Chapter 104
They rode for three days without seeing anyone. The ridge trail carried them west through pine and hardwoods still holding late-summer green, and each evening, Charlotte found a camp with water nearby and clear sight lines. The radio lived in her hazmat suit pocket.
She checked it in the morning and evening, keeping the volume low.
The word peremena came through often, sometimes alone, sometimes buried in rapid Russian she couldn’t follow.
Mason listened hard and twice picked out new patterns.
On the fourth morning, as they broke camp in a hollow beneath a granite overhang, Mason spoke without being prompted.
“The dog needs a name,” he said.
Charlotte stopped rolling her bedding. It was the first thing he’d said that wasn’t about food, water, or the route since the farm.
“You’re right,” she said. “Any ideas?”
“Jack,” Mason said. “Like Connie’s husband. The one who said as long as you’re breathing, it’s a good day.”
“Jack, it is,” Charlotte said.
The dog seemed to approve. He pressed against Mason’s leg, and Mason’s hand found his head.
That evening, they camped beside a creek.
Charlotte built a small fire between rocks, and they ate dried apples and the last of Claudia’s venison jerky.
The radio sat between them on a flat stone, giving off occasional bursts of encrypted Russian.
“What do you think they’re saying?” Mason asked.
“I don’t know, but they’re organized. That’s an army that still knows what it’s doing.”
“Aunt Claudia would’ve known what to do with the radio.”
“She would have,” Charlotte said. “She’d have found someone who spoke Russian and pulled every scrap of intelligence out of him.”
“She taught me how to clean a rifle,” Mason said. “Not to shoot it. Just to clean it. She said that knowing how something works is half of staying alive with it.”
“That sounds like her.”
“She also said most people die like this because they stop paying attention to small things, not the big danger they’re watching for.”
“Your parents would be proud of you,” she said.
Mason was quiet for a moment, his face still soft with childhood but hardening at the edges. “I miss them,” he said. “Aunt Claudia, too, but it doesn’t feel like before. It feels like they’re with me differently now.”
Charlotte understood. Grief changed shape without disappearing. She’d watched it happen in herself, and she was watching it happen in a child who’d lost everything twice and was still moving forward.
“Tell me about the cabin,” Mason said. “In Colorado.”
She described the mountains, the aspen groves that turned gold in October, the creek behind the property, the west-facing porch, and the stone wood stove.
Mason listened and asked precise questions.
Each answer built the cabin in his mind the way his stories about Claudia’s farm had built it in hers.
On the fifth day, they crossed a county road that Claudia’s map had marked as a possible checkpoint.
It was empty, littered with abandoned vehicles and old debris.
They paralleled it for a mile before cutting back into the trees.
Jack ranged ahead as he always did, returning now and then to check on Mason. Their routine had settled.
That afternoon, as they picked their way down a rocky slope toward a stream Charlotte had spotted from the ridge, Mason laughed.
It was a small sound, but it cut through the quiet.
Mason was watching Jack, who’d gotten himself wedged between two boulders and was backing out with offended determination, his tail still wagging.
“He does that on purpose,” Mason said. “I think he likes having us watch him get stuck.”
“I wouldn’t put it past him,” Charlotte said.
The moment felt light and ordinary, which made it precious.
Mason’s face had lost some of its hollow distance.
They reached the stream near evening. Charlotte helped Mason down and led the horses to water while Jack splashed into the shallows.
The radio had been silent for the past hour.
She was filtering water when the radio erupted.
It came without warning. One moment, the forest was quiet.
Next, the radio was alive with overlapping voices.
This wasn’t the casual voice traffic they’d grown used to.
It was chaos. Charlotte pulled the radio from her pocket.
The urgency needed no translation. Someone was shouting, others cutting in, and beneath it all, coordinates were being called and answered too fast.
“What’s happening?” Mason asked.
“I don’t know, but something’s wrong on their end.”
The radio kept transmitting. The voices didn’t settle.
They layered over each other, competing for air, and somewhere in the encrypted rush, Charlotte heard the word peremena again, repeated not with the routine confirmation of earlier transmissions but with the sharp insistence of an order being given.