Chapter 103
She had killed three men. The fact arrived in her mind with the flat clarity of weather information: factual, irreversible, and stripped of the emotional weight she expected to feel but didn’t.
Her hands had stopped shaking. The knife rested in its sheath, and the radio against her palm was the only thing that felt real.
A voice had come through the handset. It was distant and encrypted, speaking a language she couldn’t understand but recognized as the same one she’d heard at the river barricade.
She knew they needed to move. The rifle shot had echoed, and someone might have heard it.
Charlotte tucked the radio into the outer pocket of her hazmat suit, where it pressed against her ribs, then checked the bodies one last time.
The dog found her first. It emerged from behind the granite outcrop with its ears forward and body tense.
When it saw her, it ran the last twenty yards and pressed against her legs hard enough to nearly knock her off balance.
She touched its head, felt it tremble, and understood what it wanted from her.
Mason was where she’d left him. He sat with his back against the boulder and his knees drawn to his chest, the child-sized mask still clipped to his belt instead of covering his face.
His skin looked very pale. When he saw the blood on her hazmat suit, his eyes widened and fixed on a point beyond her shoulder.
“It’s not mine,” Charlotte said. “I’m not hurt. We need to move now.”
They gathered the horses from behind the pines.
The mare stood patiently, and the gelding had settled.
Charlotte helped Mason mount, and he found his seat with the muscle memory of someone who’d been riding for weeks instead of days.
The dog leaped up behind him and settled against the gelding’s rump.
They rode west along the ridge for twenty minutes before Charlotte felt safe enough to stop.
The forest had thickened again, and they found a shallow depression between two granite shelves where the horses could stand without being visible from above.
She dismounted, helped Mason down, and pulled the radio from her pocket.
It was military-grade and compact, with a frequency dial and a small LCD screen that displayed numbers she assumed were channel identifiers.
The encryption settings were beyond her.
“What is it?” Mason asked.
“A radio from one of the soldiers,” Charlotte said. “It’s still working, but I don’t know how.”
She turned the volume up slightly. Static filled the speaker, then resolved into the hiss of an encrypted transmission.
A male voice came through, speaking rapid Russian with the clipped cadence of military radio procedure.
Charlotte listened, trying to extract meaning from a language she had no reference for.
The voice stopped, and another responded, then a third.
The exchange carried the rhythm of coordinates being verified or orders being confirmed.
“Do you understand any of it?” Mason asked.
“No,” Charlotte said. “It’s Russian. I’ve heard it before at the river.”
“They keep saying something that sounds like per-myenn or per-meen,” Mason said.
Charlotte hadn’t caught that pattern, but she trusted Mason’s ear.
Children picked up repetition where adults filtered for meaning.
The radio went quiet. For several minutes, the only sounds were the horses shifting and the dog’s soft panting at Mason’s feet.
Then the handset crackled to life again, and this time the pattern was unmistakable.
A voice came through, urgent and repeating the same word three times in quick succession. Another voice answered with the same word, then a third. It carried the insistence of something that couldn’t be misunderstood.
“Peremena,” Mason said softly.
“Peremena,” Charlotte repeated.
The word meant nothing to her. It could’ve been a location, a code word, or an order. The fact that multiple voices kept repeating it suggested urgency, and on military radio, urgency usually meant movement.
She turned the volume down and tucked the radio back into her pocket. Its weight against her ribs felt like a new kind of responsibility. She was carrying intelligence she couldn’t decipher, but someone might be able to use it.
“We should keep it,” she said. “It could be valuable.”
They mounted again. Charlotte led them west along the ridge trail, keeping to the trees where the canopy offered cover.
The afternoon was fading toward evening, and the light had taken on an amber quality, turning the forest floor gold and making distance harder to judge.
The radio transmitted again as they rode.
The same word, repeated through different voices with increasing urgency.
Charlotte felt it vibrate against her ribs and didn’t need to understand Russian to recognize the sound of something important happening.
Mason heard it, too. He turned toward the sound with the focused curiosity of a child listening to a language he couldn’t speak but was beginning to map.
The dog’s ears angled forward, tracking the radio’s electronic voice with steady alertness.
Something was coming. The radio said it in a tongue neither of them could translate, but the message lived in the repetition and urgency, in the way multiple voices had picked up the same word.
Charlotte kept riding. The radio hummed against her chest, a voice from the enemy speaking a word she couldn’t understand but would remember.