared into the bright sunshine outside the front door. Slack with relief, Ani dropped her forehead onto the bar and gave a moan.

“I am not cut out for this,” she murmured to Lila.

Lila patted her sympathetically on the shoulder. “Want me to call Charlie?”

Ani snorted with laughter, since if any of them had experience skirting the law, it was their own corporate Robin Hood, Charlie Santa Lucia. “That’s not a bad idea. Except she’s got enough to handle right now.”

She pulled out the piece of paper in her pocket. It had been ripped from a lined notebook and carelessly crumpled. Unfamiliar writing scrawled across it.

Ice castles in the sky. Bellsong loud, never stops. Skin melts. Everything red, everything dead.

That part was in black ink. In blue ink, at the bottom of the paper, were the words, Everything depends on Gil.

What in the world…?

She tucked the piece of paper back into her pocket. Every word of it was unsettling. Was it some kind of poem? Clues to a riddle? The only part that made sense was the line about Gil. Maybe he’d written that later, with a different pen.

He must have put it in her pocket without her realizing it. Or maybe he hadn’t even realized it. After all, if he’d wanted to send a message to Gil, he could have just told her what it was. Victor had been so out of it, who knew what he’d actually intended to do.

Except that in some way, he’d tried to reach out to her. He trusted her. He’d even asked Gil to protect her. Was she going to just go back to her life and ignore that? Her old life was over anyway. Time to try something different.

Decision made, she lifted her head off the bar. “No need for Charlie. I’ve got this.”

“You do? What are you going to do?” Lila asked as she picked up Ani’s empty soda glass.

“It’s safer for you if you don’t know,” Ani said mysteriously as she slid off the stool. “But I might be gone a couple of days. If you see Gunnar, tell him his car is in your parking lot and he can have it back.”

Lila’s mouth fell open. “Ani, what has gotten into you?”

“This is the new Ani. Get used to it.” With a sassy smile and a plan, Ani headed for the door. It felt good. She decided she liked this new version of “good-girl” Ani Devi.

7

A soft wind whispered through the ancient trees that clung to the shoreline of Smoky Lake. Tall spruce and hemlock, cottonwoods adding a lighter touch of green, the occasional slender birch tree, pale as a nymph playing in the forest. The echo of birds calling to each other across the lake added to the sense that this was a different world, one meant for wild creatures, not humans with all their noise and activity.

Smoky Lake extended from the Korch Glacier to a few miles from Firelight Ridge, a long meandering flow of glacial water that fed the local waterways. Near the glacier, hardly any vegetation grew along the lake, but farther south, woodlands had grown up along its shores.

That was where the Smoky Lake Research Institute was located, and where Gil was now steering a small ChrisCraft motorboat across the misty water. He stayed as close to the shore as he could manage, in the hopes that he wouldn’t catch anyone’s attention—though most likely, he was the only person out here. As far as he knew, only two structures still existed along the shores of Smoky Lake. It wasn’t the most sensible place to build a house, given that it was a glacial lake that froze in the winter and then flooded in the spring—jökulhlaup.

Gil knew more about jökulhlaup than he’d ever dreamed, thanks to his brother.

jökulhlaup didn’t happen every year; it depended on the conditions. For instance, this past spring there had been no jökulhlaup. For Lachlan, the non-occurrence of a jökulhlaup was just as interesting. How did the wildlife adapt to the unpredictable nature of a jökulhlaup? Or—even more interesting—did other lifeforms have a way to predict it? Did they sense temperature changes, snow accumulation, some chemical signal he hadn’t yet identified?

Gil steered around old steel posts sunk into the silt, peering through the murky water. They used to hold up a dock, but it had gotten destroyed over thirty years ago. A developer had wanted to take advantage of the pristine beauty of the setting, and had built the dock for unloading materials. Then an especially overwhelming jökulhlaup had hit.

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