The pen skipped. Vlad wiped the inside of his forearm on his pant leg and tried again.
He wrote 4.2 below the crook of his elbow in figures about as tall as a grain of rice and put a box around it.
“Wait,” he said.
Marcus had one boot off and his heel up on his knee, working the side of his foot with his thumb.
“Marcus.”
“Yeah.”
“You have to go down to the creek.”
Marcus put his foot down.
Samantha looked at Marcus.
“Sorry,” she said.
“It’s fine.” Marcus was already reaching for the boot. “How far.”
“Far enough that you cannot hear me or her,” Vlad said.
Marcus got the boot on, swore at the blister, and pulled the laces. He picked up both water bags and hung them off one hand.
“I’d forget them anyway,” he said.
“You would not.”
Marcus stopped.
“Huh,” he said, and went down through the timber.
He watched the top of Marcus’s head go past the deadfall and out of sight. He sat there with the pen in his fist until he could not hear him anymore.
“Next one,” he said. “Softly.”
“Trap depth. One eighty microkelvin.”
He wrote it under the 4.2. “One eighty.”
“Yes.”
“Next.”
“Detuning on the first pair. Minus eight point six.”
“Megahertz.”
“Megahertz. Everything I say is megahertz unless I tell you it isn’t.”
The sun came over the ridge behind them and lit the far side of the drainage. They were still in the shade but the ambient warmth felt good.
He got nine numbers down before he asked.
“How many are there.”
“Twenty-six. Then two orderings.”
“Then what.”
“Then you memorize them.”
“If I get one wrong.”
“Then nothing happens,” Samantha said. “It runs and it gives you garbage. There’s no way to know what was wrong.”
Vlad looked at the nine things he’d written on his arm.
“I have been awake since the morning before yesterday.”
“I know.”
“I am going to write one of these down wrong and I am not going to know it.”
Samantha rubbed her eyes.
“I’m so tired,” she said. “Not from last night. I’m tired of being the one who figures everything out and then decides what we do about it.”
She put her hands down.
“The last three come off the first two. If you ever have all of them in front of you and the last three don’t fall out of the first two, then one of the first two is wrong. That’s the check.”
“Say that again.”
She repeated it. He put a mark next to the first two numbers and another next to where the last three would go.
“That checks my arm,” he said.
“Yes.”
“It does not check you.”
Samantha did not answer right away. She picked up a stick and turned it over.
“No,” she said.
“Is there one that checks you.”
“No.”
“Say the next one,” he said.
Something went over high up, north to south. They both stopped and looked at it through the trees. It was small and it didn’t turn. After a while they couldn’t hear it. Samantha waited another thirty seconds and then started up again.
The numbers went down the inside of his arm in four columns. At the eighteenth he ran out of forearm above the wrist bone, so he pushed the sleeve up past his shoulder and put the rest on the inside of his upper arm where nothing rubbed.
“How long before that comes off your arm,” she said.
“Tonight.”
“Shit.”
“I will have it memorized by tonight.” He blew on the last one to dry it. “Then it comes off and it does not go anywhere else.”
“Okay.”
He rolled the sleeve back down and buttoned it at the cuff.
Something moved in the timber below them. Vlad was on one knee with his hand on the pack. He waited anxiously but nothing came and there were no other noises.
He sat back down.
“There is a thing I do that I cannot do now,” he said.
“What.”
“I go out ahead and I look and I come back. I have done it every time we got near a road. I do it because if anyone is there it is only bad for one of us.”
“Yeah.”
“I cannot go out alone anymore. If somebody takes me out there, they do not just get me. They get half.”
Samantha put the stick down.
“Then Marcus has to be the one to check going forward,” she said.
“Yes.”
“You don’t like that.”
“Marcus cannot look at a person and not talk to them.”
“He did it in the store.”
“Once. Barely,” Vlad said.
Marcus came back up through the timber with both bags full and the pot under his arm, scrubbed out. He walked carefully, clearly favoring his left foot. He put everything down by the stove and sat.
“I counted to nine hundred and nineteen,” he said. “Are we done being a security company?”
“We are done,” Vlad said.
Vlad dug in the bottom of his pack. He pulled out a sock, unrolled it, and counted the twenties onto a flat rock.
“Ninety-four,” he said. He made three piles. “Thirty-one each. I keep the extra one.”
Marcus took his and did not put it away.
“What’s this for.”
“For when we are not in the same place.”
“We said nobody moves alone. That was, like, an hour ago.”
“Yes.”
“So what is this.”
“It is money,” Vlad said. “Put it in your pocket.”
Samantha’s had already disappeared into the zip pocket on her chest.