Cap
The creek covered our sound better than anything else could have, so we stayed in it longer than was comfortable. Cold worked its way through my boots and up my shins and I let it. Discomfort keeps you focused. That was fine with me right now.
Ariel's hand found the back strap of my cut and held on. Juno had two fingers hooked in Ariel's sleeve. The hoarse man breathed like something was broken in his chest but he kept moving, which was all I was asking from any of them.
We followed the creek until it bent hard and went under a tangle of roots, then I brought us up out of the water and cut north along a deer track.
The kind that knew how to stay modest, no wider than a shoulder, no more obvious than it had to be.
The rain had dropped to a steady tap on the leaves above us.
Somewhere out past the tree line, engines growled and then quieted, moving in a pattern that told me they were working a grid. Good. Grids were predictable.
The second shed materialized out of the brush about fifty yards from the creek.
Different from the one Ariel and the others had sheltered in before.
This one had caved in on its back end, leaving the front overhang intact, like a hand cupped to keep the rain out.
Pine needles had built up underneath it into a mat, dry and thick.
Not comfortable. But sheltered enough that you could close your eyes for ten minutes without paying for it.
"This is a layup," I said quietly as we got everyone under the overhang. "Not a hotel. We're not staying."
Blank faces. Too tired for idioms. That was on me.
"Ten minutes," I said. "Then we move again.
We do that until the search pattern gives up or makes a mistake.
When the engines drift east, " I pointed with two fingers toward the ridge ", you follow that line until you hear water big enough to have a name.
Keep it on your left. No fires. No talking unless you have to.
If someone yells freeze, you go flat on the ground, you don't run.
You only move on a word from her", I nodded at Ariel, "or from me. "
Juno nodded too fast. Ariel put a hand over hers and held it until the nod slowed down and became something she actually understood instead of just agreed to.
"Pockets," I said. "Everyone empty them. Let's see what we have."
Ariel was already ahead of me. One hand braced in the pine needles, eyes doing that quick inventory thing she did, chin down. She stripped a bobby pin from somewhere in her sleeve and tucked it into Juno's cuff without making a thing of it. "For later," she said. "Not right now."
Juno produced a crushed granola bar from somewhere in her hoodie.
The hoarse man came up with a packet of salt and two peppermint candies.
From the lining of my cut I worked loose what I'd had tucked there for longer than I wanted to admit.
A space blanket folded down to the size of a cigarette pack, and a strip of water purification tabs sealed in old packaging that was more glue than plastic at this point.
Ariel looked at the tabs and back at me and didn't say anything, but the corner of her mouth moved.
We built what we could. I strung the space blanket low across two ribs of the shed frame, low enough that you'd have to know to look for it to notice it from outside.
Ariel broke the granola bar into three pieces, gave Juno the biggest one without making a production of it, passed a small piece to the man, and palmed the last bit in my direction when she thought I wasn't paying attention.
I took it. The man tore the salt packet open and let it sit on his tongue, which told me he'd been through something like this before, or something bad enough that it taught him the same lesson. I didn't ask.
I scratched a shallow trench in the dirt with a stick, scattered pine needles over it. "If you need to be sick, use this. Cover it when you're done. Smell travels. It matters tonight."
Ariel watched me set up the small practical ugliness of surviving somewhere you're not supposed to be. Neither of us said Sunshine's name. The fact of her sat between us anyway, warm and uncomfortable, like something we couldn't put down but couldn't carry loudly either.
"Quiet is a posture," I told them, showing them how to make their bodies smaller.
Chin tucked, shoulders dropped, elbows in, everything close.
"When fear hits, your arms want to go out.
Keep them here." I pressed my palms flat against my own ribs.
They mirrored me, and I watched the tree line swallow a little of their outline. Good.
Juno's breathing started to come faster. Ariel slid in next to her without being asked. "Four in," she said, steady and low. "Hold two. Four out." She glanced at me quickly — okay?
"That works," I said.
Juno found the rhythm like she'd been waiting for someone to hand it to her.
A pickup engine growled somewhere on the service road, then backed off. Closer, a dog was working the edge of the water, nose busy with everything we'd left behind in the last twenty minutes. The handler's voice came low and even. The kind of quiet praise that said the dog was on something real.
Ariel's fingers tightened on my strap. I felt the words she wasn't saying through the tension in her hand.
"New plan," I said. It came out ahead of the part of me that wanted to argue about it. "We split."
Ariel didn't flinch. She just looked at me and asked, "Where do you want them when I bring you back?"
I didn't tell her to be careful or to take care of herself or any of the other things that wanted to come out. She didn't need them and they'd cost us both time.
"Ridge spur," I said. "There's a trail marker about twenty minutes north. Orange, half-peeled off, on a pine that got hit by lightning and refused to fall down. You'll know it. If the engines push west while you're moving, cut south and take them back to water."
"Got it," she said.
I pulled my shirt off, wrung as much water out of it as I could, and tore a strip from the hem. Tied it around a low branch at eye height, then snapped the branch back so it sat flush. Invisible unless you were looking for it, which I would be.
Ariel raised an eyebrow.
"Marker," I said. "For when I come back through here and the dark tries to convince me I've never been here before."
She looked at the branch for a second. Then she turned back to Juno and checked her wrist wrap, tightened it where it had slipped, and added a strip from her own sleeve to reinforce it, all without any fuss about doing it.
I made a deliberate heel-drag through a patch of soft mud near the creek bank and then smoothed it out with a pine bough until it looked like nothing in particular. The dog's voice rose higher, more certain. The handler's praise got closer.
"You're invisible as long as you choose to be," I told the two under the lean-to. "You're going to want to move or make noise or do something. Don't."
Juno looked at Ariel instead of me. "You're coming back."
It wasn't quite a question.
"Yes," Ariel said, without looking to me for backup. "We're going to draw them off. That's all this is."
I put Ariel's hand on Juno's wrist. Set Juno's hand on the man's sleeve. "Count," I said to Juno.
"One two three four," she whispered.
"Keep going," I said. "The world is easier when you give it a job."
Ariel and I eased back out from under the overhang, moving slow enough that the pine needles didn't announce us.
The trees closed in behind us. The dog's footsteps made soft sounds along the creek bank.
It was close now, close enough that I could hear it breathing.
I pressed my boot heel into a soft patch of rock near the water and dragged a palm print across a mossy surface, the kind of mark that said a man slipped here and caught himself.
The handler would spend five minutes on this spot. Five minutes was five minutes.
We moved into the open, not recklessly, just enough.
Enough for a flashlight to feel like it found something and move on satisfied.
Ariel matched my pace without me having to tell her anything.
She'd figured out how to read my shoulder angle about two days in and she used it consistently, which was something I'd stopped taking for granted.
A branch cracked somewhere off to our left. Not us. She didn't react.
I loved her for that and a hundred other things that were going to have to wait.
At the old cut line where the county had bulldozed through five winters back and never finished cleaning up, I took us across and then doubled back under our own footprints and brushed them to fuzz.
Ariel reached up on her way past and tugged the strip of shirt I'd tied to the branch, just once, like testing a bell, then set it back exactly the way it was.
We hit a seam of fern and ran it, letting the fronds close behind us. Ariel checked my forearm without breaking stride, pressed two fingers to the bandage she'd made, made a face at what she found.
I shrugged.
She shifted one step left so she was taking more of the brush on her side instead of mine.
I let her do it because fighting her on it would slow us down and because she was right that it was the smarter move, and also because I was going to have to let myself be looked after once in a while if this was going to work between us in the long run.
The drone came back. We both heard it in the same breath. The thin insect whine of it somewhere above the canopy. Ariel grimaced.
"Eyes," she said.
"Yeah."
We dropped into the creek again, not because water hides you from a camera, it doesn't, but because the trees along the bank break your outline and make the thermal imaging work harder.
The drone made one lazy pass, somebody up there sweeping IR like a flashlight instead of letting the sensors work the way they were supposed to.
That was good. The less competent the operator, the more patterns they fell into, and patterns were something I could work with.
We crouched behind a root ball while it circled. Ariel leaned her forehead against my shoulder for one breath. Not drama, just two people getting their bearings in the same direction before they kept moving.
"Two more moves," I said. "Then we pull the search pattern east and let Juno and the man go quiet."
She nodded. "Then we come back for Sunshine."
"Then we come back," I said.
The generator coughed out on the service road.
The dog called from the creek bank and its handler answered it with the kind of calm praise that meant the animal was confident about something.
I got up, every joint in my legs lodging a complaint, and pointed us deeper into the trees, where the canopy was thick enough to hold the dark down a little longer.
We moved. And every step we took drew the search a little further from the two people sheltering under a pine needle mat, counting quietly to four.