Chapter 3
TRENT
The rimrocks offered perfect sight lines to Evelyn’s house.
I’d scouted this position six months ago before dropping them in Garnett, memorizing every approach, every vulnerability.
The jagged outcropping of rock formed a natural blind where I could watch without being seen, the sparse pine coverage providing enough shadow to conceal my movement.
Perfect for a man who didn’t want to be found.
Perfect for a man who needed to protect without being noticed.
Six months since I’d dropped them here, but I still remembered every approach to that little blue house, every line of sight, every potential vulnerability. Six months of wondering if I’d made the right call, walking away.
I knelt and unzipped the duffel. Each piece of equipment came out in order, muscle memory guiding my hands as I assembled the surveillance kit.
Long-range thermal imager. Directional microphone.
Motion sensors for the perimeter. Satellite uplink that would beam any triggered alerts directly to my phone and to Edge Ops HQ.
The gear was newer than what I’d used last time I was here, courtesy of Kate’s constant upgrades.
Lighter, more powerful, with better battery life.
I positioned the thermal imager on its compact tripod, adjusting the focal length until Evelyn’s little blue house came into clear view through the eyepiece.
Two heat signatures glowed in the kitchen, one adult-sized, one child-sized. Evelyn and Sophia, safe at home. The tightness in my chest eased slightly.
I watched as they moved around the kitchen, the thermal imaging transforming them into glowing silhouettes against the cooler background of their house.
The smaller figure—Sophia—seemed to be dancing or spinning in circles while the taller one—Evelyn—moved with the careful, measured steps I remembered so well.
Even as a glowing orange shape on a screen, I’d recognize her movements anywhere.
My mind slipped backward in time, to Hope’s Embrace.
To the first time I’d seen her there, kneeling in the garden with a little girl beside her.
The child had been maybe three, wearing the white robe all children wore in the community, clutching a stuffed rabbit like it was the only real thing in the world.
I’d been “Brother Vigil” then, two weeks into my cover as head of security. My mission: find and secure Tectra-X, the stolen seismic weapon Edge Ops believed the cult planned to trigger as part of their doomsday prophecy. Not rescue a woman and her child.
But plans change.
Evelyn had looked up as I’d passed, and our eyes had met for just a second. Long enough for me to see the same thing I saw in the mirror every morning—someone pretending. Someone watching. Someone who didn’t belong.
She’d gone back to showing her daughter how to plant seeds, but I’d felt her awareness track me across the compound.
Over two years, I’d learned her routines.
Breakfast in the communal dining hall, Sophia always on her left.
Teaching the children in the old schoolhouse until Hopeful shut it down.
Evening prayers where she stood in the back, lips moving but eyes too sharp, too alert.
She watched everything. Noticed when people disappeared.
Noticed when the rhetoric shifted from salvation to destruction.
Just like me.
The first time Sophia had approached me on her own, I’d been inspecting the perimeter fence. She’d appeared at my elbow without a sound, rabbit clutched to her chest.
“Brother Vigil?” Her voice had been so small. “Mama says you keep us safe.”
I’d glanced around, making sure no one was watching. “That’s right.”
“From the bad things outside?”
“From everything.” The words had come out rougher than I’d intended.
She’d studied me for a long moment with those serious eyes, then held up her rabbit. “This is Promise. Mama gave her to me when I was a baby.”
The cult had renamed Sophia that—Promise.
Their “special one.” Their “chosen child.” I’d seen how Hopeful watched her during gatherings, the way he talked about her future role in their sick vision.
It made my skin crawl. But the name change had been confusing for a three-year-old, so she’d called her rabbit by her cult name instead.
“That’s a good name for a rabbit,” I’d said.
Sophia had smiled then, just a little. “You can pet her if you want.”
I’d reached out and touched the worn fabric of the rabbit’s ear, and something in my chest had shifted. This kid trusted me. Her mother trusted me, even though we’d barely spoken directly beyond the bare minimum required by commune life.
But Evelyn’s eyes found mine across crowded rooms. Brief moments of connection that said she saw what I was, what I was really doing there.
She’d known I wasn’t one of them.
The trust had built slowly. Sophia bringing me dandelions she’d picked from the garden. Evelyn letting me watch her daughter during the mandatory prayer sessions when parents were separated from children. Small acts that shouldn’t have mattered but did.
I’d watched the cult get darker. Hopeful’s sermons shifting from peace to prophecy, from community to control. The school closing. The perimeter fence getting higher. People who questioned things vanishing overnight, their cabins cleaned out like they’d never existed.
I’d watched Evelyn’s fear grow as she realized what she’d gotten herself and Sophia into. How the place she’d come to for safety when Sophia was barely more than a baby had twisted into something dangerous.
Three weeks before the end, Sophia had been taken for “spiritual preparation,” and I’d spent six hours tracking her down, finally finding her locked in the meditation building with three other children. I’d gotten her out using my security access and returned her to Evelyn just after midnight.
Evelyn had opened her cabin door at my knock, her face pale and streaked with tears. When she saw Sophia in my arms, asleep and unharmed, something in her expression had cracked open.
“Thank you,” she whispered, taking her daughter from me. She carried Sophia to the small bed, tucked her in, checked her over with shaking hands. No injuries. No signs of the “purification” she’d feared. Just exhaustion.
I turned to leave, to give them privacy, but her hand caught my wrist.
“Stay,” she said. “Just for a minute. I can’t...” Her voice had failed. “I can’t be alone right now.”
I stayed.
She sat on the edge of her bed, shoulders shaking with silent sobs of relief. I stood there, unsure what to do, until she looked up at me with red eyes and something raw in her expression.
“I thought I’d lost her.”
“You didn’t. She’s safe.”
“Because of you.” She stood and crossed the small space between us. Her hand had come up to my face, palm against my cheek. “You keep saving us.”
I meant to step back. Maintain distance. Instead, my hand covered hers.
She kissed me first. Desperate, grateful, full of relief and fear and everything that had been building between us for years. I kissed her back, pulling her close, feeling her body shake against mine.
We’d moved to her bed, as far from where Sophia slept as the small yurt allowed. We were quiet. Careful. She pulled at my clothes with an urgency that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with needing to feel alive, to confirm we were both still here, still breathing.
Afterward, we’d lain tangled together, her head on my chest, both of us listening to Sophia’s steady breathing across the room.
“This can’t happen again,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“Sophia comes first. Always.”
“I know that, too.”
She pressed her palm flat against my ribs. “When this place falls apart, you’ll get us out. Promise me.”
I covered her hand with mine. “I promise.”
She’d fallen asleep like that, her body curved into mine, trusting me to keep watch while she finally let go. I’d stayed until just before dawn, then slipped out before anyone could see.
We’d never spoken of that night again, but something had changed between us. An unspoken understanding that we’d crossed a line we couldn’t uncross, and that we couldn’t cross ever again.
By the time the mass suicide order came down, I’d already made my choice. Tectra-X be damned. I was getting them out.
The night it happened still played in my head sometimes.
The compound in chaos. People drinking the poisoned mixture, lying down in the gardens to die.
Hopeful screaming about transformation and rebirth while his followers convulsed and bled.
Tectra-X already gone, smuggled out by someone I hadn’t identified in time.
I’d found Evelyn in the schoolhouse, Sophia wrapped in her arms. The child had been crying, terrified by the screaming outside.
“You promised,” Evelyn had whispered.
“That’s why I’m here. Can you run?”
“Yes.”
And she had. No hesitation, no looking back. Just grabbed her daughter and followed me into the night while people died behind us.
We lost Sophia’s stuffed rabbit somewhere in the woods that night, but I got them safely to Montana.
Set them up in the little blue house in Garnett, a random town I had picked off a map at a truck stop.
Made sure they had what they needed, including a replacement rabbit for Sophia.
Then I’d left to hunt Tectra-X with the team because that was the mission, and the mission was all that mattered. At least, that was what I told myself.
But we’d failed.