Marcus sat on a log with a shirt around his shoulders while Vlad cut his hair off.
The scissors on the multitool were an inch and a half long and made for fishing line. Vlad worked in rows from the front and dropped what came off onto the shirt. It took a long time.
“How bad is it,” Marcus said.
“Bad.”
“Bad like a guy who cut it himself, or bad like a guy who’s hiding?”
“Yes.”
Samantha came down through the timber with the water bags and stopped when she saw them.
“Oh,” she said.
“Thank you.”
Vlad finished the back with his knife, dry, a little at a time. Marcus swore twice but held still. When it was done Vlad carried the shirt down to the creek and shook it out into the water.
Marcus put his hand on top of his head and left it there. Above the sunburn line his scalp was white.
“Do I look like a thumb?”
“Yes,” Vlad said.
Samantha laughed for the first time in two days. She dug her spare buff out of a side pocket and threw it at him.
“Wear that or your head will fry.”
She sat down on the ground and emptied the food out of all three packs onto a flat rock and sorted it. Bars. Two bags of the ramen. Tuna packets Marcus had bought a while ago.
“Four days,” she said. “Three if we keep doing days like today.”
“And then what,” Marcus said.
“Then one of us walks into a store and buys more food.”
Vlad folded the scissors back into the multitool. He stared at it and said, “Every one of those posts said two founders.”
“Yeah,” Samantha said. “So you can go into a store.”
“That is one thing it gives us. There is another.”
Marcus turned around on the log. “What other thing.”
“Nobody guesses three. The only people who know three have our cap table, or they have been inside my machine in Virginia, or they put the car at the end of your street.” He put the multitool in his pocket. “So we watch for the word three.”
Samantha stopped playing with the food.
“Okay,” she said. “That’s good.”
“Vlad, you’re not going into a store,” Marcus said. “You’re the one keeping us informed. If somebody picks you up out there we’re deaf.”
“There is no photograph of me that anyone can find,” Vlad said. “The only one floating around is a school photograph in Kyiv. I was nine.”
“The people who found your machine know there are three of us,” Marcus said.
“They are not working at a Stop ’n Save in Buena Vista.”
Samantha was looking east, down the drainage. “There’s a road over the pass after next. It’s paved, and it goes down to Buena Vista. Day after tomorrow, if we move.”
“How much money do we have,” Vlad said.
Marcus dug the money clip out of his pocket and counted it, which took no time. “A hundred and forty.”
“Twenty-two hundred,” Vlad said.
Marcus looked up. “Where.”
“In my pack.”
“You have been carrying twenty-two hundred dollars in cash in your pack?”
“Yes.”
“Of course.” Marcus rubbed his now very bald head.
Samantha had her elbows on her knees and was looking at the creek.
“Vlad. Say this ends the good way. There’s a room somewhere with lawyers in it. We sit down and talk about what happens.”
Vlad just stared at Samantha.
“Marcus sits down. I sit down. What do you do?”
After a pause that lasted a little too long, Vlad said, “There is no employment record. The cap table has a Delaware entity on it that doesn’t name me. If I sit down at that table, nobody talks about what happened. They talk about me.”
“So you don’t sit down.”
“So I do not sit down.”
“And if the only person who can fix something is you?”
Vlad said nothing.
“Then you’d have to become somebody,” Marcus said.
“Yes.”
“Would that be so bad?”
Vlad stood up and got the antenna out of his pack.
He took it to the edge of the trees where the ground dropped away and brought the link up. He ran his checks. Nothing had moved, including the file in Virginia.
Then he ran other checks, the ones he did every few weeks. His name. The two addresses in Cambridge. A phone number that had been dead for eleven years. The Delaware entity and the registered agent it was filed under.
Nothing came back.
He ran the Delaware one again.