Chapter 27 #2
The woman pours coffee with the steady hand of a professional and leaves us with menus sticky enough to qualify as local artifacts.
Miles reaches for the sugar packets, then slides two toward me before I ask.
I stare at it, then at him.
“What?” he asks.
“Nothing.”
“You’re making a face,” he counters.
“I’m being normal,” I say.
“You hate plain diner coffee.”
“I do.”
“You use two sugars here.”
“I hate that you know that,” I say, a smile curling at my lips.
His mouth tips. “I know a lot of things.”
“Terrible for you.”
“Great for science.”
“Science doesn’t need to know how I take diner coffee.”
“Science is comprehensive.”
Jax drops his menu. “I would like to formally complain about being seated near whatever this is.”
Taylor shoots him a look. “You ship it.”
“I can ship something and still suffer from exposure.”
Owen leans back. “I don’t ‘ship’ anything involving my brother.”
“Booo,” Jax chimes in.
Miles taps the table twice. “Okay, I love this energy,” he says sarcastically, as if he wasn’t the one who got distracted. “But let’s focus, guys.”
The change is immediate.
Menus lower.
Coffee mugs settle.
Miles pulls out the map. It’s not a paper map this time, but a topographical printout marked up with pens and highlighters, because of course Miles Adler would rather perish than fully trust a screen.
Red lines cut through washes, ridgelines, and dry creek beds.
A cluster of small black dots marks the cave system Owen flagged from old satellite overlays and whatever classified-adjacent fever dream probably got him fired.
The area is deeper than we’ve ever gone.
Higher, too.
A maze of high desert brush, sandstone shelves, narrow slots, and cave mouths carved into the ridge like the land is keeping its own secrets.
Taylor traces the route with one blunt fingernail.
“We enter here, before sunrise. No north access. Too exposed.”
“And Daisy’s got Ridgefield covered.” Maya asks.
“Wait, what?” Miles says.
Every face turns toward me. My pulse kicks. Performance adrenaline. Real adrenaline. Maybe those are finally the same thing now.
“Yeah, I didn’t really get a chance to tell you last night.”
Jax elbows Miles in the ribs while Owen chokes on his coffee. Taylor and Maya giggle.
“Okay, guys! Not like that!” I practically shout. For as good as it feels to not be hiding anything from this crew, I can’t help but feel a little validated in our choice to keep it under wraps.
“Anyways,” I say, trying to reset, “I have a plan to get dear old Grant out of the way through some misdirection. I noticed they’d been showing up at every site we’d visited within twenty-four hours.
He obviously had his crew scrubbing your footage and my posts to identify the locations so might as well give him a new location to check out. ”
I hold my phone out on the table so everyone can see.
“He posted again forty minutes ago.”
Jax groans. “Does he sleep?”
“No. He’s undead. Have you seen his skin tone?”
Miles’s mouth twitches.
I open the video.
Grant Ridgefield fills the screen, standing somewhere dusty and scenic, talking directly into camera with the kind of confidence only mediocre men and cult leaders possess.
“Strange Terrain can keep chasing fairy tales,” he says, voice tinny through my speaker. “We’re done playing games. We know where the real activity is. Some of us are actually willing to go where the evidence leads.”
The video cuts to a blurred ridge.
Then to an edited clip of Miles kneeling over a track, slowed down and filtered to make him look ridiculous.
My jaw tightens, and Miles goes very still.
Taylor says, “Turn it off before I throw the phone.”
I do, then switch to our profile, perking up.
“Our turn,” I say. Miles looks apprehensive.
Jax brightens. “Oh, I like vengeance for breakfast.”
“Not vengeance,” Maya corrects.
I lift a shoulder. “Strategic control of the narrative.”
Owen looks at Miles. “Is she always like this?”
Miles’s eyes stay on me, glowing with pride.
“She is.”
Warmth moves over my skin.
I open the drafted post. It’s a short clip featuring a wide shot of desert, along with deliberately vague footage shot far away from today’s actual route.
It’s meant to promote the next podcast release, but it’s more than that.
The caption reads:
Curiosity is powerful. It can bring people together, open doors, and make the world feel bigger. But wonder without respect becomes exploitative.
If you’re following this story, please don’t search for locations, trespass, disturb land, leave bait, set unauthorized cameras, or interfere with ongoing fieldwork. The best way to engage with the mystery is to protect the people, wildlife, and land connected to it.
The truth doesn’t belong to the loudest person in the room.
It belongs to those willing to move with respect.
Taylor reads it once. Then again. Her mouth firms.
“Crushed it.” From her, it feels like a Pulitzer.
Maya nods. “Post it.”
I look at Miles and he’s already looking back at me. There’s something in his expression I don’t know what to do with. “Ready?” I ask him.
“Do it.” His voice is low.
I post and my stomach does a dramatic cartwheel.
Jax immediately grabs his phone.
“And now we wait for the internet to be normal.”
Maya gives him a look.
“Right,” he says. “Sorry. Delusional.”
The first comments roll in before our food arrives. Then more. Then shares. The tone shifts faster than I expected. People echoing the ethics language. Calling out Ridgefield accounts. Fan pages updating rules. Outdoor creators reposting the boundary message and adding commentary.
A van life creator named Sadie reaches out and asks if I need help getting the message out there to protect public lands, offering her services as a designer. After seeing her work from a Bryce Canyon campaign, I plan to take her up on the offer as soon as I can.
A strange feeling blooms in me. Hope, maybe. The kind that scares me because it asks something of you.
Then the other part of the plan starts working.
One of the harmless fake Instagram Stories—a deliberate reference to a canyon system northeast of town—is viewed by Ridgefield.
The audio features our general background chatter, including something that sounds like “black mesa.” But it’s actually Jax mumbling “backpack’s a mess” under wind distortion.
There’s a visual of a ridge from an older scouting day, cropped tight enough to be useless, familiar enough to look important.
It all looks like we’re actively searching and getting closer, but nearly forty miles from where we actually are.
We’re mapping out the latest coordinates when Ridgefield’s latest story updates, just five minutes after we posted. Grant’s crew is loading gear. And based on the highway sign shown, he’s heading the wrong direction. Jax claps his hands together like a villain.
“Oh, that is delicious,” he says.
Taylor’s smile is small and terrifying. “Fuck yes.”
Maya exhales for what feels like the first time all morning.
Owen leans over to look. “They’re really that eager to be where we are?”
“Sure are,” I say.
Miles laughs quietly beside me.
The sound settles under my skin.
The waitress appears with pancakes, eggs, hash browns, toast, and a side of bacon Jax calls “emotionally necessary.”
Taylor holds the energy drink she walked in with for a celebratory cheers. “Here’s to getting those fuckers out of the way! Bigfoot Catfish was a success!”
I smile at her, holding up my coffee and the rest of the crew does the same. My eyes pass from one person to the next, taking in the scene.
“Thanks for trusting me, guys,” I say quietly. Smiles and nods follow, and for a little while, we eat like normal people pretending not to be planning a final expedition into suspicious cave systems while attempting to outmaneuver an aggressive rival crew.
Miles cuts off a piece of my pancake and steals one of my hash browns.
I gasp and he freezes.
“That was a crime,” I say.
His ears go pink. “I thought we were sharing.”
“We are bonded, not merged.”
He slides the hash brown back onto my plate.
It has a bite out of it.
I stare. He looks genuinely uncertain.
Jax whispers, “This is the most intimate thing I have ever witnessed.”
I point my fork at him. “You’re next.”
“I respect boundaries,” he puts his hands up in surrender.
“You do not,” Maya cuts in.
“No, but I’ve heard of them.”
The table laughs, and for a heartbeat, everything feels easy. Miles gets quiet, watching everyone at the table.
“I, uh, I just want you guys to know, we could call it,” he says. “And it would be okay.”
The words surprise me. Taylor looks up sharply, dropping her fork on the plate.
“Miles,” she says, incredulous. “Be for real.”
Miles ignores her, keeping his eyes on mine.
“If this feels too exposed, if we think the risk is too high, we stop. We’ve got other cases on deck.
I know I’ve been hanging onto this one, but that’s exactly why I felt I had to say something.
” He looks around the booth. “All of you are more important to me than getting to the bottom of this. If we don’t go through with this expedition, it’s not the end of the world. ”
I know what that would cost him. I know exactly what the hunt means to him. A thread connecting him to people he lost and a childhood full of wonder and a version of the world where grief didn’t get the final word. And he would put it down. For us. For me.
I reach under the table and take his hand.
“No,” I say. “We’ve come this far. And I think we all want to wrap this one on a good note. No matter what happens. At least we’ll know we tried.” My voice comes out steadier than I feel.
His gaze searches mine. A muscle in his jaw moves, and then he nods. The room exhales around us.
Taylor folds the map. “Then let’s finish breakfast and move, bitches.”
The rest of the day is like muscle memory for everyone but me.