WRECKER
The ranger station was a memory. Smoke on the ridge, a busted door left for the next storm. We'd moved downhill to an old toolshed near the creek. Close enough to hear the depot's trucks if they rolled before dawn.
The shed had been a rectangle of ideas at some point. Now it was blackened studs and a tin roof that popped when the wind remembered it. We'd aired it out until the steam quit lying. It still tasted like battery smoke and wet plywood.
Ghost took first perimeter. Ranger took second.
Cap paced a groove from the door to the table and back, jaw working like he was chewing through something that wouldn't give.
Doc had gone quiet, doing his inventory thing.
Counting what we had, cataloguing what we didn't. Praying, in his way.
I tried the chair. It creaked like it was filing a complaint. I got back up.
We'd lost Amanda in that smoke a few hours ago. Lost as in the ridge swallowed her path. Not the other kind of lost. I couldn't think that word and keep my hands still.
The handheld sat dead center on the table, screen cracked, battery taped in with gaffer tape. We'd tried the MC relay twice. Static and crosstalk both times. The watcher had been sitting on the frequency since dawn, running interference.
"Say it," Ranger said from the doorway, not turning around.
"I'm not saying it," I said.
"You're thinking it loud."
"Thinking isn't saying." I rubbed my eye with the heel of my hand. It came away gray. "We don't eulogize without a body."
Cap stopped mid-pace and braced his palms on the table. The tendons in his forearms stood up. "Doc?"
Doc closed the med kit with a click. "Two rounds left for the big gun. Low on gauze. Out of miracles." He paused. "I've seen worse. I don't like it."
"Copy," Cap said. Which is what he says when he wants to put his fist through a wall but the wall hasn't earned it.
The handheld woke up.
A chirp. Low and stubborn, like something knocking from inside a trunk. Ghost slid back in from the doorway, he'd been right outside, waiting for exactly this kind of cue, and looked at our faces before he looked at the radio. Good habits.
Another chirp, clearer. A short-burst packet, not voice. The kind Scout used when she needed to move without being heard.
I felt my ribs expand and contract at the same time. "Up," I said.
Ranger closed the door with his shoulder and killed the outside light. Cap lowered the blackout curtain without being asked.
I rolled the dial past the watcher's spooled-out noise and the weather band down to the thin lane where Scout lived when she went quiet. Another chirp. Three short, one long, three short. Scout's signature. But Scout wasn't the one in there.
I thumbed transmit. "Say again."
"I'm in."
Every head came up like someone had pulled a wire.
I kept it flat. "Identify."
"Freight front. Northern depot." A pause. "Don't come for me."
The room froze.
Ariel's voice came first, rough from smoke. "We thought you got taken. You were in the woods, there was gunfire. How are you, where are you—"
Static, then Amanda again, quieter. Like she was crouched under a desk. "Not taken. Not yet. When the smoke hit, Doc and I split at the bend. I doubled back."
"You what?" Cap said.
"I could see the trucks pulling out," she went on, fast but steady. "Half the drivers bailed. The ones that stayed were yelling about restaging, reprinting manifests, moving the convoy before daylight. Nobody was checking faces, just counting clipboards. So I grabbed one and walked with them."
"You walked back into the depot," Ranger muttered. "While bullets were flying."
"It was loud, chaotic, perfect cover," she said. "I found an office with the morning shift coming in. Temp hires, short-staffed, desperate. Said I was from the contractor agency that sent the last girl home. They bought it."
Doc scrubbed his face with both hands. "You went backward into hell and they gave you a badge."
"Badge, desk, and an outdated password list someone wrote on a sticky note," she said. "I've pulled internal manifests. There's a basement that doesn't show up on any official plan."
Cap leaned on the table, voice low. "So you're inside."
"I'm inside," she said. "And if you come for me now you'll blow it. Wait until I send proof. Then burn them."
I kept my voice level. "Confirm. You hot or you safe?"
A short laugh, no humor, just air leaking from a tire. "Define safe. I'm on a borrowed badge and a laptop that thinks I'm temp labor. They like fresh faces. I'm not the only one."
"Time since separation?" Cap asked.
"Three hours, give or take the part where I ran, hid, pretended to know how to smoke, and learned the difference between a freight supervisor and a man with a clipboard complex."
Ranger tilted his head, eyes on the ceiling. "How'd you get in?"
"Same way I got through college," she said. "Confidence and a printer."
Doc made a sound that might've been a laugh. Might've been a warning.
I pinched the bridge of my nose. "You walked into the front office while we were trading fire out back."
"They were short a morning admin," she said. "Two didn't show. Smoke spooks people."
"And you figured, why not you."
"I figured I was already inside the fence," she said, voice dropping lower. "I figured if I went with you, I'd be a witness. If I stayed, I could be more than that."
Ghost moved to the map on the wall and tapped the depot square with his knuckle, soft. "She's good."
"We knew that," Cap said. "Question is whether they know it yet."
"I'm fine," Amanda said, which is what people say when they're not.
"I've got three screens and a password someone wrote on a sticky note like it's still 2008.
There's a sublease folder that shouldn't exist. A camera grid with blind corners.
A door to a basement that doesn't appear on any plan. I'm pulling copies."
Something banged in her background. Drawer or door, couldn't tell.
"Amanda," I said, coming in lower than I meant to. "You did good. Now you wait. We come to you."
"No," she said. The no had shape. "Not like that."
"Say it clear," I said.
"Don't come in loud," she said, and then softer. Like the words were private and the radio was just borrowing them. "Not fast. If you rush, they burn it all. You know this."
"Trap," Ghost said to the room, not the radio.
"Could be," I said. I listened to the breathing under her voice. The hitch she has when she's holding something back. The phrasing was right. The rhythm was right. "It's her," I said.
Cap nodded once. "It's her."
"Time?" I asked her.
"Until someone better at spelling than the foreman shows up," she said. "I'm wearing the badge and the attitude. Three people carry the weight so seven don't have to. I'm pretending to be one of the seven."
"How deep?" Ranger asked.
"As deep as I can get," she said. "There's an internal manifest that doesn't match the external one. If I can pull the gap between them, we don't think they're moving people as aid. We know."
"And if they cut your access?"
"Then I walk out smiling and say my agency screwed me on the rate," she said. "Which they probably did."
I looked at Cap. He looked back. That look said: she's inside, we're outside, it's a gift and it's terrible.
The radio hissed. Voices in her background. Men talking about pallets and coffee and why someone keeps forgetting something in the supervisor's drawer. I heard it and my fingers twitched for grip tape.
"Wreck," Amanda said, quick. "I can send a dead drop if I get anything worth dying for."
"You won't," I said. "You'll send it and live for it."
"Copy," she said, and I could hear the shape of her mouth on the word. "I have to go. My break ended before it started."
"Amanda," Cap said, soft enough I almost missed it. "We're here."
"I know," she said. "Don't be dumb."
Static. One second, two. Then the tone chirped once, short, smug, and died.
I set the handheld down like a fragile animal. Let my hands shake once and then quit. You can't run a crew with theater hands.
Ranger blew out a breath. "She's either a genius or we're about to buy ourselves a small war."
"Why not both," Ghost said.
Doc rubbed his thumb over his lip and left a soot mark. "We can't hit the front. Even if we had the ammo, which we don't, you start shooting at a depot stamped relief goods and every cop in three counties shows up to film it."
"So we don't hit the front," Cap said. He was looking at the map. At the corner where the access road met the chain-link and the trees pressed close. "We walk in."
I knew the shape of the thought before he finished saying it. "As them," I said. "Not the office. The trucks."
Ghost nodded once. "Contract haulers. Short-term, cash, no questions. Every shell moving boxes hires off a board."
Ranger shrugged. "I can tolerate boredom. Six minutes, tops."
Doc cleared his throat. "We need IDs that survive a glance. Plates that don't bounce. A story for why we show up mid-cycle. And clothes that aren't on fire."
"Plates are easy," Ghost said. "IDs. A day if we need them to pass anyone careful. A glance? I can do a glance before lunch."
Cap tapped the map. "We don't all go. Two inside, two outside, one float."
"Who floats?" Ranger asked.
"You," Cap and I said at the same time.
Doc lifted two fingers. "I'd like to not be the guy explaining a clipboard for more than thirty seconds."
"You're medical if anyone asks," I said. "You're always medical." I scratched my jaw. "Ghost and I do the hire."
Ghost's eyes moved. That's a yes, coming from him.
Cap didn't argue. He wanted inside, but he knows when to pick a lock and hand it to the man who looks better doing the opening. He pressed one finger to his temple. Agreeing, saving the fight for later.
Ranger wandered to the pile that used to be our gear and kicked a boot heel. "What do truck guys wear that we don't?"
"Less black," Doc said. "More stains."
"Ball caps," Ghost added. "Sunglasses that say no eye contact."
"The smell of menthols," Ranger said. "We can fake that with toothpaste and regret."
Cap wasn't smiling. He was running timelines. "We need a truck."
"Two," I said. "One to sell, one to keep clean. We don't know if we're walking out or driving out."
Doc tapped the med kit's burn mark. "What's the plan if we have to leave with someone who doesn't want to be seen leaving?"
"Crates," Ghost said. Not a joke. "We came in with crates. We leave with crates."
I pressed my palm flat on the map. "Okay. Ghost and I pull the contract. Ranger builds the float lane on the creek side. Doc gets us looking respectable. Cap. You run the outside line and keep the sisters breathing until we come back with something that doesn't end in a news story."
Cap's eyes went to the doorway where the morning was trying to exist and failing at it. "You sure it's not a trap?" he asked.
"No," I said. "I'm sure it's both."
He took that the way you take weather. "Then we plan for both."
Ghost had already moved to the corner where we kept the printer. He knocked ash out of the tray and plugged it into a battery pack. "We need names," he said.
"First names that sound like second choices," Ranger said. "Nobody trusts a Trevor."
"Speak for yourself," Doc said.
I flipped my notebook to a page that hadn't burned. Pen found the groove. Not plans yet. Promises.
"Temporary hauler paperwork," Ghost said.
"Safety vests," Doc said. "Not neon. The sad orange."
Ranger: "A toolbox that looks used."
Cap: "Comms that don't look like comms."
"Attitude," I said. "The we're-here-to-work kind. The kind that makes you invisible unless you screw up."
The handheld ticked once, soft. I didn't key it. I put my palm flat on top of it instead, like a hand on a shoulder.
"You all right?" Ranger asked. He meant me and the plan both.
"No," I said. "But I'm useful. That's better."
Ghost printed a test sheet. Signature line, tax form, a question about reflective triangles. It looked exactly like every form I'd ever wanted to throw across a room. Perfect.
Cap rolled his shoulders like he was shrugging off a jacket he'd been wearing too long. "We do this quiet," he said. "No heroics. We're not saving the world today."
"Just breaking theirs," I said.
Ranger headed for the door. "I'll get your ball caps," he said over his shoulder. "Try not to pick cowboy names while I'm gone."
"That's the tetanus shot when you're back," Doc said to me. "Not a request."
"Add it to the list."
Cap's mouth moved. Almost a smile. "Make the list shorter."
"Working on it," I said.
Ghost held up the first fake badge. Laminate crooked in that specific way cheap offices always are. He handed it over. The name on it was forgettable. Good.
I clipped it to my shirt and felt the weight of what we were about to do settle in.
"If they think we work for them," I said, "we'll burn them from the inside."