CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE #2
Cold water filled the narrow space to her chin.
The current pressed her against the concrete.
She ducked beneath a jammed branch, turned her face sideways to breathe, and dragged herself forward by fingertips alone.
Things moved past her in the darkness—twigs, leaves, something soft that brushed her mouth.
“Don’t follow. She’ll drown in there,” said Nutt.
“She’s already in it,” Wood answered.
The Swamp Rats had spread wide. The team filled the gaps between them. Voices overlapped now, some calling her name, some warning about water, some telling someone named Tank to keep moving toward the ridge.
They were building a net. Neela pushed through it before it closed.
She saw a narrow gap between two lights and aimed for it.
There was no trail, only tangled brush beneath a leaning oak.
She dropped to her stomach and crawled under the lowest branches, dragging her injured leg.
Thorns raked her back. One caught in her hair and held her until she tore free with both hands.
The voices passed on either side.
“Check the ridge!” Ham yelled.
“I’m on it,” came Tank’s answer from somewhere ahead.
Neela stopped. The sound had come through the rain almost directly in front of her. She backed away beneath the oak, but a dead limb cracked under her knee. The noise was small. In the storm it should have meant nothing. A beam snapped toward her.
Neela rolled downhill before the light reached the tree. She slid through leaves and mud, struck a root, and tumbled into a shallow basin filled with knee-deep water. The impact drove what little air remained from her lungs. She came up choking.
“Neela?” Tank called.
He was close. She splashed across the basin, leaning on the water with both hands as though it could hold her upright. At the far side she tried to climb the bank. The mud sheared away under her fingers. She dug again, gouging four furrows, and dragged herself onto the slope.
Behind her, Tank entered the water.
Neela climbed.
The ridge was not high, but it might as well have been a mountain. She hooked her fingers around roots and pulled while her feet slipped below her. Mud coated her teeth. Her breath came in tiny, useless gasps. Halfway up, her arms gave out and she slid back several feet, skinning both knees.
“Stop,” Tank said. “There’s nowhere left to run.”
She clawed higher.
“Don’t make this worse, Neela.”
Bark pressed rough against her cheek. She pushed away and continued. Lightning flickered repeatedly inside the clouds, not bolts now but a cold pulsing that made the forest seem to breathe. Neela’s shadow jumped from tree to tree. The wind carried fragments of voices from below.
“Tank!”
“Up here!” he shouted back. “She’s on the ridge!”
Neela lurched between the pines. Her sight narrowed to a trembling circle. She could hear her heartbeat but not the thunder. Her hands had curled into claws. She could not make them open.
A root caught her. She fell face-first. Mud filled her nose and mouth. She rolled onto her side, coughed, and tried to rise. One elbow straightened. The other collapsed. She crawled instead, pulling with her forearms, dragging both legs. The ground gave beneath her fingers in wet clumps.
“Just a little further. A little further and you can run,” she told herself.
Ham reached the slope first, followed by Rush and Christian. Jean and Iggy came behind them. Nutt, Plum, and Wood moved along the base of the ridge, their beams cutting across the flooded basin for another way up.
Tank was already on top.
Neela heard him moving through the trees, not rushing now. He knew she had nowhere left to go. She dug her fingers into the mud and pulled herself toward the darkest stand of timber.
The ridge narrowed ahead, pinched between a steep drop and the uprooted mass of a fallen cypress. Neela tried to pass beneath the lifted roots. They formed a wall of black earth taller than she was, threaded with pale, twisting wood. Water streamed from it. She turned toward the drop.
The bank vanished into darkness. Far below, swollen water moved through the trees with the sound of tearing cloth. No way forward.
Neela pivoted, lost her balance, and caught the trunk of a pine. Her muddy hand left a dark print on the bark. She held herself there for one breath, then another. Her lungs refused to fill. Each gasp stopped high in her chest.
Tank’s light appeared through the rain.
She shoved away from the tree and made one last attempt to run. Her injured foot folded. She dropped to both knees and pitched forward. Her palms struck the ground. Mud squeezed between her fingers.
“Neela.”
She crawled. There was no strength in it, only movement. Her nails scored the earth. She pulled a few inches, slipped back half of them, and tried again. Rain washed the grooves smooth almost as quickly as she made them.
Tank slowed when he saw her. She lay near the base of another tree, one shoulder against its roots, clothes plastered to her body, bare feet cut and dark with mud.
Her breath tore in and out in shallow gasps.
Both hands worked at the ground as if she could dig her way beneath it.
Her fingers opened, clawed, filled with mud, and opened again.
“Stay back,” she managed. “You’re a fucking traitor. All this time it was you who made sure things went sideways. You mismanaged the drops. You made sure the vaults were empty when we arrived. You told the fucking Swamp Rats everything!”
The words were barely air. Tank kept the flashlight trained just below her face, watching her hands. Rain streamed over his jaw as he stopped several paces away, balanced and ready in case she reached for a weapon or tried one last deception.
“The hunt is over.” Tank lowered into a guarded crouch, staying beyond the reach of her mud-caked hands.
“Don’t,” she gasped.
“You’re done running.”
Lightning split the sky beyond the ridge. For an instant, the whole swamp burned white. Tank on one knee, Neela broken against the tree, the black flood below, and the others climbing through the rain behind them. Thunder crashed over the ridge and shook loose a veil of water from the branches.
Neela’s hand closed around nothing.
Tank closed the distance as darkness returned. He pulled the weapon from his belt, pointing it directly at her.
“I’m no fucking traitor. I’m a patriot.”