Rootbound Wanderers

The first time I saw him, I was up to my elbows in soil and the sky was falling apart.

Not literally. Not yet. But the barometric pressure had dropped like a stone in the last hour, and the anemometer was screaming. I'd been up on the ridge since dawn, digging root samples from the _Primula scotica_ that clung to the granite like it knew something the rest of the mountain didn't. The wind tasted of iron and ozone. A storm was coming, the kind that peeled roofs back and turned dirt roads to rivers.

I should have been packing my samples. Instead I was on my knees, fingers buried in cold earth, because this particular patch of primrose had anthocyanin levels I'd never seen before. The petals were almost black. I needed to know why.

The first fat drop hit my neck. Then another. Then the sky opened and the world went white.

I grabbed my gear and ran. The observatory was half a mile down the switchback, a domed silhouette against the bruised sky. I made it to the tree line before the hail started. Pea-sized at first, then marble-sized, bouncing off my pack and stinging my scalp. I pulled my collar up and kept moving.

That's when I saw the plume of smoke.

Not from the observatory. From the switchback below, where the road hairpins around the old mining shaft. Someone was down there. Someone with a vehicle that was very much on fire.

I should have kept walking. The storm was getting worse. The hail was coming down in sheets now, and I could barely see ten feet ahead. But I'd been alone up here for eight months. Eight months of silence, of talking to my notebook, of watching the seasons strip the mountain bare. The part of me that still remembered other people made the decision before the sensible part could stop it.

I found him standing twenty feet from a pickup truck that was very much not on fire anymore. The flames had mostly died, leaving a blackened skeleton that steamed in the rain. He was staring at it with his hands on his hips, water streaming off his hair and down his face, like he was having a conversation with the wreckage and losing.

I stopped at the edge of the clearing. The hail had softened to rain, but it was still coming down hard enough to soak through my jacket in seconds. He hadn't noticed me yet. I watched him kick the front tire. Hard. Then he said something I couldn't hear, but I could guess the shape of it.

"Need a phone?"

He spun around. Fast. His hand went to his back pocket before he stopped himself, and I caught the outline of something flat and rectangular. A wallet. Not a weapon. But the instinct was there.

He relaxed when he saw me. Slightly. His shoulders dropped maybe an inch. But his eyes kept moving, scanning the tree line, the road behind me, the sky above. Like he expected something else to be coming.

"Phone won't work up here," he said. His voice was rough, scraped raw by something. Maybe the smoke. Maybe not. "No signal for thirty miles."

"I know." I stepped closer. He was taller than me, lean, with the kind of hands that had fixed things. Broken things. His knuckles were split, fresh blood mixing with the rain. "I live up there. The dome. I've got a landline."

He looked at me then. Really looked. His eyes were dark, almost black in the grey light, and they moved over my face like he was reading something written there. I felt it in my chest. A pull. Like the ground had tilted and I hadn't noticed.

"Leo," he said.

"Celine."

He nodded. Didn't offer his hand. Didn't smile. Just looked at me with those dark eyes and let the rain run down his face.

"I'm not looking for trouble," he said.

"Trouble usually finds you anyway."

Something flickered in his expression. Surprise, maybe. Or recognition. Like I'd said something he'd been thinking himself.

"Yeah," he said. "It does."

The wind picked up, and I felt the temperature drop another five degrees. The storm was settling in. This wasn't a squall. This was a system, and it would be here for days.

"You can't stay here," I said. "The road's going to wash out. And that truck isn't going anywhere."

He glanced at the wreckage. The frame was still smoking, the cab gutted. Whatever had happened, it had been thorough.

"I wasn't planning on staying."

"Doesn't matter what you were planning." I felt the words leave my mouth before I could stop them. Eight months alone had eroded my politeness. "The storm's going to sit on top of this mountain for at least three days. Maybe four. You'll freeze if you try to walk out."

He looked at me. Long enough that I felt the rain on my skin, felt the cold seeping through my boots. Long enough that I started to wonder if I'd made a mistake.

Then he picked up the duffel bag at his feet. It was old, canvas, stained with things I didn't want to identify. He slung it over his shoulder and walked toward me.

"Lead the way."

I turned and started up the path. I could hear him behind me, his boots finding the same rocks I'd stepped on, matching my rhythm without trying. The rain kept falling. The sky kept darkening. And something in my chest kept pulling, pulling, pulling.

I didn't know yet that he'd come from somewhere else. Somewhere not here. Somewhere not now.

I didn't know that I'd been waiting for him my whole life without knowing it.

I just knew that when I looked back at him, water streaming off his jaw, eyes fixed on the path ahead, I didn't want him to leave.

And that was the most dangerous thing I'd felt in years.