Chapter Thirty-Five
Thirty-five
“Ugh, these terrible midges.”
I hear the voice, but my eyes aren’t open. It’s as though I’m swimming in a deep, black lake. It’s a male voice, capable and confident. Not heavily accented like Allard’s.
“There you are.” I am gently turned. I fight to open my eyes, and the world comes into muted color and focus.
The Munros. The yellow-and-green hills. And Luca’s red-gold beard scruff, longer than I remember seeing it.
His wide blue eyes. He grins, his handsome face splitting with it.
“Hey, look at that. You’re back with me again. How do you feel, Zoe?”
I stare at him, trying to understand how Luca could be here.
“It’s all right, a bit disorienting, I know.
” Luca shifts. I’m cradled in his lap like a baby, head on his arm, knees up.
Nothing hurts, but I feel groggy, like there’s a layer between reality and me.
A layer of cloud. I’m sitting back, removed from pain.
“I’ve given you a shot of morphine. That’s why you’re a bit fuzzy. ”
Fuzzy. Yes. I nod, my lips moving, and Luca brings a water bottle to my mouth. I sip, but apparently my lips don’t work, because the water dribbles down my cheek.
“All right, we’ll work on that.” Luca nods. “Here, let’s sit up.” He gently lifts my back so I’m in sitting position, but I don’t have the ability to hold myself up, and my head lolls back against his chest. He swats at midges with his other hand.
It feels like long minutes pass.
“How?” I croak.
“Okay, yes, of course, how is a good question. But first things first. I’ve splinted your arm—looks like a nasty break, Zo, I was sorry to see that. And I’ve taped your broken fingers.”
“Allard,” I mumble. “And the 1982.”
He seems to understand what I mean because he shifts so my head is in the crook of his arm again and I can see his face. He gives me that megawatt smile. “They are both quite dead, just over there. And a mess, I have to say.”
I try to look, but I can’t move. “Really?”
“Yes. I’m not a doctor, although I have some medical training.
Comes in useful in the field, as you can see.
Looks like a truly beastly fight went down out here.
Lots of vomit on Allard. Multiple stab wounds.
The 1982’s face is honestly a horror—it looks like it was bashed in!
Allard seems to be missing an ear. I’m hoping I don’t see that when I close my eyes at night. But you are thankfully alive.”
“Good,” I say. Pushing the single word out takes Herculean effort.
“Yes. I’d have to agree.” Luca laughs. “There’s a lot of blood on you, though. It’s not yours, am I correct? You’re not stabbed or hurt anywhere else?”
“No.” At least I don’t think so. “Just…arm.”
“Yes, and I’ve got that.” He pats my good arm.
We sit for what feels like a long time. I drift in and out of consciousness, but Luca doesn’t move or talk. He simply holds me, and this is a generous gift. When I swim to the surface again, it’s because he’s shifting me slightly again.
“Well, Zoe, now is the time when we must see if you can walk, yes? We should get moving. It is already evening, and the hike back is long. We have loads of daylight, of course, and it’s almost a full moon tonight, so at least we’ll have that if the clouds stay away long enough.
Come.” He gently helps me to a sitting position.
“You’ve been sleeping for a few hours, and the morphine will be wearing off now, but perhaps you can go on a bit with the last of it.
Let’s see.” He gets up and lifts me to standing.
I sway a bit, but it’s okay. Farther along the trail, to the side of the stream, are two human-shaped lumps.
“You sure they’re dead?” I mumble. “Please be sure.”
“Quite.” Luca takes my elbow and guides me along. I stumble for the first several steps but right myself. Pain hovers at the edges of my brain like wicked red lace, but the morphine did a phenomenal job.
We walk-stumble, Luca straightening me when I need it, for what feels like a long time before I ask again, “How are you here?”
“Yes,” he says, as though he remembers the thread of conversation. “Well, you pressed the satellite button, so that was one way to pinpoint you—if you’re ProtoDark, and I happen to contract with them on the satellite ping.”
I make a huh sound of exhaling breath, because this is news.
“Of course, Xhan and I were already in Scotland by that time. We decided to come when we didn’t hear from Dane yesterday.
Took us a bit of time to work through customs and rent a car and get out to the Highlands, so after some discussion”—he says the words grimly, like discussion means argument—“it was decided that I should come out here after you.”
“Luca,” I say, my voice breaking. “Dane.”
“Right, yes, Dane wanted to come, but his leg, of course. I am here in his stead.”
Dane is alive.
I focus on breathing and sorting through this information. It feels monumentally difficult, like a math problem or a puzzle with a particularly complex cipher. “You…are the guy. You’re ProtoDark. You run the game.”
Luca laughs again. “Not the guy, definitely not. A guy. Occasionally forced to work for ProtoDark, yes, because of Dane’s involvement with them. They liked that I work with maps too. I’m sure there’s plenty of time to explain all of that.”
“Please,” I say. I take a moment to form the words that are most pressing. “Where is he?”
“In a hospital in Inverness.”
I’m weak with relief, but it’s hard to tell because I’m loopy from the morphine.
“Now, I do have to say that we lost track of Howland, but we’ll find him later. That guy’s an incredible bastard, but one thing he’s not good at is keeping a low profile.”
“Did he bring Dane to the hospital?” I lean heavily on Luca, and he rights me, holding me steady. We wait until I’m able before he marches us on.
“Yes, but he certainly wasn’t there by the time we arrived.
According to Dane, after you left, he told Eric that if he didn’t get him to the hospital and he died as a result, Eric would be liable for his murder.
That scared Eric enough to take him. They took Dane into surgery immediately, although I heard he put up a big fight and made the hospital let him make a call to us—well, to an answering service we use that forwards like an SOS to our phones.
We were three hours away from Inverness at that point.
” He chuckles. “Right, so, when we got close to Inverness, the satellite signal came through, then your PIN. It was perfect timing, really. It made sense for Xhan to stay with Dane since he was just getting out of surgery, and for me to come out after you. Not my fastest retrieval, admittedly. That record still goes to the one in Paris getting you and Dane out of Sophie’s wine cellar, but this wasn’t bad.
Typically this trail can be done in around five hours, but I got here in three. ”
I can’t sort through all that, but I manage, “Legend.”
Luca laughs. The sound is good. It feels right. He is a good person, no matter what his involvement in this game is, and not just because he hiked into the Scottish wilderness for me and brought morphine.
“In normal times, I’d be quite up for this hike, Zoe. It looks amazing. I can’t believe Allard marched you out here all this way. When did the 1982 catch up with you?”
I recognize that Luca is chattering to keep me awake and going, but there’s so much I need to ask and can’t.
I think about my sister and that disastrous email Eric scheduled for her employer.
And the county inspector, who will cite our parents’ house for being a pit.
And Dane. Everything concerning Dane. I wipe my face.
It’s swollen and achy from all the tears I’ve expended since coming out here.
I focus on Luca’s question. “He appeared at the end. He’d figured out that we gave him a fake fifth puzzle. ”
“You’re lucky to be alive.”
Even through my drug fog, I know that. I stop walking and choke on a sudden sob out of nowhere.
Luca catches me. “Ah, now. Yes. It’s upsetting. I get it.”
I sink against his chest, soaking his shirt with hot tears. I’m tired of crying. Tired of hurting. He pats me comfortingly.
“I have to say, it really is extremely beautiful out here,” he says over my head.
“You’ve been here before,” I say, my face muffled in his chest. “To bury the box?”
“Ah, no. Not me. That would be someone else.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. ProtoDark employs many people. We don’t know who’s in the organization. It’s safer for everyone that way.”
“But…what do you get out of it?”
He releases me and keeps his hand on my good arm as he guides us along the trail, which I appreciate because I’m stumbling as we go.
“Money, of course,” he says. “And ProtoDark gets to see the bad actors in the space—the Allards, the 1982s, the Sophies. The Howlands. Dane says that matters to overall business. All I know is the small part I play, or Xhan plays, or Dane, even. It is separate from our real work.”
I am quiet for a long time before I say, “Luca. I like you and Xhan so much.”
“We like you too, Zoe.”
“But you’re telling me too much. Bad guys always like to tell things.”
We emerge onto the main trail back from Loch na Sealga now. It’s a relief; my arm is throbbing at a low, insistent level and my head is clanging, but I recognize the trail. We’re a few hours from the road and out of this nightmare.
“I’m not a bad guy,” Luca says. “Anyway, you won.”
I stumble again and Luca catches me. No, he’s not a bad guy. But there are so many competing thoughts in my head that I don’t know what to think.
“Hey,” Luca says. “Do you think you can stop and take some water and a little food?”
“I’m not drinking from these streams,” I say. I don’t remember where the rotten rabbit was, but it was on this stretch of the trail. “That’s what happened to Allard. He drank contaminated water.”