Cap
I should've waited for backup.
The thought had been sitting in the back of my head since the basement, and it came back every time things went quiet enough for me to actually hear myself think.
I'd made a call and I'd been wrong about it and people had paid for that.
I wasn't going to resolve it by turning it over and over.
But I also wasn't going to pretend it wasn't there.
Dawn came in slow through the cave mouth, gray and reluctant, the kind of light that showed up and immediately started making excuses for itself.
The fire had burned down to almost nothing.
Ariel was asleep against my chest, her cheek warm through my shirt, one leg thrown over mine like she'd made a decision about where she was going to be and stuck to it.
I lay still and let the morning tell me what it knew.
No engines. The dogs had given up sometime in the small hours.
I'd heard the change, the searching bark turning frustrated and then falling off.
Somewhere out in the woods, men had argued with a map that wasn't giving them what they wanted, and eventually they'd gone somewhere else to argue with it.
The woods outside the cave were just woods now.
Rain drip from the lip of the overhang. A jay making noise in the upper canopy. Water running somewhere downhill.
No boot sign within earshot. No drone.
I eased my arm out from under her carefully and got to the mouth of the cave, breathing in the morning air and reading it. Cold, wet, pine and mud and the particular smell of a woods that had been rained on hard and was now deciding what to do with all of it. Nothing that said men.
"Don't leave," Ariel said behind me. Her voice was rough with sleep, quiet.
"I'm not going anywhere," I said, and meant it more than I usually meant things.
She pushed up onto her elbows. Her hair had dried into something approximate of its usual shape, which was wild and a little sideways, and she had a crease from the cave floor across her cheek and her eyes were still half-asleep.
She looked at me for a second like she was checking that I was still real.
"We should move," she said.
"We will. Fire first." I nodded at the cave. "We boil water before we do anything else. Ten minutes now saves us hours later."
She made a face but she came and sat beside me while I coaxed the last of the fire back up enough to be useful.
I'd found a dented tin near the cave entrance, left by whoever had sheltered here before us, and we filled it from the cleanest part of the stream and set it over the flame.
Ariel watched me feed wet twigs into the small fire, learning what worked and what didn't, and she picked it up fast. She always did.
I'd noticed that about her early on. She watched how things were done once and then she just did them, no second-guessing.
When the water rolled, I dropped the purification tabs in and we waited.
"Lesson one," I said.
"Let me guess. Always boil your water."
"Water and warmth before anything else," I said. "Courage doesn't keep you moving. Your body temperature does."
"That's slightly less inspiring than I expected from you."
"Inspiration is a luxury. Warm feet are a plan."
She smiled at me over the steam and then made a face when she actually drank the water because purification tabs tasted like a chemistry lesson. I didn't warn her. It seemed funnier not to.
We ate what we had left. The last of the granola bar, and a strip of jerky I'd found jammed into a stitched seam in my cut that I'd completely forgotten about.
She tore it in half and handed me the bigger piece.
I took it without arguing because we both needed it and there was no point in being stubborn about portion size when we were running on nothing.
"What's the plan?" she asked.
"Get Juno and the man somewhere safe that isn't in the middle of a search grid," I said.
"There's a couple who live off the ridge.
Retired, been out here twenty years, know how to keep their mouths shut and their porch light off when it needs to be.
She plays cards with Amanda's aunt. He has a shotgun he hasn't needed to use in about a decade because his face does the job. "
"You trust them?"
"I trust that they've seen enough of the wrong kind of people in their lives to know what to do when the right kind shows up needing something." I looked toward the north ridge. "We move Juno and the man there in two jumps. Then you and I head back south."
She was quiet for a second. "And then we go back for Sunshine."
"That was always the plan," I said. "She told us to run. She didn't tell us to stay gone."
Ariel's jaw set in a way I recognized by now. Not upset. Decided. "Good."
We cleaned up everything we'd used. Cold ash buried, tin set back where we'd found it, leaves redistributed.
The woods remembered every mistake you made in them, so you tried not to make many.
We took the creek for a stretch just to muddy our recent history and then cut up onto a deer trail that ran along the ridge without calling attention to itself.
I left the first marker for Wrecker where the trail split around a big storm-downed pine.
The Battalion had its own language for this.
Things that looked like litter or accident to anyone else but meant something specific to us.
I worked a pull tab through two pine needles, wedged them under the bark at shoulder height.
Two needles crossed meant friendlies came through.
The aluminum tab bent into a V shape meant take the left fork, go quiet.
Ariel watched my hands while I did it, then watched me tuck the bark back into place. "He'll find it?"
"Wrecker could find a breadcrumb in a blizzard if I left it," I said. "He hates being late to anything. I gave him a reason to be early."
We made our way back to the layup. The shed looked like it had never seen any of us, which was exactly right.
Pine needles undisturbed, no sign that four people had sheltered under that overhang through the worst of the rain.
Juno opened her eyes when she heard my boot on the ground, and for just a second her face went through about fifteen things before it landed on relief.
The hoarse man was already awake, sitting with his back against the frame and his hands loose in his lap.
He'd slept some. He looked marginally more human for it.
"Ready to move?" I asked.
Juno nodded. The man started to say something and stopped himself and just nodded too.
We took them along the spine of the ridge where the ground was more rock than soil and less likely to hold a print.
Ariel went first, talking them through the terrain in a low steady voice — step here, not there, root on your left, I've got you — the same voice she used on her students, I'd imagine.
Practical and warm and completely unrattled.
I took the rear and watched the tree line and moved the hoarse man's foot twice when it was heading somewhere that was going to announce us.
The first hide was a hunting blind somebody had nailed up years ago and stopped maintaining.
It looked neglected from the outside, which was perfect.
Inside it had shadow and a decent sight line and two exits that didn't point at each other.
I got them settled and crouched down to scratch a rough map in the dirt, route, landmark, water source, then smoothed it out with my palm once they had it.
Juno frowned at me for erasing it.
"The ground talks," I told her. "Don't give it more than it needs."
She thought about that. Nodded.
"Two hours," I said. "If we're not back, you take the route she showed you. No fires. No conversation above a whisper."
"No songs about how brave you were," Ariel added, squeezing Juno's shoulder.
That got a small, surprised sound out of Juno that was almost a laugh.
We slipped back into the trees.
The second leg was easier without two extra people to navigate.
Ariel and I moved faster, quieter, fitting ourselves into the spaces between things the way you learned to after enough nights like this one.
She didn't need me to narrate anymore. She watched my shoulders and read the angle of my head and moved accordingly, and there was something quietly satisfying about that, about being readable to her.
I left another marker at a logging road notch.
A flat river stone with a shallow arc scratched into the underside, set face-down with the mark pointing upstream.
It was one of the original signs from the early days of the club, something Vic had taught the first ten of us back when the patch was new and the code was newer.
We passed here. We're breathing. We're not bringing anything after us. Old language. Still good.
I also left a false trail. A boot scuff that looked like a slip, a bit of moved debris that read as careless. Men who were looking for us would spend time on it. Time was the only currency out here that actually mattered.
By midmorning the engine sounds had dropped away completely. The drone hadn't come back. Somewhere out there, someone with money and a plan was waiting for a status update that wasn't coming. I was fine with that.
The retired couple's place sat at the edge of a field that had grown up around it over the years, gray clapboard weathered to something that looked almost intentional, a porch with a slight lean to it, a dead truck half-swallowed by grass next to a live one with working tires.
A tin rooster on the shed roof, knocked sideways in some old storm and nailed back up crooked.
The kind of place that had decided it was done performing for anyone.