4. Ryker
Ryker
She's been asleep for two hours and I haven't sat down once.
There's a rhythm to this kind of work. Triage. Stabilize. Secure the perimeter. Only then do you let yourself think about what just happened. I'm still on step three.
The generator needs diesel. I keep a fifty-gallon drum in the lean-to off the back of the cabin.
I pull on my coat, step out the back door, and walk into a wall of white.
The storm has settled in hard. Wind driving snow sideways, visibility cut to ten feet.
The lean-to is fifteen steps from the door and by the time I reach it my beard is crusted with ice.
I top off the tank by feel. The motor catches on the second pull. Reliable machine. Old and loud, but it hasn't failed me yet. I clear the snow from the exhaust vent, secure the lean-to door against the wind, and head back inside.
I stamp my boots on the mat and take stock.
Firewood. Two days' worth stacked inside against the kitchen wall and another cord under the tarp on the porch.
Water. I fill two five-gallon jugs from the tap as backup because generators fail and pipes freeze.
Food. Freezer's stocked with elk and venison.
Pantry has rice, oats, canned tomatoes, dried beans, powdered milk, salt, honey.
Enough for two people for a week without rationing.
Two people. The math keeps doing that. Folding her into my supplies and my square footage. I shake it off and move to the next task.
The ankle.
I wrapped it once already when I first got her inside, but that was just field work.
Now I need to do it right. I pull my medical kit from the closet and carry it to the bedside.
The fire throws enough light to work by.
Zoe is deep under. The kind of sleep that looks less like rest and more like her body shutting systems down because the resources aren't there to run everything at once.
Her breathing is slow and shallow. Even in sleep a faint crease holds between her brows.
I unwrap the elastic bandage carefully. She stirs but doesn't wake.
The joint is worse than it looked in the field.
Swelling has spread into the arch of her foot and up toward the shin, the skin mottled purple and green.
Grade two sprain at minimum. Three to four weeks to heal if she stays off it, which in this cabin in this storm isn't going to be a problem.
I check the bones. Fibula is intact. Swelling is concentrated over the anterior talofibular ligament, the one that goes first in an inversion injury.
Classic misstep on uneven ground. Moderate laxity on the drawer test. She's lucky.
Another degree of rotation when she fell and we'd be talking about surgery in a hospital she can't get to.
I mold the SAM splint to the contour of her ankle and foot, layer gauze first, then the splint, then the elastic bandage in a figure-eight pattern. Capillary refill in her toenails is good. I prop her foot on the folded blanket again, elevating it above her heart.
While I'm down here I check her feet. The sneakers drying by the fire are finished.
Soles cracked through, canvas separating from the rubber.
She walked eight days in these. Twenty-dollar shoes asked to do a thousand-dollar job.
Her feet themselves are blistered but not frostbitten.
Skin abraded where the wet canvas chafed.
I clean each spot with antiseptic, apply thin pads of gauze, and pull a pair of my wool socks over them carefully. My socks reach past her knees.
The dress is still draped over the back of a kitchen chair where I hung it to dry.
Thin. Cheap. A little faded at the seams. A coffee stain on the hem.
I changed her out of it fast and focused when I first brought her in, the way I'd handle any casualty.
Clothing is an obstacle between the patient and warmth.
You deal with it clinically and you don't let your hands register anything beyond the task.
I noted the bruises on her upper arms. Fingerprint patterns. Someone gripping too hard. Raw spots on her wrists that could be zip ties or rope. I studied them the way I'd catalog evidence, and I filed the rage behind the discipline where it can burn without consuming.
But there was a moment. After the shirt was on and I was pulling the quilt up to her shoulders, when her head turned and her hair fell across the pillow and I saw her face without the terror in it.
Just the bones of it. The line of her jaw.
The dark lashes against too-pale skin. Something in my chest shifted.
I shut it down immediately. Not because the feeling was wrong.
Because the timing was wrong. She is a victim of a federal crime I am actively investigating.
She is injured and malnourished and traumatized and unconscious in my bed.
The power differential between us right now could not be more absolute.
I have shelter, food, medical supplies, and a badge.
She has a ruined dress and an ankle that won't hold her weight.
Any feeling I have toward this woman is compromised by every one of those facts.
She is in your care. She is not yours to want.
I say it like a patrol cadence while I clean the kitchen and check the generator one more time. The saying doesn't make the feeling go away. It just puts a fence around it.
I should call Mason. I've been putting it off because he'll ask questions I'm not ready to answer.
How long do I plan to keep her here? Has she been medically evaluated by someone with actual credentials?
All reasonable questions that imply she should be somewhere else, with someone else, in a system designed for exactly this. And she should. I know she should.
The storm answers for me. Satellite phone signal is intermittent at best. I'll try him tomorrow. For tonight it's me, the fire, the generator, and the woman in the bed.
I eat a plate of leftover elk stew standing at the counter because sitting at the table feels too much like this has shape and routine. I wash the plate. Dry it. Put it back on the shelf.
I locked it after she went under. Not to keep her in — the deadbolt turns from the inside and I told her so. To keep the mountain out. There's a difference and I need her to know it.
The couch is old leather, cracked at the seams, deep enough to be comfortable if you're under six feet and a hardship if you're not.
I'm not. I pull a wool blanket from the closet and stretch out as best I can, one boot still on, sidearm on the floor within reach.
The cabin is dark except for the firelight.
The wind sounds like something alive trying to get in.
I close my eyes. I don't really sleep. I drift into the shallow edge where my body rests but my ears stay open, sorting sounds. Fire. Wind. Generator hum. And underneath all of it, the sound of her breathing. Steady and thin. Proof she's alive.
The scream pulls me off the couch like a detonation.
I'm on my feet with the sidearm in my hand before my conscious mind catches up.
Training. Muscle memory. I sweep the room in a second and a half.
Door locked. Windows sealed. No breach. No intruder.
Just the woman in the bed, sitting upright with her hands fisted in the quilt and a sound coming out of her that I've heard before in combat hospitals and places where people are taken apart from the inside.
She's screaming. It’s a raw, scraped sound of pure animal terror. Her eyes are open but she's not seeing the cabin. She's seeing the shipping container or the face of the man who told her she belonged to him.
I holster the weapon. I don't go to her.
Every instinct I have is telling me to cross the room and put my hands on her shoulders and hold her until the shaking stops.
But I've held enough people through enough nightmares to know that touch, in this state, with this history, can make it worse.
Her nervous system is firing blind right now.
If a large male body suddenly grabs her in the dark she won't feel comfort. She'll feel confirmation.
So I stay where I am. Ten feet from the bed. And I talk.
"Zoe." I keep my voice low and steady, pitched just above the wind. "Zoe, you're in the cabin. Ryker's cabin. The one with the stone fireplace and the blue quilts and the elk broth. You're warm. You're dry. The door is locked and I'm the only one here. Can you hear me?"
The screaming breaks into ragged breathing. Her eyes are still wide, still unfocused, but her hands have loosened in the quilt by a fraction. She's hearing me.
"You're not at the mine. You're not in the container.
You're not in the woods. You're in a bed in a cabin with a bolt I threw against the mountain, not against you.
It turns from the inside. You can walk out that door any second you want to, and a US Marshal is standing across the room who is not going to come any closer unless you tell me to.
I'm right here. I'm not leaving. And nobody is getting through that door tonight. "
Her breathing slows. The tremors downshift from full-body convulsions to a fine shaking in her shoulders and hands. Her eyes track the room. The embers. The shadows. The shape of me near the couch. I watch her come back to herself the way you'd watch someone surface from deep water.
"Ryker." My name comes out broken.
"I'm here."
"I was—" She stops. Swallows. "I was back there. In the container. Tyler was closing the door. The metal door. And it was dark and I couldn't—"
"You don't have to tell me. Not right now."
"I can still hear it. The sound it made when it closed." She presses both hands flat against her ears. "It's still in my head."
I cross to the hearth, not toward her, the opposite direction, and add two split logs to the grate. The bark catches. Light swells back into the room.
"Listen to that instead," I say. Still not looking at her. "The fire. The wind outside. The generator humming. Those are the sounds that are real. The metal door isn't real anymore. It's memory. Memory is loud but it can't lock."
Silence. Then, very quietly: "Memory is loud but it can't lock."
She repeats it like she's testing the words. I let the silence sit. The fire crackles. The wind pushes at the cabin and the cabin pushes back.
"Can you leave the fire going?" she asks. "I know it wastes wood. But the dark is—"
"I'll keep it burning all night. Every night you're here. Don't worry about the wood. I've got a cord stacked on the porch and another in the lean-to. You won't run out of light."
I hear her exhale. Something deeper than a sigh. The quilt rustles as she lies back.
"Ryker?"
"Yeah."
"Thank you for not coming over here. When I was— if you had touched me right then I would have— I don't know what I would have done."
"I know."
"How did you know?"
I consider the truth. That I've been where she is. Not the same place, not the same kind of damage, but the same dark water where someone reaching for you feels like someone pulling you under. I consider telling her about the nights after Fallujah. I consider being that honest.
"Experience," I say instead. It's not a lie. It's just a smaller truth, and smaller truths are easier to carry at three in the morning.
"Okay. Goodnight, Ryker."
"Goodnight, Zoe."
I sit on the couch. I don't lie back down.
I feed the fire every forty minutes, rebuilding it each time it sinks toward embers, keeping the room lit and warm through the long dark hours.
She sleeps. Not peacefully. There are small sounds throughout the night, catches in her breathing, a soft moan once that could be pain or memory or both.
But she doesn't scream again. And each time she stirs I hear her breathing change for a moment, and I know she's listening for me the same way I'm listening for her.
Present. Accounted for. On opposite sides of a room that feels smaller every hour.
The storm howls. The fire burns. And I keep watch through the longest night I've had since the desert.