1. Bleeding Hearts

ONE

Bleeding Hearts

S unlight fluttered through the swaying trees. Pine needles crunched underfoot, still slightly green from late spring, rather than the golden path that nature would lay in the fall. The breeze rustled Luca's white-and-purple flannel, rolled up over thick forearms and hugging his beefy biceps like a soft blanket.

He adjusted his ancient hiking pack and breathed deep on the heady scent of the woods—earthy and sweet and almost cool from the conifers.

There was nowhere in the world more beautiful than the Pacific Northwest.

In pictures he'd seen of the great parks of California—Pinnacles and Joshua Tree and Sequoia—there always seemed a tension in the air. Green, yes, but with a sweep of sand ever looming. Deeply colored canopies covered grass that was already halfway to hay. The rivers seemed like reliefs in the landscape, rather than assumed features.

But the woods of Washington State were totally different. Because every leaf and fern and blade of grass was lush .

From the trail head, streams cascaded over shaded rocks. Birds twittered and leaves rustled. The whole woods felt like somewhere you could willingly lose yourself in. Where you could live an idyllic life in a little cabin, with your own little garden and own little world.

With a skip in his step, Luca set off. The smile across his round and bearded cheeks was as bright as the morning sun.

Because this great, green wonderland was his home for the next three months. And these majestic woods were the perfect spot to start his adventure as a journalist.

It was six minutes into the hike when Luca realized his mistake.

Every pore on his body was sobbing—running in rivers along strong brows and soft whiskers, before meeting at his neck and forming two waterfalls down his stocky chest and gym-broadened back. The front of his pink undershirt was sticking and see-through over his full belly, showing the outline of his treasure trail. His socks were already damp with a mix of thigh and ball sweat.

He sucked in buckets of fresh mountain air. Embarrassingly, it wasn't even that hot. The prior winter had laid a heavy snowpack across the mountains, leading to a vibrant and pleasant spring. Summer was still four days away and was also expected to be mild—perfect conditions for a rookie season as a fire watch.

If I ever make it.

It wasn't that Luca was unfamiliar with the outdoors. Far from it. He'd grown up in Lynden, Washington, a town of fifteen thousand people a few miles from the Canadian border. That had involved way more days in the woods than glued to some video game console—like so many of his old college friends.

As a child, he'd camped plenty with his family and knew his way around these kinds of woods. He could build a fire from scratch and cast a mean fly fishing line. He could navigate roughly by the sun and stars. He could tell if water was drinkable and what to do if you got cornered by a grizzly bear.

Cry and crap yourself, mostly.

However, it was equally true that the last five years living in Seattle had involved a bigger focus on keg-stands and computer screens than fifteen-hour hikes to remote fire watch towers. And whatever cardio he'd honed as a child had been replaced with late-night pizzas and just enough weights to look poundable in a jockstrap.

And the worst part? He had to keep going. There was literally no other option.

His parents were long gone from where they'd dropped him off. He'd lost phone reception miles before the hike even began. There was no one else on the whole trail. And he hadn't even packed a tent.

We'll provide the food and shelter, but you'll have to hike everything else in , Sandy had said. So don't waste space with overnight gear.

Luca mopped his brow with the brim of his cap, flicking open the waterproof trail map. The path now traveled seemed impossibly short, and the path beyond seemed impossibly long.

But if he wanted to reach Bleeding Heart Tower before sunset, he had to push through.

Mount Masters was 14,410 feet in elevation. And Luca's ratty old hiking boots had trodden every single one of them.

A sliver of dusk remained when he crested the final ridge, enough to brush the horizon orange but too late in the day to give shadows to the trees.

It wasn't a warm welcome—with lights lit and loved ones waiting on the porch. In fact, it was only the dark silhouette of something building-shaped that gave it away. That, and for the first time all day, there was no more up left to go.

After a few more vacant trudges, the climb was over. Luca at last kicked into something man-made—his reward for reaching the end of the long and arduous trek.

It was a set of stairs.

"For fuck's sake!" he barked into the now-moonlit sky, his voice echoing down the mountain.

It was a slight overreaction, given there was a grand total of four steps to the wraparound porch. Unlike most fire watch towers, Bleeding Heart wasn't elevated on three stories of winding scaffolding. It didn't need to be. Apparently, the tower was the tallest point for thirty miles.

Not that he could tell that now . In this light, all he could see was the pale shade of the lockless and well-oiled door.

The smell of old attics greeted him, still and surprisingly warm. The only light was a tiny green speck on the far side of the single room.

He dumped his pack with a contemptuous thud, the padding sticking against saturated wool, and staggered toward the little bulb.

The switch for the solar panels ?

Just as he was leaning down to figure out the answer, the tiny light blared into deafening sound.

"Control to Bleeding Heart, do you copy?"

Once his heart had settled, he groped for the radio receiver, a sturdy, fist-sized microphone on one of those long and curly wires. "God, Sandy! You scared me half to death!"

"Hello, my little hiking buddy! I've been radioing in for the last hour. Glad you made it in one piece."

"Barely."

"That's the spirit!" There came the rustling of paper over the speaker. "Now, just a few questions before you settle in. Did you get bitten by a snake?"

"What? No. Why?"

"Any crippling heatstroke or hypothermia?"

"Not that I'm aware of."

"And did you projectile vomit or crap yourself at any point from eating poisonous berries or drinking fouled water?"

"This . . . can't be a standard checklist?"

"Nope, just tallying up the wagers from the control room."

Luca stared at the dark microphone. "You took bets on whether I'd get injured?"

"Of course not! That'd be super inappropriate," she said, alongside the sound of coins being clanged. "And welcome aboard! What do you think of your new digs?"

He looked around, his eyes struggling to stay open. He was exhausted, and thirsty, and sore, and overwhelmed. There was a single shard of moonlight creeping through the open door, but that was it. "It's pitch black in here."

"That'll be the boards. It stops the birds flying into the glass over spring."

"Is there a light switch in this place? "

"I assume so."

Luca waited for an answer that never came. " Where, Sandy?"

"How should I know? You're the one standing there."

Luca rubbed his face with one hand and reached blindly for the wall with another.

He yelped at the near-immediate jab of some kind of spike.

A rogue corkboard pin?

A stray splinter?

It was impossible to tell.

And you know what? It didn't matter. Because the only point in finding a light would be staying awake. And right now, none of his limbs would support that plan.

With every step of the mountain now weighing on his eyelids, Luca mumbled a farewell to Sandy, staggered around until he found something bed shaped in the gloom, and was asleep before his head hit the pillow.

Luca woke to something that was so close to perfect.

The face was furry. Salt and pepper—or more accurately, cinnamon sugar , given it was mostly red. The eyes were golden brown, like sparkling topaz. And the gaze suggested a beast who wanted to leap on top of Luca and start nibbling.

Unfortunately, the sunlight through the still-open doorway wasn't backlighting a ravenous daddy searching for some pre-breakfast fun, but a curious-looking fox —its little paws resting on the pillow besides Luca's chin.

"Bah!"

The scream was more in shock than to shoo. Still, the latter was the effect, leaving a scurrying blur and eight tiny tears in the bedding.

Luca slammed the only door in the tower, peering suspiciously through the gaps between boards.

The fox was gingerbread brown, mottled dark gray and white in places, with black fur around the paws and in a single splotch on its neck. It had a thick tail that a socialite would've killed for.

And he could've sworn that the fox cocked its head in confusion before scurrying off.

Luca turned. It was dark as hell inside the tower, save the little beams of gold that crisscrossed the gaps in the boarded-up windows, catching dust motes in the morning air.

Still, it was just enough to see the vague outline of a light switch by the door. And the spike of the wall-hung fireman's axe he'd inadvertently high-fived in the dark.

A pleasingly mechanical click later, and his new home was revealed.

The fifteen-foot studio room was small but surprisingly neat— surprising because he'd assumed any building inhabited by a rotating cast of misfits for almost a hundred years would've accumulated its fair share of crap. And there was some of that, like the little bookcase that either had thirty unrelated owners, or one owner with really varied tastes. It wasn't every day you saw classics like Lady Chatterley's Lover and The Art of War next to a recent thriller like The Da Vinci Code .

But apart from that, it all felt pretty cohesive—like a rustic college dorm. Old posters of rock and folk musicians were taped between the ceiling and the 360-degree windows. In the middle of the space was a rib-tall stand with a circular map of the area. There was a desk against one wall, with a gorgeous antique typewriter, furthering his assumption that only mad creatives would take this job. Even bigger was the radio next to it, with so many dials and numbers and frequency meters that it made Luca's head spin.

And that was pretty much it. Apart from a few home basics like a fridge, small gas burner, sink, shelves for food, and the unexpectedly comfortable double bed, there wasn't any space to have anything else.

Well, I guess I should get the boards off?

Luca opened the door, but only made it as far as the porch before freezing. The morning breeze swept cool against his gaping mouth.

"Holy hell . . ."

It wasn't the green and pink across the railing that took his breath away—the bleeding heart flowers that the tower took its name from. Or the crate of helicopter-dropped rations that he'd somehow missed last night, wrapped in waterproof tarpaulin and roped up a few dozen yards away.

What captured his attention was the view .

Green and blue were the first words that came to mind.

The green below was so vast and so varied that the only obstacle to infinity was the tower itself. There was no other man-made object anywhere in the mountainous distance. Not an electricity tower. Not an outpost. Nothing but ancient pine trees and deep valleys and gray-granite peaks beyond—still speckled white in places, despite how close they were to summer.

The blue above was so broad and so sweeping that Luca felt that he was swimming among the clouds. Like he could reach up and pluck them from the heavens, eating them like ozone cotton candy.

And yet, the branching paths from the tower were sloped surprisingly gently—promising birdsong and crunching leaves and all the incredible smells of summer.

Luca drank it all in, not just the scenery but the serenity . The clouds moved slow. The trees swayed gently. The breeze was calm. And not a single feature in the expanse suggested speed or stress.

He walked his hermit kingdom in disbelief, the ankle-deep grass warm from the sun and clicking with insects.

Beyond the tower was a long drop toilet on the eastern side, sun bleached and mischievously doorless, facing what had to be the most epic sunrise in the whole state.

On the north was the water tank, full to brimming after a wet spring. It had a shower attachment on the side, also open air. It seemed like his bare ass would be getting a very good view of the wilds this summer.

A simple wooden shed was round the western side. He'd expected some terrifying spider box but was surprised to find it in the same state as the tower—neat and ordered. There were axes and shovels and propane tanks and gloves. At the back were some smaller bottles, held tightly closed with those levered pop tops you sometimes saw on foreign beer.

But the most unexpected part of the property was the garden on the southern side, starting from the entrance steps and going all the way across to the window above the bed. They were cut into five little terraces down the slope, with a set of stairs down the middle, giving ten good-sized beds. It wasn't some makeshift thing, either—the steps and beds were built from perfectly cut pine sleepers that looked almost new.

The soil was rich chocolate peeking out beneath thick layers of straw mulch. He doubted the chopper pilots had done that bit of housework, so the hay must have been laid by the former resident at the end of last season—the same person who'd built another little shed by the base of the garden stairs, made from the same wood and filled with planting utensils and fertilizer. There was a beautiful apothecary chest on a sturdy bench, with dozens of tiny draws for seeds.

Luca almost jumped when he noticed the white suit hanging behind the door, taking a few moments to realize that it was a bee-keeping outfit. That made sense when he followed the soft sound of buzzing into the mountain meadow, toward a bustling village of cute wooden stacks by the edge of the woods, where the bleeding heart flowers grew so thick that the ground was more bubble gum pink than green.

And as Luca returned to the shed, taking a hammer for the boards, he couldn't help dwell on just how established it all was. How homely and ready to be occupied it seemed.

And how strange it was that the former occupant had given it up, rather than returning.