Seth drove them up the canyon and through Nederland. Vlad watched the mirror the whole way and saw nothing unusual. By the time they turned off onto East Portal Road the adrenaline had drained out of him and he was shivering. He had not slept since Thursday.
At the gate he leaned across Seth and typed four one seven seven, and the light went green.
The two-track climbed up through the aspens. Somewhere below them a train came out of the tunnel and ran under the hill for a long time. Cooper lifted his head off Samantha’s lap, listened to it, and put his head back down. Samantha opened her eyes, but didn’t move a muscle.
After they parked, they all got out of the car slowly. Vlad could smell the anxiety. Seth opened the garage from the side door. The red truck was where Samantha had put it, next to the snowmobile and the canoe. Both bays were full. There was nowhere to put the Rover.
Seth walked a slow circle around his car in the daylight. The back window was a hole with cubes of glass still hanging in the frame. He put his hand flat on the rear quarter panel like it was an animal.
“There is a tarp in the garage,” he said. “We can cover it.”
“It does not matter if you cover it,” Vlad said.
“It matters if somebody flies over.”
“A woman in that parking lot took a video of it. The plate was in the video. It is a car registered to you, Seth, with a hole where the back window should be, and by now it is a still frame in an email with your name on it.” Vlad looked at the Rover. “You cannot delete that. The tarp is for satellites. The problem is not satellites.”
Seth took his hand off the car. He didn’t say anything for a second, and Vlad watched him understand it: that he had driven into the lot a private citizen. When he drove out of the lot, he was on a list. Maybe more than one.
“Okay,” Seth said. “Then we cover it so the neighbors don’t call about a shot-up Range Rover, and we stop using it.”
“Yes.”
They got Marcus inside and onto the couch. Samantha drew a new line around the red on his heel and wrote the time next to it.
Sam said, “The red hasn’t moved. The Bactrim is already working. It is the only fucking thing going the way it is supposed to today.”
Vlad went back out and stood in the cold. He needed quiet to figure out how they had been tracked.
No phone of theirs had been on. He had them in the bag, turned off or dead. Seth had picked the store; nobody could have known they would be at that King Soopers, because the choice had been made that morning, on no phone and in no message of theirs. And still two people had been sitting in a rental in the back row with the engine off before they had finished walking Cooper.
Which meant somebody had told them a town. Not a store. A town. Somebody had put Boulder into the air, recently, and the other side had flooded Boulder and waited.
The pharmacy had Seth’s name on the prescription. That was a public thing, and it was stupid, but it was not something that could be picked up that fast. A name in a pharmacy system was a thread you pulled on for a day. It did not put two people in a parking lot in ten minutes.
A message did that. Fucking Marcus.
Vlad went back inside. Samantha was filling a pot at Doug’s sink. Seth was building a fire. Marcus had his eyes closed.
“Who did you call,” Vlad said.
Marcus opened his eyes.
“I didn’t call anybody.”
“Who did you text.”
The kitchen went quiet. Samantha turned the water off.
Marcus looked at the fire, and then he looked at Vlad, who was staring angrily at him. Marcus paused, shivered, and then wrapped his arms around his chest.
“I texted Brett,” Marcus said. “From the doctor’s phone. To tell him to tell my mom I was alive.”
“Brett,” Vlad said.
“She’s been calling him. My mom. She didn’t have anybody else to call.”
“You texted Brett Sasaki,” Vlad said, “who has had a public account on every platform since he was twenty, who reposts his own breakfast, who you told me yourself replies to everything inside a minute.”
“I told him not to tell anybody.”
Vlad laughed. It came out flat, with no humor in it. He let it.
“You are a fucking idiot.”
Marcus didn’t answer.
“What did he write back,” Vlad said.
“Vlad,” Samantha said.
“No. I want to know what it said. Because somebody read it. What did Brett write back, Marcus.”
Marcus’s jaw worked. “He said my mom would be happy. He said somebody named Harper would be happy. And then a number I didn’t know started calling and I hung up and deleted everything.”
“Harper,” Samantha said. She had gone very still by the sink.
“I don’t know a Harper,” Marcus said. “I thought it was one of Brett’s people.”
“Brett thinks it is,” Vlad said. “It has to be one of theirs. Brett is dumber than you. You just introduced them to us through Brett.”
Samantha set the pot down on the counter without a sound. Vlad knew she had figured out the same thing, just a step slower. He was sorry it had happened, again, to her.
“You did not tell us,” Vlad said. “You sat in the car this morning and asked how they found us, and you already knew. You looked out the window at the rocks.”
“I didn’t know it was the text,” Marcus said. “I didn’t know until right now.”
“You knew it was possible. You promised both of us you would share everything. You do not get to decide which of your mistakes the rest of us have to plan around, especially if we don’t know about them.”
Marcus pushed himself up on the couch, and his face was red now, and not from the fever.
“My mother thinks I am dead,” he said. “I have been gone for eleven days and she sees me on the news daily. She thinks I am dead in a ditch somewhere. I sent six sentences from a stranger’s phone so she could sleep. I’m not going to apologize for that.”
“I am not asking you to apologize. I do not need your apology. I am telling you that you cannot do it again. You aren’t just hurting me, who you don’t care about. You are hurting Sam, who you do.”
Seth looked awkwardly at all three of them. He could see Samantha crying quietly. Cooper was at her side.
Marcus was agitated now. “Seth trusted somebody today. Seth drove four hours and walked into a parking lot full of people who want to put all of us in a cell, with no plan, and lied to people, and it worked, and that is the only reason we are standing in this kitchen. You want to go to ground and trust nobody. Trusting nobody does not get us out of this. Seth got us out of this.”
“Seth is a resource,” Vlad said. “A resource you aim. And he’s good. And I trust him. Brett is a loser who can’t keep his mouth shut about anything for more than a minute.”
“They are both people I trust,” Marcus said. “You just like one of them.”
Vlad did not like either of them, but he let that go, especially since Seth was standing there. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes for ten seconds, and then opened them and stared right into Marcus’s eyes.
“Here is what your six sentences cost,” he said instead, and he counted it on his fingers, because Marcus understood a list. “The car is gone. Seth’s name is on a list so he is no longer clean. We cannot go back to the machine in Broomfield, not to re-run anything, not for the camera trick, not for anything, because they know we were in this county this morning. And, for a while, no one knew where we were. The days we had, where nobody knew which direction we went — those are over. They have a video of us driving north out of Boulder. We go deeper now, in a stolen truck, with less than we had yesterday.”
“I know,” Marcus said quietly. He looked at Samantha who was wiping her eyes.
“I do not think you do.”
Seth stood up from the fire.
“That’s enough,” he said. It was the first sharp thing Vlad had heard him say. “You’re both right and you’re both done. Marcus, you can’t touch a phone again, not Brett, not your mother, not a pizza place. Vlad, he gets it. Look at him. He gets it.”
Marcus was looking at the floor. He looked up, made eye contact with Vlad, and Vlad could see that he was crying also. Vlad decided that he was being too hard on Marcus, who looked like he was about to break.
“Marcus. Ok. I believe that you get it. I’m stressed also. I’m sorry I’m being so hard on you. Please don’t withhold anything again. Anything. No matter how small.”
Cooper got up off the rug, crossed the room, and leaned his whole weight against Marcus’s good leg. Marcus put a hand down into his fur and left it there.
Vlad went to the window. Outside, Seth’s burned car sat in the gravel waiting for a tarp it didn’t need anymore. Below the cabin, right on time, another train came up out of the tunnel and took a long time going by, loud enough that for a minute nobody in the room had to say anything.