The Sapphire Crew, Book 1
Backburn
She survived the burnover. Her new crew is not entirely human.
Sadie Quinn survived the burnover that killed her captain. Ray Delgado counted his crew past him on a Helena flank road and went back in for a seventh man who was already safe, and two seasons later Sadie is still the one left standing in the ash, doing the arithmetic. Now she has talked her way onto the Sapphire Hotshots, the best handcrew in Montana's Bitterroot, and she means to earn her place on the line and never miscount a fire again.
Superintendent Wyatt Kane is the man she has to convince: third generation on the crew, controlled, exact, impossible to read. And from her first week she keeps seeing things that do not add up. A sawyer's stitched cut sealed shut overnight. A green fir trunk one man drags clear of a trail like a chair. A grizzly's track pressed fresh into an ash bed her crew raked flat at noon. The Sapphires heal too fast, hear too much, and carry what no human crew should be able to carry, and the reason is a hundred and forty years older than the crew itself.