4. Hutch
HUTCH
Cade's message was three words: Light moved south.
He had eyes on the ridge from a position I'd established for him before the storm hit — a forward observation point he could reach by vehicle road and maintain without exposure. Which meant whatever had been on the ridge last night was now between us and the southern trailhead.
I sent back two words: Holding position.
Gabrielle was watching me from her sleeping layer with the specific quality of someone who processed fast and didn't need to ask questions to draw conclusions. She'd already gotten most of it. She was just waiting for me to confirm the pieces she hadn't assembled yet.
"Tell me," she said.
So I told her. Not everything, but enough.
The threat timeline, Linden's escalation from letters to field operation, and Cade's assessment that the data she was carrying had become the primary target.
Her backup drive — eleven nights of photometry readings from three sites across the Ridgeline corridor — was the only complete record of this sector's light environment.
Without it, the dark-sky application collapsed.
She listened without interruption, with the specific attention of someone building a structure in real time.
"The data is in my pack," she said when I finished.
"I know."
"You knew before tonight."
"I read your field reports." I paused. "Cade sourced them through your conservancy's public records. It was clean."
She looked at me for a long moment. Not anger. Something more calibrated than that.
"Why did you take this job?" she asked.
I turned the yew piece in my hands. I'd picked it up when I reached for the communicator, and I hadn't put it down. "Cade asked."
"That's not an answer."
"It's part of one." I looked at the wood. "I've done a lot of work where the stakes were institutional. National security. Corporate liability. Political exposure." I paused. "The stakes on this one are different."
"Dark sky," she said.
"Your reports." I turned the yew over. "You wrote about a place in eastern Nevada where you took baseline readings five years ago and went back last fall.
The skyglow had increased by forty percent in five years.
" I looked at her. "You wrote about what forty percent looked like from the ground. What you could no longer see."
She was very still.
"I've been in a lot of places where the night was functional," I said. "Military operational environments. Remote terrain. Genuine dark. And you come to understand — when you work in it the way I've worked in it — that it's not nothing. What you're protecting."
She held my gaze for a moment. The headlamp was low, running on reserve, and the quality of the light made her look the way she'd looked through eleven nights of observation — entirely herself, unhurried, present in a way most people weren't.
"What happened?" she asked. Not the job. The wound.
I was quiet long enough that she might have let it go. She didn't.
"I lost someone on a job," I said. "Three years ago. Private contract, corporate client. I made a judgment call about the primary threat, and I was wrong about the secondary." I looked at the shelter wall. "She was twenty-six. She had a daughter who was four."
The silence was not uncomfortable. She didn't fill it with condolence or recalibration. She just let it be what it was.
"That's why you run cold," she said eventually.
"It's more efficient."
"It's more survivable." She said it without judgment. The clinical precision of someone naming a thing accurately.
"Same thing," I said.
"Not always." She looked at the yew in my hands. "What are you making?"
"I don't know yet."
"How do you start something without knowing what it is?"
"You follow the grain." I turned it to show her — the line of dark heartwood against the pale edge. "The material already knows. You're just removing what isn't it."
She reached out and touched the edge of the wood with two fingers. Carefully, the way she handled her instruments. Reading the surface before naming it.
"Pacific yew," she said. "That's rare here."
"Yes."
She looked at me. "You should get some sleep. I'll monitor until four."
"I'll monitor."
"Hutch." My name in her voice was a different thing than I'd been prepared for. "I said I'd take a turn. I meant it."
I looked at her for a moment. Then I lay down and closed my eyes, and I listened to her settle into the watch — the particular quality of her attention, the small adjustments as she tracked the storm's sound profile — and I was asleep in minutes for the first time in eleven days.
When I woke, she'd made coffee on the small camp stove and was reading the light quality outside through the shelter seam. The storm had shifted. Not breaking, but breathing differently.
"Something moved again," she said quietly. "Twenty minutes ago. Closer than last night."
I was up before she finished the sentence.