Chapter 23 Ariel #2
Amanda looked back. It was stupid. I did it too. Our compound was still there, the trucks coughing, men throwing shadows bigger than their bodies. Somewhere inside that, the office we’d marked on the map would have servers or printouts or nothing. Somewhere inside, the lie had hands.
“Leave it!” I said again, because the drive felt like a magnet and we didn’t have any more iron to give.
“It’s proof,” she said again, jaw set. “If I don’t take it, none of this matters.”
“It matters if you’re alive,” I shot back.
She didn’t answer because a flare went up over the lot and turned the world cruel daylight for three seconds.
That was all the shooters needed. Bullets chewed bark two feet above us and then remembered gravity and came down mean.
A sliver of something hot tore my sleeve and bit my skin. I didn’t stop to check blood.
“Move!” Cap’s hand hit my back and shoved me into the creek. The water was shock-cold and loud, up to my calves, then higher when I misjudged a step. He went after Doc and Amanda, staying between them and the open like there was any other place he’d be.
We ran in the water like idiots, and it still worked better than running on land. The bank took some of the sound. The rocks forced us into a careful, stupid dance. We made it twenty yards before the flare died, and the dark tried to take us back.
Smoke rolled low into the trees, thick and chemical, heavier than the pretty kind you get from campfires and bad decisions. It wrapped the creek clear to the bend and then got dense, the way fog does when it’s tired of pretending to be polite.
“Mask up,” Ranger said in my ear, sudden and calm. He must’ve cut back to our channel. “If you got it.”
We didn’t. My sleeve made a useless mask; my hand did worse. Amanda coughed. Doc pushed us lower, toward the water. It helped and didn’t.
We reached the bend where the bank rose and there was a half-down pine you could belly under to get a minute between you and consequences.
Doc slid Amanda into that triangle of root and trunk and mud and put a hand on her shoulder like a paperweight.
I hit the ground on the other side and felt the drive in her jacket under my forearm, small and solid and maddening.
“Give it,” I said. “You can’t,”
A white blossom of light blew in the smoke to our right and turned into building headlights barreling through the trees like headlights had a right to do that.
Someone had stolen one of the trucks or kicked it off the apron because they wanted to see what they were shooting at.
It bucked through scrub and hit a stump with a thud I felt in my teeth.
Cap raised, aimed, and took the left headlight out. The flash and scream of it bought us a breath. He put the second round into the right. The truck moaned and stopped pretending to help.
“Go!” he said again, and we went.
We tried to stay as a unit. We did it for maybe six seconds. The smoke took what it wanted.
I kept Amanda in my hands by the fabric of her jacket and then I didn’t.
Doc had her elbow and then he didn’t. The world went all smear and ash and white pain where the flare bits found exposed skin.
I lost the creek and found dirt. I lost dirt and found a slick log that said nope and put me on my knees.
“Amanda!” I shouted, and sound died a foot from my mouth.
Cap’s hand closed around the back of my neck and snapped me back to the ground.
A round hissed through the air where my head had been and tore a leaf into confetti.
He hauled me by my collar into a crawl. We moved under that fallen pine like kids at recess who’d been told the game was good for them.
The smoke thinned for a second and in that second, I saw Doc rise, waving us, Amanda right behind him, and the next second the smoke took them in the other direction entirely.
“Left!” I yelled. “Doc, left,”
Cap shook his head once, hard. Not no. Later. He mouthed the words: Stay alive first.
We made the creek again. Ranger popped out of the fog like a ghost with hands. He grabbed my arm and planted me behind a rock shaped like an overturned bathtub. Ghost slid in from the other side with eyes like he’d been here the whole time. Wrecker’s voice on comms: “Status.”
“South bank,” Ranger said. “Three.”
“Two,” Doc coughed.
“Two where?” Wrecker asked.
“Working it,” Doc said. I could hear Amanda breathing, high and sharp. “Keep your heads down.”
Another flare. Another round of that awful noon.
Figures ran at the far end of the creek, vests, security jacket, a third in civilian clothes that meant boss.
They were dragging a second floodlight on a wheeled base like a cartoon, cables snaking behind them.
If they planted that thing we’d be rats in a mirror.
Cap checked his count, me, Ranger, Ghost, and lifted two fingers. He went up, took a knee, and put a shot into the wheeled base. Sparks jumped and the light flopped like a fish. It didn’t go dead. He put the second shot into the cable. That did it. The men yelled cuss words that sounded very human.
“Doc?” Wrecker again. His voice had a steel core now, the kind that makes you want to stand straighter.
“Smoke pocket,” Doc said. “Northeast of the bend. I have one.” He meant Amanda. He didn’t say her name on air. “Moving to you on count.”
“Copy,” Wrecker said. “Creek is hot. Push west if you can.”
We held. Sometimes that’s the entire job. We held until the gunshot rhythm changed and the trucks stopped trying to help and the men with vests remembered they didn’t get paid extra to die. We held until my lungs burned and my hands shook less because they’d run out of shake.
Then, the quiet.
Not real quiet. The fake kind that means reloads and regrouping and someone on a radio lying about how well it’s going. It was enough to take stock.
“Amanda?” I said into my sleeve.
Doc didn’t answer. The channel hissed.
“Amanda,” I said again, louder. “Answer me.”
Static. And then the nothing that tastes like metal.
I stood up too fast and Ranger caught the back of my jacket. “Wait,” he said, low. “Smoke’s still a liar.”
“I have to.”
Cap’s hand landed on my wrist, not hard, but the kind you feel in your elbow. “We sweep,” he said. “We don’t sprint into a net.”
“She had the drive,” I said, and swallowed the rest because it wanted to come out in a noise that wasn’t words. “She had it.”
“We’ll find her,” Cap said. “Doc’s not the losing type.”
We moved slow along the crease of the bank, heads below the line. Ghost scouted ten feet ahead and made a short chopping motion that meant clear enough. We edged into the spot where the smoke had been dumbest, and the ground was torn up like a small war had lost interest and left.
There was a footprint in the mud that wasn’t ours. A heel print that said hurry. Boot treads that didn’t match Wrecker’s or Ranger’s. Two sets, dragging. The marks scuffed out halfway like someone had thought about leaving breadcrumbs and then remembered they weren’t in a story.
My throat did that hot sting thing. I crouched and touched the place where a jacket had brushed a rock and left a thread. It was Amanda’s color. It could’ve been anyone’s. It wasn’t.
“She took the drive,” I said. It came out flat because the other choice was something that would break me in half.
Cap looked toward the tree line where the creek spat out toward the fire road. He listened like he listens to walls and hinges. His jaw went hard.
“And they took her,” he said.