2. Ryker
Ryker
I count the birds before I count anything else.
Old habit from selection that never left.
Two Steller's jays yelling at each other in the pines to my left.
A Clark's nutcracker hammering a dead limb forty yards south.
Somewhere higher, a golden-crowned kinglet whistling.
Means the storm building behind the peaks is still a few hours out.
Birds tell you things. Right now they're noisy, which means nobody's been up this trail today except me.
I cut the engine on the ridge and sit for a minute staring down at the old mine site.
Feds have been crawling over it for days.
Yellow tape snaps in the wind. Black SUVs sit near the empty shipping container.
Agents load evidence boxes and take final photos.
The place looks smaller in daylight. Stripped of the chaos and the gunfire.
I step out into the cold. Snow crunches under my boots.
The air bites at my face, but I've been breathing this mountain air long enough that the cold's just another texture.
My breath fogs. I can feel the storm in the low ache behind my left knee, the one I shattered overseas.
When that knee starts talking, snow's twelve hours out at most.
I walk down toward the site, scanning the tree line like I always do. Agent Davenport spots me first. He's leaning against the lead SUV with a thermos, silver at the temples, the kind of fed who's been in the field long enough to stop caring about his tie.
"Stone. Thought you'd be halfway to your cabin by now, feet up, fire going."
"Feet up isn't really my thing." I take the thermos he offers. The coffee's terrible. Thin and burnt. I drink it anyway. "You boys wrapping up?"
"Just about. Evidence is logged. Container's processed. The women are all placed. Haven 7 or back with families." He pauses. "Fourteen women, Ryker. Fourteen. And Weathers had routes set up to move more. If your team hadn't gotten to that semi when you did—"
"But we did."
"Yeah. You did."
I don't say what I'm thinking. We got lucky on the timing. Skill only explains about sixty percent of any good outcome. The rest is the universe deciding not to kill you today.
"The count," I say. "Fourteen match your intake intel?"
His face tightens a little. "We had reports of fifteen to eighteen being cycled through. Hard to pin down. Fourteen is what we pulled out. Could be the others were moved before the raid. Could be the numbers were wrong."
"Could be."
"You don't sound convinced."
"I'm not paid to be convinced. I'm paid to make sure your perimeter's clean before you pull out and leave these mountains to me." I nod toward the tree line. "I'm doing a sweep of the outer trails. Make sure nobody cached anything or left a bolt hole we missed."
Davenport waves me off. "Have at it. We're wheels up by thirteen hundred regardless."
I leave him to his bad coffee and move into the trees.
This is the part I'm good at. Not the briefings or the paperwork. Boots on frozen ground. Eyes reading what the snow has to say.
I work the perimeter outward from the main structures. Tracks everywhere. Federal boots. Equipment drag marks. Vehicle ruts already filling with powder. All expected.
Then I see it.
A faint trail leading away from the site.
Not toward the road. Into the deep timber.
Small prints, half-filled with fresh snow but still legible.
Days old. From right around the time the shooting started.
Spacing's wrong for walking. Too wide at first. Running.
Then the stride shortens and gets irregular.
Limping. Right foot striking lighter. Low branches snapped at about five and a half feet. Shorter than any of the men we ID'd.
One of the women. She bolted when the chaos hit. Got scared, didn't know we were the ones coming to pull them out, and ran straight into the wilderness.
My jaw tightens. These mountains don't care about fear or good intentions. They'll kill you either way. And someone in flat-soled sneakers has been trying to survive out here for days.
I follow the trail.
It winds deeper into the pines, away from roads and lower elevations. She went up. Into harder country. The kind that gets people killed in summer with full gear, let alone in winter with nothing.
I read the signs without slowing much. Falling. Getting back up. Places where she sat against a tree long enough to compress the snow. She tried to cover her tracks once by dragging a branch. It might've fooled a casual hiker. It didn't slow me down.
The wind picks up as I climb. My radio crackles with static from the feds below, but I don't answer. The storm in my knee is getting louder. Sky confirms it. Heavy gray stacking over the peaks. Snow starts falling thicker.
I should turn back. The trail's old. Whoever left it has either made it down the other side or—
I stop that thought.
The trail goes cold at a creek crossing, then picks up again upstream. She's barely walking now. I can see where she went down hard on one knee and stayed there long enough for snow to start covering the impression before she got up again.
The will it takes to get up from that—I've seen trained operators fail to summon it. This woman has it.
I keep going.
The trail leads higher into a cluster of granite outcroppings and a big fallen pine that's created a natural hollow against the rock face.
I slow my approach. Identify cover. Listen.
Wind in the canopy. My own breathing. And underneath it, the thin rasp of someone pulling air through a throat that's too dry and too cold.
I move around the edge of the fallen pine. Disturbed snow. Branches stacked in a rough lean-to that's half collapsed. Someone tried to build a shelter with apron strings and desperation. A few stripped sticks propped against the rock, one sharpened to a rough point. Not useful, but she tried.
Then I hear the sound.
A short, sharp gasp. The kind a body makes when pain overrides the command to stay silent. It comes from inside the hollow, followed by the clatter of something skittering across snow. A rock. Palm-sized. It tumbles out and comes to rest three feet from my boots.
I round the fallen pine and look down into the hollow.
She's on her knees in the dirt. Dark hair tangled and crusted with ice.
Face too thin and too pale, streaked with grime and dried tear tracks.
Waitress dress, the kind of thin polyester a thousand small-town diners put their girls in.
Soaked through and clinging to her. Apron still tied at her waist, strings frayed because she used them for the shelter.
One ankle swollen dark and tight inside a canvas sneaker split along the sole.
What stops me is the rest of it. A small pile of pine needles arranged like she tried to make a nest. Three stripped sticks laid parallel.
A handful of red berries set carefully on a flat rock, rationed in groups of three.
And scratched into the dirt near the wall, a single tally.
Five marks crossed through, and three more beside them. Eight days.
Eight days alone in country that should've killed her in two.
Her hands are pressed flat against the frozen ground. She's shaking hard. Full-body tremors. Her eyes are open but unfocused, pointed at my boots. The expression of someone who's stopped hoping for rescue and is just waiting to find out which kind of end has arrived.
I drop to my knees in front of her. Hard enough that my kneecaps bark against frozen ground. Standing over her right now would be the cruelest thing I could do.
"Hey." I keep my voice low. Not soft. Soft would sound like a lie in this wind. Just low and even. "Can you hear me?"
Nothing. Her eyes stay on my boots. Breathing shallow and ragged.
I pull off my glove and press two fingers to her throat. Pulse is there but thin. Skin like river ice. She's deep in it. Hypothermia, dehydration, that ankle, and the exhaustion that comes from sustained terror.
I pull my jacket off and wrap it around her. She's light when I lift her. Not just small. Empty. Her head lolls against my chest. Hair smells like pine sap and the sharp unwashed smell of a body that's been surviving instead of living. I hold her closer.
She stirs. Eyes flutter open, shot through with raw terror. She tries to pull away but there's nothing left in her. Her voice comes out like something dragged over gravel.
"No... don't take me back. Please..."
Those words do something to me that years of combat never managed. My throat goes tight.
"Easy, sweetheart. I'm not here to hurt you. Name's Ryker Stone. US Marshal. We hit the mine last week. Dale Weathers and his whole operation are in cuffs. The women we found are safe. You're safe now. I've got you."
She blinks. The terror shifts. Fear drains out of her eyes, replaced by something so raw and unguarded I have to look away for a second. Relief. The kind that takes your legs out after you've been holding yourself together too long.
"I ran," she whispers. "When the shooting started. I thought you were more of them. I didn't know. I've been—I don't even know how long—"
"Eight days." I say it before I think better of it. "You scratched it into the wall. You survived eight days up here alone in a dress and broken shoes and you're still talking. Do you understand what that means?"
She doesn't answer. She just presses her face into my shirt and cries like it's been waiting inside her for all eight of those days. I let her. I hold her against my chest and let her fall apart because she's earned it.
The wind howls harder. Snow falls in thick curtains. The storm's here. My knee was right, as it always is. Marshals' field office is a four-hour hike down in good weather. In this, carrying her, with her ankle and her condition—not possible.
My cabin is a few minutes away. High on the next ridge. Solid log construction. Stocked. Generator. Fireplace. Medical kit. Food. One bed. I'll take the floor.
"I've got a place close," I tell her, mouth near her ear so she can hear over the wind.
"Storm's here and it's going to get worse.
I'm taking you there. Warmth, food, first aid for that ankle.
Nobody touches you but me unless you say otherwise.
You have my word and my badge number and my name, and all three of them mean the same thing. "
She nods against my chest. Just barely. Trust given because she's out of options and too depleted to do anything else. I know the difference.
I stand with her in my arms and start moving. Northwest toward the higher ridge, staying in the timber where the pines break the worst of the gusts. Snow's ankle-deep and climbing. She weighs nothing. Her small hands clutch at the front of my shirt even half-conscious.
I talk to her while I walk. Not because she can hear most of it, but because silence feels wrong after eight days alone.
"You're going to be all right. That ankle's a sprain, not a break. We'll wrap it and get it elevated. You need fluids and calories and real sleep. You're going to hurt worse before you feel better. That's how recovery works. Let it. I'm not going anywhere."
She mumbles something I can't catch. Something that sounds like pie. Then nothing.
The cabin appears through the trees just as visibility drops. Solid logs. Steep roof. Small covered porch. I kick the door open and carry her inside.
Main room is one big space. Stone fireplace along the far wall, already laid with kindling and split logs. Kitchen with a propane stove. Heavy wooden table. Worn leather couch. And in the far corner, the bed I built from beetle-kill pine, piled with quilts.
I lay her down. She makes a small sound when I pull my jacket back. Loss, not pain. I move fast. Fire first. Match to kindling, then split pine. Flames catch and start pushing heat into the room. Then her.
I strip the soaked coat and dress off with steady hands and clinical focus.
She's too far gone to notice. Mottled skin.
Bluish tinge at her lips and fingertips.
Fine tremors running through her. I wrap her in the heaviest quilt, then another, then a third.
Check the ankle. Swollen and discolored but bones are aligned.
Sensation when I press the top of her foot.
Sprain, not fracture. I wrap it with an elastic bandage and prop it on a folded blanket.
Water next. Small sips from a cup I hold to her cracked lips. She drinks like desert things drink. Desperately. I make her go slow.
Her eyes open. Clearer now with the fire's warmth. She looks at me like her exhausted mind is still trying to figure out what I am.
"Ryker," she says. Testing the word. Then, "My name's Zoe. I was a waitress. Before all of this. I made really good tips on the cherry pie."
The plain ordinary humanness of it does something to the back of my throat that I cover by reaching for the water cup again.
"Rest now, Zoe." My voice sounds rougher than I want it to. "Storm's going to keep us here for a while. You're safe. I'm not going anywhere."
She nods. Her eyes drift closed. Tension in her face softens as the warmth and exhaustion pull her under. One hand stays on top of the quilt, fingers curled loosely. Nails broken. Knuckles scraped raw.
I sit in the chair beside the bed. The fire grows. The storm hammers the cabin. Inside it's warm and quiet except for the flames and the sound of her breathing finally evening out into something that resembles sleep.
I should radio Davenport. I should call Mason. I should document her condition and enter her into the system as a recovered victim. I should do a dozen things the badge on my belt says are my job.
Instead I sit in the chair and listen to her breathe and think about the tally marks scratched into the wall of a rock hollow by a woman who counted every day she survived because the counting was all she had left.
Eight days. She should be dead. She isn't. She's in my bed in my cabin in my mountains, and the storm outside has just sealed us in together for however long it decides to last.
I lean back. My rifle's by the door. The fire's burning steady.
I don't move the chair back. I don't reach for the radio. I just sit there and keep watch.