Free The Wildfire Season by Andrew Pyper

Miles has chosen to live on the outside of things.
    ‘Momma! He’s following me!’ Rachel shrieks, walking backwards down the hall with Stump wagging after her.
    ‘He sure is,’ Alex says, pulling away from the window to study the dining-room table next to it. A plate smeared with egg yolk, three half-filled coffee mugs, and at the opposite end, a chess board with a game laid out over its squares.
    ‘Who are you playing?’ she asks, picking up the white queen by her crown.
    ‘My mother.’
    ‘She lives here?’
    ‘No. She doesn’t know that I’m here either.’
    ‘You don’t visit?’
    Alex places the queen down on the board again. There’s a darkness under her eyes now that Miles remembers, clouds gathering over the crest of her cheekbones.
    ‘I went down there once a couple years ago. It wasn’t very—’ He stops, shrugs. ‘I just think it’s better if I stay up here.’
    Miles tries at a laugh but nothing comes out, so that there is only his opened throat for Alex to look down.
    ‘How do you play?’ she says.
    ‘She sends me a postcard with her move on it,and then I send my move back to her. It’s slow, but you can really think out the options. I’ve given her a post office box number in Whitehorse and they forward them up to me. There’s less to worry about if nobody…’
    ‘If nobody knows where you are.’
    Miles nods.
    ‘The postcards are almost as fun as the game,’ he says, sensing that it’s better to speak than not. ‘It’s not easy finding something new in Ross River, once you’ve gone through the dog sled team and northern lights photos, and then the cards you can get anywhere on the planet, the bikini babes and the joke Yukon at Nights. I’ve been forced to make some of my own.’
    ‘Your own postcards?’
    ‘Cut and paste. A photo of George Bush’s head on top of Stump’s body. The Welcome Inn with a Royal York letterhead underneath it. Arts and crafts.’
    ‘You make your own postcards ?’
    Miles can see that Alex is about to cry, and while he doesn’t feel any particular sadness at the moment, he is more intensely humiliated than he can recall. Once more the smell of last night’s moose steak reaches him and he is sure he cannot meet Alex’s eyes again so long as the two of them remain in this room.
    ‘The winters are long,’ he says.
    Rachel is in the kitchen, opening and closing drawers that Miles knows contain little aside fromrolling mouse turds. As she moves, Stump follows her, tapping his nails over the linoleum.
    ‘Honey? It’s time to go,’ Alex calls to her.
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Just come here.’
    Rachel trots into the living room and clasps her arms around Alex’s legs, the dog plopping down in front, so that the three of them form an instant portrait.
    Halfway through the current breath he is inhaling, Miles feels a wave of fatigue so great he thinks he might fall before he gets a chance to breathe again.
    ‘You’re going to need a place to stay,’ he manages.
    ‘One with a shower would be nice.’
    ‘The Welcome Inn’s the only place for fifty miles. Talk to Bonnie.’
    ‘And tell her Miles sent us?’
    ‘If you want. But it won’t bring the rates down any.’
    For Miles, the room is now a sickening carousel, rotating slowly, unstoppably, the different shades of brown carpet, furniture and panelling smearing together. He throws a hand out and finds the dining-room chair that his chess opponent would sit in if she were present.
    ‘You have to go now,’ he says.
    The idea of having to bend and slap the cheeks of a passed-out Miles on the floor of his dingy cabin makes Alex turn her back to him. She takesRachel by the hand and strides out the cabin’s open front door.
    Even now, the solstice sun has not wholly surrendered to the night, so that the trees are cloaked figures against the sky. Alex has the strange sensation of being at once here and not here. Ross River. A name like a hundred others she has passed on signs hammered into the soil