Grifo zigzagged across our trail as Jem and I struck out towards the smoke. It would be a full day's hike, so we matched our paces and settled into a comfortable walk. Traveling with Jem was one thing that made me glad I was a head taller than either of my parents. Jem shared my lanky build, but he had inherited his father's height.

I kept my gaze forward, somehow even more aware of him beside me than I had been last time we'd scouted together. His dance request last night had upset my carefully stamped-out feelings, and I couldn't help but resent him for it. If there was one blessing in all this, it was the fact that we'd gotten past the moony-eyed teenage romance stage when we'd last dated properly, leaving the comfort of a long-term relationship in its stead.

Being with Jem was like slipping into a jacket worn to a perfect fit by years of familiarity. We had fought and made up time and time over; we knew how to talk and how to forgive. We knew each other's quirks and patterns inside out. He knew exactly how long I could go without food before I got cranky; I knew exactly how hot he liked his soup or tea. I knew he had a secret, irrational fear of ladybugs—he said they bit him—and he knew just how bad a shot I was with a bow and arrow. It was why I only ever hunted with a knife, trap, or sling.

We balanced each other. I acted fast; he thought things out. I could talk with Emma when she was moody or upset. He could do the same with anyone when I was too angry to do anything but keep my mouth shut. He could cook; I could trap. I could sew; he could scout. Technically we both had all those skills, but we'd taken to dividing duties according to our strengths after so many years of working as a team.

We stopped for lunch when our stomachs told us it was lunchtime. Jem had the food halfway out when Grifo's tail started wagging. Jem rubbed his forehead and closed his eyes. Neither of us had noticed.

"You can come out now," I said.

There was silence from the desert. I whacked Grifo's rear end, and he zoomed around a clump of brush. Emma squealed as she was ejected. Grifo grabbed her hat from the ground and held it, wagging, until she took it back from him.

"Do Rodolfo and Elías know you're here?" I said.

Her jaw jutted. "I left them a note. And I brought my own food."

"Emma, this isn't just a scouting trip. You should have stayed in the village."

"It was Fuego, right? That smoke?"

Jem's eyes met mine. We didn't know how much Emma had seen, and if she'd been following us undetected since the village, we didn't know how much she had heard, either.

"Look," I said. "This is going to be riskier than most of our scouting trips, and it'll fall on our heads if something happens to you. Take Grifo and go back to the village."

She sat down and crossed her arms. "I'm not a kid anymore."

"You're fourteen."

"Fifteen." She yanked on the string at her throat. Her Grillo Negro pendant clacked against the golden, turquoise-studded one she had been wearing when Elías found her as a baby. "And you don't want to send me alone with Grifo. There are coywolves around."

"I didn't see any tracks," said Jem.

Emma pointed east. "They're over that way, but they come here if they smell something. It's a full pack. Eight of them, and pups."

Jem looked skeptical. If there were ever coywolf dens around the village, he found them.

"That's why you never catch antelope here," said Emma. She dropped her pendants back under her jacket. "They're too scared. So, are you letting me come?"

The antelope part was true. I tried to suppress the mental image of Emma with a bunting on her hand, and failed epically. My intuition reluctantly told me she might be onto something.

Jem seemed to have come to the same conclusion. "Fine. But if we ever tell you to run, you run. And stay with Grifo."

"You got that?" I told the dog. "Guard her."

Grifo wagged and panted.

"I'm his favourite anyway," said Emma, petting my dog. "He guards me even if you don't tell him to."

"And yes, it was Fuego," said Jem. "So stay away from any roads. And if you see a person, keep your distance until we can confirm they're not infected."

Emma giggled and wrestled a stick away from Grifo.

"Emma," I said.

She gave an exaggerated eye-roll. "I know. Pappy's told me a million times."

"Good."

Jem had gone back to making lunch. He wordlessly offered us each a hot tamale when we finished bickering. He had picked his battles, and Emma wasn't one of them.

After eating, we had walked only another hundred paces when Jem found coywolf tracks. Eight adults and four half-grown pups.

Maybe having Emma along wasn't such a terrible idea.

Emma, fortunately, could keep up with Jem and I. By late afternoon, we were nearing our destination. Jem's hand whipped up, and we all crouched. Ahead of us was a road, its surface scorched and streaked with fissures. Even dirt roads had felt Fuego's wrath, a fact that made it decidedly harder to maintain the "miracle" theory around which targets the fire had picked. I shoved the thought away. Fire wasn't magic. I could deal with fire. And miracles did happen. Magic, on the other hand, was a myth, and could stay that way for all I cared.  

The burns on this road meant it was probably safe, but Jem still made us wait while he crept forwards alone. If one of us died and the other had to get Emma back to the village safely, I was a better bet. But Jem reached the road, then walked along it safely. He waved us over. We returned to the brush on the other side. Emma plucked a scorpion from her boot and tossed it away. I held out mine, and she relieved me of my passenger, too. Scorpions liked roadsides.

We moved at an angle that would take us around the smoke source while we got a handle on what had burned. We found another road headed in a different direction. The two would intersect in a wedge near the lingering haze where the fire had been.

"A town," murmured Jem.

A town, but not a recent one: the damage to the roads was old, and a fire on untouched buildings would have lasted longer than this one. A settlement must have sheltered here. I closed my eyes against a curl of nausea. Just this morning, there would have been people here. People who could walk and talk; who had survived a hundred years just like Grillo Negro had. We could have found them.

Or worse, we could have been them. Nobody knew where Fuego hid, to reappear so suddenly so many years after its rise. Had this settlement dug into the ground and unearthed it? Had they caught the wrong animal? Cut the wrong tree? Fuego didn't touch trees or any kind of plant, though most had died regardless in the cold after the burning. Maybe their dead wood harbored the disease.

"Whatever you do," said Jem, "Don't. Touch. Anything."

Emma swallowed hard. Her curls bobbed as she nodded.

We followed the road into the town. Crumbled buildings rose along its fringes. On one lot, an intact, once-living fence encircled a pile of rubble. The next house still stood, but its roof did not. The corrugated metal had curled into a roll that jutted from the cage of its walls like an upended burrito. Grifo jumped back from a bush as it snarled. The dislodged raccoon lumbered away. The house it vanished into looked like its top had exploded. Metal shafts as thick as my thumb rose where the walls had been and made curlicues in the air.

We found the remains of the settlement in the town square. Nothing was left but scorch marks. Jem paced the site grimly. Emma gave a cry. On the wall of a house washed clean by summer rain, a shadow remained. The silhouette of a human being, sooty and streaked at the edges. Emma breathed harder as she stared at it.

Jem caught her wrist, and we made an agreement without words. "Come," he said. "I'm going to look for tracks."

Emma's other hand found her pendants. She squeezed them and let Jem lead her away.

It was my job to finish the inspection. I held a hand over the burn shadow. Its residual heat warmed my palm. I left it and walked around the town square. I could identify where the tents had been: their clean-swept floors and the divots their poles had left were still visible. Not to mention that each was a black patch the size of the tent that had once stood on it. I stepped back and counted them. The tents were big. Family-sized. I added one child for each medium soot-stain and two for each large one, and came up with a hundred people, even a hundred twenty... twice as many as Grillo Negro had dwindled to. I didn't need more encouragement to hate Fuego, but the fact that it had robbed the world and me of such a sizeable population made my gut burn.

There was nothing in the town center, so I left it and began to walk among the ruined houses. The prize here was any sign of where Fuego might have hidden. It hit fast, so the reservoir would have to be close. Something organic; anything human-made would have burned. I could imagine a chopped tree or a hole in the ground, or even an animal. Animals could carry disease.

The town was frustratingly pristine, though. I walked in wider and wider circles, until I was far enough to start finding dirt heaps that marked where people had done their private business in the scrub. None had traces of fire. Could someone have contracted the disease and run back to the town? The thought made my stomach twist almost painfully. What a horrible last act. If they felt the fire coming, the least they could have done was run the other way.

I was far from the town now. Jem and Emma would cover this ground, so I walked back to search the settlement's remains a second time. My mind painted imaginary tents around me as I stopped where the central cookfires would have been. It had been sickening to imagine the aftermath of Fuego, but now that I was here, I felt strangely calm. Maybe it would have hit me harder if there had been anything left: an empty tent or a blackened mortar. Or bones. But if I hadn't seen the smoke myself, you could have convinced me that people hadn't set foot here in a hundred years.

I turned and found myself staring at a turkey.

It stood immobile in the middle of the square, watching me with white eyes. As my hand went to my knife, it vanished in a puff of smoke.

"Jem, run!" I screamed.

Fuego hit me like a gust of hot air. Heat curled up from the bottom of my lungs, tasting like ash and crackling like oiled firewood. I fell to my knees as it intensified. It spread down into my stomach and up my throat, searing me, strangling me. I couldn't breathe. God above, please let Jem have heard my warning. Into my shoulders, down my arms. I couldn't breathe! A half-formed thought struck me. I gripped the ground as I fell forwards. If I kept my hands down, I could keep in the fire until I went up in flames. The burning roared hotter with every breath.

The thunder of my heart doubled as footsteps sprinted towards me. No. She was supposed to run.

"Adi, give me your hands!"

"Run!"

"Now!"

Something yanked them out from under me. Emma's fingers danced around my wrist, grabbed my other wrist and traced that, too. The burning vanished. Emma shouted for someone, and I saw Jem running towards us as I crashed to the ground. The world curled up and flung itself into darkness.