DAY 9
Samantha set the panel down on a slab of granite.
“There is no sun yet,” Vlad said.
“There will be at eight.”
“You are going to leave it lying there for two hours.”
“Why not.”
The Continental Divide was east of them which meant the camp stayed in shadow most of the morning. The panel did nothing while they waited which was annoying.
Vlad got the Mini out and set it on its kickstand and squatted in front of it.
Marcus came out of the trees carrying his boots. He sat down on a log, put the left one on, and then sat staring at the right one.
“Let me see it,” Samantha said.
“It’s better than yesterday.”
“Show it to me.”
He rolled the sock down and looked at it himself. “It’s better than yesterday.” He rolled the sock back up.
Vlad walked over, picked up Marcus’s right boot, and held it upside down. A small stone came out of it and bounced off the log.
“There,” Vlad said. “Cured.”
Marcus laughed, which quickly turned into a wince.
At twenty past eight, the sun hit the panel. They packed up and were on the trail at nine. They only had a thirteen percent charge.
They worked their way down the mountain until two, which felt painfully slow to Samantha. She walked behind Marcus, both to let him set the pace and to watch how he was moving. It was rough to watch as he limped more prominently than yesterday, putting his right foot down flat every time instead of rolling through it.
At two they were four hundred feet above the road. Once she saw it, she started counting vehicles. A Ford pickup. A RAM 3500. Another Ford pickup. A Jeep.
“What is the pattern,” Vlad said.
“There isn’t one.”
“There is always a pattern.”
“Maybe when people are going to work.” She kept her eyes on the switchbacks. “These are people on vacation.”
In forty minutes, there were eleven vehicles, most of them trucks or SUVs. The longest gap was nine minutes. The shortest was under one. Samantha was almost certain it was random, and there were two instances where a vehicle came down while another one was going up, which meant it was unlikely there was a roadblock at either end.
“We can go up over the pass at night,” she said. “Above all of it.”
“How far up.”
“Two thousand feet. Then two thousand back down the other side.”
Nobody said anything about Marcus. She looked over at him. He looked dejected, but met her eyes and shook his head. She felt bad for him.
Samantha recalibrated quickly. “Let’s go down instead. There’s a place to camp there.”
The campground was below the road on the near side, at the end of a spur, along the edge of the lake. She lay on her stomach in the trees and looked at the campground for a long time. Vlad sat next to her, also scanning the campground.
There were ten sites. Six of them were taken. It was the normal collection of campers: a fifth-wheel with its slide out and its awning down, two trucks with rooftop tents, a white pickup with a canopy on the back, and an old dingy VW van with the curtains shut. There was also a small green tent at the far end.
“There are cars,” Vlad said.
Samantha kept looking.
“Then we have power.”
Thirteen percent. She needed it at sixty percent for a full working day. An hour on a truck’s socket would put about eight percent into the bank, so she needed six hours. She’d never get that from a turned-off truck without draining the truck’s battery.
“Say it out loud,” Vlad said.
“To get a day of power out of that truck I’d have to run his engine for two and a half hours in the middle of the night.”
Vlad looked at the campground.
“That is not a thing we can do,” he said.
“No.”
“Then we take forty minutes.”
“Forty minutes is five percent. That’s four more minutes of Starlink and nothing else.”
“Eleanor is going to answer today,” Marcus said. “Or she isn’t. Either way it’s four minutes.”
Samantha lay there with her chin on her forearm and looked at the pickup.
“The green tent bothers me.”
“Everything bothers you.”
“There’s no vehicle with it.”
Vlad waited.
“It’s forty minutes,” she said. “Okay.”
Samantha and Marcus napped until eleven, when Vlad quietly nudged them each awake.
Vlad carried the bank and the cable. Samantha carried nothing since she wanted her hands free. Marcus stayed behind to keep watch even though he couldn’t see much in the dark.
The pickup was still there. It was a Tacoma with Wyoming plates and the canopy was closed. There was a folding chair beside it with a towel that had been there all afternoon over the back of it.
Vlad silently opened the driver’s door. He put the plug in the socket and the little light on the bank came on green. He covered it with his jacket, came back out and lay down next to Samantha in the grass.
The green tent at the far end was dark. She looked at it twice, but then made herself stop.
After eleven minutes a dog came around the front of the fifth-wheel. It was a brown terrier of some sort, wary but curious.
Samantha did not move. The dog got about six feet from her, stopped, and put its nose down in the grass where something more interesting than either of them was.
It stayed there a while, sniffing and pawing at the grass. Then it turned around and went back to the fifth-wheel where it lay down under the awning with its chin on its paws.
Samantha’s hands were shaking. She let them.
“Forty-one minutes,” Vlad said, very quietly.
“Go get it.”
“We could take another twenty. He is asleep.”
“Now.”
He went. She watched the fifth-wheel and the dog under it. It didn’t look back at her so she decided it must be asleep.
He was back in a minute with the bank under one arm and the cable wound around his hand.
“Door?”
“Closed. The towel is where it was.”
When they got back to Marcus, he was sitting against a tree with the Mini in his lap. His eyes were closed but he popped them open when he heard their rustling through the trees.
He handed the device to Vlad who walked to an open spot and set it up with a clear view of the sky. While Vlad fiddled with the tablet, Samantha looked up at the stars, which dominated the cloudless sky.
After a minute, Vlad looked up and cleared his throat.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing from her.” He kept scrolling with his thumb. “A hospital in Pennsylvania is running everything off paper logs.”
“Shut it down.”
“There are three more.”
“Shut it down.”
He shut it down.
Samantha could think of several reasons Eleanor hadn’t answered. One was that the man at Kestrel had said no. Another was that someone had taken Eleanor’s phone away, which only meant something bad. Another was that Eleanor was making Marcus wait on purpose, which Samantha wouldn’t put past Eleanor.
She had spent five hours coming down a drainage, an afternoon on her stomach above a campground, and about an hour stealing power from a stranger’s battery, to buy four minutes of a satellite. Kestrel was in Broomfield, which was on the other side of the divide. Between here and there was a week of walking, and a road to get across every couple of days, with no easy way across any of them.
“Sam.” Marcus had not moved from the tree. “How many more nights like this.”
“Six,” she said. “If nothing goes wrong.”
Vlad was putting the Mini away and he stopped with it half in the bag.
Eight days ago, she said she would exhaust every other option first. Vlad had just stared at her across the fire.
They could not do six more nights like this one. There was one thing that would make the trip shorter, and she really did not want to do it.
“Vlad,” she said. “What would it take.”
He put the Mini the rest of the way into the bag and closed it.
“Say the whole question.”
She didn’t.