The Woodpile Rule

The axe felt honest. Cold steel, heavy oak, a straight line of force. Everything else was a lie, and the cold was the only thing that didn't care.

The air had teeth. Silas felt them in his lungs with every breath, a sharp, crystalline bite that felt cleaner than anything he’d breathed in years. His exhale was a thick plume of white vapor that hung in the still air before dissolving. One breath. One swing. The two were linked. Inhale on the lift, a sharp grunt of an exhale on the downswing. The head of the maul, a solid eight pounds of forged steel, met the round of birch with a sound like a gunshot in the muffled silence of the forest. The wood resisted for a fraction of a second, then surrendered with a clean, satisfying crack. Two perfect halves fell away onto the snow.

He didn't need this much wood. The cabin was small, well-insulated. The stove consumed fuel at a miserly pace. But the chopping was the point. It was a physical anchor in a life that had become entirely theoretical. It was a task with a beginning, a middle, and an end. You took a log, you split it, you stacked it. No subtext. No deception. The woodpile didn’t lie or change its story. It just grew.

His hands were raw inside the leather gloves. The skin over his knuckles was split and dry, and a dull ache had taken up permanent residence in the meat of his lower back. It wasn’t the ache of injury, but of use. It was a good pain. It reminded him that the body was a machine that required fuel and produced work. It was simple. He focused on the grain of the next log, finding the faint stress line, the path of least resistance. He centered the block, planted his feet in the snow, and lifted the maul again. The handle, worn smooth with use, felt like an extension of his arms. Up over his right shoulder, a brief moment of weightlessness, and then gravity and muscle brought it down. *Crack.*

He’d been here four months. Since October. He’d watched the last of the autumn leaves turn to brown mush under the first snowfall and had seen that snow buried under more and more layers, until the world was just white and grey and the dark green of the pines. His phone had no signal. The satellite internet was expensive and he used it only once a week to pull down a single encrypted message from a dead-drop server. The message was always the same: a single, meaningless number. A confirmation that the world was still turning and he was still, technically, a part of it. A part on standby. A part in storage.

He paused to shove a loose wedge of birch into place on the chopping block. His back protested. Forty-seven. He was forty-seven years old. Too old for the running, too young to be put out to pasture. This place, this frozen purgatory, was the compromise. He wiped sweat from his brow with the back of a rough glove, the gesture leaving a smear of dirt on his skin. The sweat was already starting to feel cold. He needed to keep moving.

That’s when he heard it. Not a sound from the forest—a deer, a falling branch heavy with snow—but a sound from the world. The low, grinding hum of an engine in a low gear, navigating the unplowed track that led to his cabin. It was the first vehicle he’d heard in seven weeks. His body went still, but his mind did not. The maul remained in his hand, its weight a dense, comforting reality. He didn’t look toward the sound. He focused on the log on the block, his ears tracking the engine's progress. A four-cylinder, he guessed. Not a big truck. Something practical. Something that wouldn't draw attention, if there was anyone around to pay attention.

The engine cut out. A car door opened and closed, the sound thin and sharp in the cold. He still didn’t look. He lifted the maul, swung, and split the log perfectly. He knelt, placed another half on the block, and only then did he allow his eyes to flick toward the end of the short path. A woman was standing there. Lena.

She wore a dark grey woolen coat that was too stylish for this deep in the woods, but she wore it with an indifference that made it functional. No hat. Her dark hair was pulled back tight, and her face was pale, pinched by the cold. She didn't move, just watched him, her hands in her pockets. She knew better than to approach a man with an axe until invited.

Silas split another log. The sharp crack echoed. He set the maul down, leaning it against the chopping block. He pulled off his gloves, tucking them into his back pocket, and blew on his raw fingers. He finally looked at her directly.

“The roads are bad,” he said. His voice was rough from disuse.

“I managed,” Lena replied. Her breath came out in a neat, concise puff. She was always neat. Concise. “You look healthy.”

“The air is clean.” He gestured vaguely at the stacks of firewood lining the path to the cabin. “The work is honest.”

“We need you.”

He laughed, a short, barking sound that had no humor in it. “We? There is no ‘we,’ Lena. I’m a line item in a black budget. A contingency. And the contingency hasn’t happened.” He picked up one of the split logs and began carrying it toward the cabin’s porch. He didn't invite her to follow. She did anyway, her boots crunching on the snow behind him.

“Something’s happened,” she said to his back. “Minsk.”

He stopped, his hand on the cabin door. Minsk. The name landed like a stone in his gut. The last job. The one that had ended with him here, chopping wood like a homesteader. The one that had ended with two names crossed off a list and a third one, an asset, burned beyond recovery. “Minsk is over.”

“A loose end has unraveled. The network that ran The Chimera, we thought it was dismantled. It wasn't. It’s active. And it’s hunting.”

Silas dropped the logs onto the porch with a clatter. He turned to face her, his expression flat. “Hunting what? Old ghosts?”

“It’s hunting the list of everyone who worked the Minsk operation. Our people. They got to Petrenko in Kyiv last week. A car bomb. It was made to look like a local dispute.”

He felt a cold that had nothing to do with the air. Petrenko had been their logistics man. A worrier with a taste for expensive shoes. “And you think they’re coming for me.”

“We know they are. We intercepted a fragment. Your location wasn’t specified, but a description was. The ‘hermit,’ they called you.”

Silas leaned against the rough wood of the cabin wall. He looked out at the silent, snow-covered trees. It was a beautiful prison, but a prison nonetheless. He had almost convinced himself he was free. “So you came to warn me. Very kind. I’ll be sure to lock the door.”

“This isn't a warning, Silas. It’s a tasking. We want you to go on the offensive. We have a name. A source. The man who’s reactivating the network.”

He looked at his hands, at the calluses and the split skin. He thought of the simple, clean line of the axe falling. “No.”

“It’s not a request.”

“Everything’s a request when you’re talking to a man holding the axe,” he said, his voice dangerously quiet. “I’m done. I did my time. Minsk was the end of the contract.”

“This is an extension of Minsk. A clean-up. You know the players better than anyone.” Lena took a step closer. The cold had brought a faint touch of color to her cheeks. “It’s Julian.”

The name hung in the air between them. Julian. The asset from Minsk. The one they were supposed to extract. The one who had supposedly died in the crossfire. The one he had personally vouched for.

“Julian’s dead,” Silas said, the words feeling like ash in his mouth.

“He was our source. The one giving us the intel to dismantle his own network. We thought he was a defector in place. But he was playing us. He fed us Petrenko and the others to consolidate his own power. And now he’s tying up loose ends.” Lena’s eyes were hard. “The final loose end is the man who recruited him in the first place.”

Silas stared at her. The ache in his back was no longer a good pain. It was a hot needle, twisting deep into his spine. The woodpile looked like a monument to a stupid, naive dream. There was no such thing as an honest job. Not for him.

“He’s not just the target, Silas,” Lena said, her voice dropping, delivering the final blow. “He’s the bait. And he’s asking for you by name.”