7. Render #2
The first pursuer clears the SUV's hood and raises a pistol.
I fire twice from thirty yards. Not ideal range for a suppressed nine-millimeter but close enough.
The first round catches him in the upper body and he spins sideways.
The second round hits the SUV door and punches through the sheet metal with a sound like someone hitting a trash can with a bat.
The other two drop behind the vehicle and return fire. The rounds kick up dirt and concrete fragments near the loading dock. I pull Enley behind the concrete lip and we crouch there, breathing hard, the river rushing behind us.
"How deep?" I ask.
She looks at the water. "Chest height at least. Current's strong."
"Can you swim?"
"Can you?"
"Not well." It's the truth. I'm a competent swimmer in a pool. Moving water with a current this strong and a go-bag on my back is a different proposition. The cold alone will cut our efficiency in half. The current will do the rest.
"We go together," she says. "Link arms. The current will try to spin us. If we go in angled upstream we can use the flow to push us across instead of fighting it."
She knows rivers. I file that information in the growing folder labeled things Enley Cameron knows that Poe never mentioned.
More rounds hit the concrete lip. Chips of old cement sting my face. We're pinned and the pursuers are going to flank us within the next sixty seconds if we don't move.
I fire three more rounds over the concrete lip. Not aiming to hit. Aiming to buy time. Suppressive fire that forces them to keep their heads down while we move.
"Now," I say.
We scramble over the back edge of the loading dock and hit the riverbank at a run. The mud is slick. Enley goes down on one knee and I grab her arm and pull her up and we hit the water together.
The cold is a physical assault. It drives the air from my lungs in a single explosive gasp.
The current grabs us immediately, pulling at our legs, trying to fold us downstream.
Enley links her arm through mine and angles us upstream the way she said and the geometry works.
The flow pushes against our locked bodies and drives us sideways across the river instead of straight downstream.
The water hits my waist. Then my chest. The go-bag on my back tries to float and then tries to drag.
The footing is bad. River rocks, slippery and uneven, each step a negotiation between balance and momentum.
Enley is shorter than me and the water is at her shoulders.
She doesn't make a sound. Just keeps her arm locked through mine and keeps her feet moving and keeps her chin above the brown rushing surface.
Halfway across, the last of the gunfire reaches us.
Rounds hit the water upstream, little geysers that look almost harmless from this angle.
The concrete lip is providing partial cover and the distance is growing.
They'd have to come to the river's edge for a clean shot and by the time they do, the angle and the current will make us a difficult target.
We make the far bank. The mud on this side is thicker, sucking at my boots, and pulling ourselves up the slope takes the last of the energy reserves I've been running on since dawn.
Enley claws her way up beside me, soaking wet, shivering hard, her pink hair plastered to her face and her teeth already chattering.
My leg stings and I glance down. I’m sure I’m cut, but no time to check right now.
I look back across the river. Two figures on the loading dock, weapons lowered. They're not following. The river made the decision for them. By the time they find a bridge or a crossing point, we'll be gone.
The forest on this side is different. Denser undergrowth. Birch mixed with the pine. The ground slopes upward into a series of ridges that will give us elevation and distance from the crossing point.
I check the bag. The laptop case is still sealed. The medical tape held. The router is in the zippered pocket, above the waterline for most of the crossing. The first-aid kit is soaked but functional.
Ten rounds in my magazine minus five fired. Five rounds left.
No satellite uplink. No backup burner. No secondary bag. No vehicle. No safehouse.
We're on foot in wet clothes in late autumn with limited ammunition and a laptop that may or may not have survived its first river crossing.
I look at Enley. She's wringing water from her hair, jaw set, eyes already scanning the tree line ahead of us.
"What now?" she asks through chattering teeth.
“Southeast. There’s a second safehouse.” I run the map in my head.
We're approximately eight miles from the nearest road.
The second safehouse is a storage unit complex on the industrial side of the city, another twelve miles past that.
Twenty miles total, most of it through forest, in wet clothes, with limited supplies.
"Twenty miles," I say.
She nods. Like twenty miles is a light stroll in the park.
"Then we better start walking."
I sigh, and we start walking.
The forest takes us in. The sound of the river fades behind us. The cold seeps through our wet clothes and into the muscle underneath. I take point. She follows close enough that I can hear her breathing, steady and controlled even through the shivering.
Behind us the sedan sits dead in a clearing beside a rusted mill. The cabin that kept us safe for a few days has been found and compromised. The external drives are formatted and lost. The secondary bag is lying on the ground where we dropped it during the sprint to the car.
We've lost the safehouse, the vehicle, and a third of our equipment.
But the laptop is still in the bag. The Orchid channel is still active.
The intelligence we gathered is still in our heads, in the systems we built together, in the shared understanding of two people who spent days learning each other's patterns well enough that running through gunfire together felt less like chaos and more like choreography.
I look back once. Enley is right behind me, arms crossed over her chest against the cold, jaw set, eyes forward.
She catches me looking. And my system runs a degree hotter, and for a split second I think about kissing her.
Then, I turn forward and keep walking too.
Twenty miles.