Chapter 10
chapter
ten
DAISY
Thursday morning starts with coffee and avoidance.
I feel it the second I wake up. The Machine is quieter than usual. Not an unhappy quiet. Just tired, emotionally and physically.
Jax is editing footage with his headphones on but hasn’t made a single joke in ten minutes, which must mean he is in crisis.
Maya is hunched over budget spreadsheets with the expression of a woman one bad receipt away from homicide.
Taylor sits cross-legged on the dinette bench, sipping coffee and staring out the windshield like she’s trying to spiritually intimidate the desert into cooperating.
And Miles is pretending everything feels normal. I recognize it because I’ve been in the same mode since I got here.
He’s moving a little too efficiently. Talking a little too much during the morning briefing. Falling back on facts, maps, and field language to keep everyone focused on process rather than outcome. It’s weirdly endearing. Also deeply concerning for my emotional well-being.
Everyone in the Mystery Machine is avoiding the same thing: nothing has happened since the vocalization.
It’s not out of the ordinary for the team, but they’re feeling the pressure of it because of my presence.
I have the framework of the first episode, but not the hook to lead into the rest of the series. We need something.
We need visual confirmation, clean track, thermal signatures, or anything that holds up under scrutiny. Not just strange noises, weird patterns, and the kind of lingering tension that builds when a group of people wants something badly enough to start reading meaning into silence.
I sit on the floor in the center of it all with my recorder balanced beside my laptop while Miles pulls up terrain maps on the main monitor.
“Okay,” he says, clapping once. “New lead came in overnight from a ranger contact near the Coconino border. Possible vocalization reports near a canyon system east of the old fire roads.”
Taylor raises one eyebrow. “Possible possible?”
“Potentially possible.”
“That’s not a real category,” she says, annoyed.
“It is in my brain,” Miles replies.
Jax mutters, “God bless this weird little man,” without looking up from his footage.
Out of professional courtesy, Miles ignores him.
“We’ll head out in two groups,” he continues. “Jax and Taylor will get to the border and run aerial and perimeter sweeps first. Maya handles logging and comms.”
Taylor murmurs something, her voice so quiet we ask her to repeat it.
“What if it’s nothing again?”
The room stills. Even Jax pauses his editing. Taylor doesn’t look embarrassed, exactly. Just worn down in a way I haven’t seen from her before.
She absentmindedly twists her coffee cup between both hands.
“I’m serious,” she says, eyes still fixed on the windshield. “What if I keep doing this forever and it’s always almost?”
Nobody answers right away.
My heart tightens unexpectedly because this… this is real. Not the fun, quirky cryptid-hunting dynamic. Not Taylor’s usual cosmic cowgirl chaos.
Just doubt. Raw and human and exhausted. Instinctively, my hand brushes the recorder beside me.
This is the moment. The kind producers kill for. Vulnerability. Cracks in the foundation. Emotional truth surfacing all on its own.
My brain starts assembling episode structure before I can stop it.
Even believers get tired eventually.
What happens when this becomes too much?
When the thing keeping you going starts wearing you down instead?
I glance toward Miles. He’s standing motionless near the monitor station, one hand resting against the edge of the table. He doesn’t jump in with reassurance, and that catches me off guard more than Taylor’s doubt does. Miles always has an answer. Not arrogant answers. Just grounding ones.
But now? Now he looks… careful. Like he understands exactly how much weight his response carries.
Taylor finally looks up at him, and suddenly I understand what this really is.
She doesn’t need him to prove Bigfoot exists.
She needs to know this life still matters if it doesn’t.
Miles exhales.
“I don’t know,” he admits.
The words land hard.
Even Maya looks surprised.
Because this is Miles Adler. Miles “migration patterns” Adler. Miles “cryptid ecology is a legitimate field discussion” Adler.
And yet he still says, “I can’t promise anybody there’s something out there.”
Taylor’s face crumples for a fleeting second before she covers it with a laugh.
“Well,” she says thinly, “that’s a horrifying reality check.”
“What’s horrifying is not believing there’s something more,” Jax counters.
Miles rubs the back of his neck once, gaze dropping to the floor before lifting again.
“Jax is right. I do believe Bigfoot is here,” he says, the conviction in his voice softer than usual. “I really do.”
“And if we’re wrong, if I’m wrong…” He pauses. “That doesn’t make us stupid.”
Nobody moves. I don’t think anyone’s breathing. Miles glances around the Machine slowly, meeting each of their eyes one at a time.
“This team still exists,” he says. “The work we do still matters—it goes way beyond Bigfoot. The cases we’ve solved and the people we’ve brought some peace to matter.”
Taylor’s eyes shine. Jax looks away toward the window. Maya goes very still beside her laptop.
And Miles… God. He keeps going anyway.
“Half the things we’ve documented are real regardless,” he says.
“Missing person correlations. Environmental anomalies. Sounds we can’t explain.
” A tiny shrug. “And honestly? If all this ends someday and all we did was build something good out here together…” His mouth twitches faintly. “That’s still not nothing.”
Something shifts painfully in my chest. Because I know where this is coming from now. The hike yesterday. His parents. The fear underneath all of this.
Who is he if this isn’t real? What happens if he built his life around grief and hope and turns out to be wrong? And worse—I can see him trying to carry the emotional weight of everyone else too.
Taylor wipes under one eye. “You’re not allowed to emotionally devastate me this early in the morning.”
“Didn’t mean to,” Miles says with a sympathetic smile.
The tension breaks after that.
Jax mutters something about needing therapy.
Maya’s quiet typing resumes.
Taylor declares herself “spiritually repaired until further notice.”
And I sit frozen, looking down at my untouched recorder.
When Taylor started talking a few minutes earlier, my fingers hovered over the recorder for one suspended second. I knew where that conversation was going, and I knew it would make incredible audio. Beautiful and human and vulnerable.
The exact kind of emotional honesty audiences connect to.
In the past, I would’ve started recording without a second thought.
Not because I’m cruel. Because it’s my job.
But then I looked at Taylor as she wiped her tears.
At Maya, pretending to look unaffected.
At Miles, standing there trying so hard to hold everyone together while quietly unraveling inside.
And suddenly the idea of packaging that moment for strangers felt…wrong. On a personal level.
I never thought that would be a choice I’d be proud of, but I am.
No recording. The decision feels tiny and enormous all at once. Across the room, Miles glances toward me briefly. Then toward the recorder as I slide it into my pocket.
And something in his expression shifts. Small, but unmistakable.
Trust.
Well, fuck.
By noon, we are all in Coconino National Forest following the new lead.
On our drive to the trailhead, we ascend over 2,000 feet in elevation. The landscape changes fast out here.
Red desert slowly gives way to dense pine and steep canyon terrain, shadows stretching longer beneath the trees while the air cools almost twenty degrees. It feels right in a way. More Bigfoot-like.
The crew split naturally into motion when we got here. Maya, Taylor, and Jax are in the 4Runner. Taylor drives, Maya logs coordinates, and Jax operates the drone. Miles and I are on foot, tracking the report he found. We have plans to rendezvous back at the trailhead before sundown.
Miles leads us deeper along an old game trail, scanning our environment at every turn. I’m glad one of us is confident and present here, because mentally, I’m still back in the Machine.
I’m trying very hard not to think about his speech this morning. Now, every time I look at him, I remember that underneath all the conspiracy forums and wilderness competence and annoyingly attractive leadership qualities, he’s scared too.
In the past, that would’ve made a man less attractive to me. Instead, with Miles, it makes him feel real.
The trail narrows sharply as we move deeper into the trees.
Wind brushes through the pines overhead.
Somewhere farther down the canyon, something knocks once against wood.
We both freeze.
Miles lifts one hand and does a series of tactical hand gestures, as if I’m supposed to know what he means.
“Again?! What the fuck, Adler?” I whisper-yell.
Then he just puts his finger to his lips in a plea for silence.
The forest stills around us.
Then, voices. Male voices. Loud and careless.
Miles’s expression hardens. “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”
I’ve seen him protective before. I have not seen him like this.
“Ridgefield,” he growls, head down.
Three men emerge farther down the trail wearing camo tactical gear so aggressively masculine it feels insecure. They don’t look like researchers. They look like men who want to win something and don’t care what breaks in the process. Hunters in every regard.
Mud on their boots. Dark jackets. One with a shaved head and a scar cutting through his eyebrow. Another with a camera bag slung across his body, his hand resting on it like it’s a weapon. The tallest one leads them, blond beard, hard eyes, smile already loaded.
He spots Miles immediately.
“Well,” he says, loud enough to scare deer away. “If it isn’t the Strange Man himself.”
Miles tenses. The energy changes so fast my stomach drops.
“You’re in our zone, Grant,” Miles says evenly.
Grant laughs. “Your zone?”
“Active investigation zone.”