Samantha started with the camera.
“At the Spur, Vlad said it couldn’t send from up there. Marcus, you heard that as it can’t send.” She kept her hands around the cup. “It can. A guy unstraps it, carries it down to his truck, and it finds a bar of service before he gets to the highway. Everything on the card goes out then. Our faces, the Jeep, the plate.”
Marcus turned his head toward Vlad.
“You knew that.”
“Yes,” Vlad said.
“So neither of you —”
“I’m not done,” Samantha said.
Marcus shut his mouth.
“When I had the battery cable off I paused and held it. I thought about putting it back on, going down the grade to Timberline, out to Leadville, and having a cup of coffee at the Golden Burro by six-thirty.” She looked at the ash. “I wanted to leave you both up there.”
Nobody said anything. Below them the thrushes had quit and a nutcracker started up in the timber.
“You wouldn’t have, Sam,” Marcus said.
“I don’t know what I would have done. I keep thinking about bailing on the two of you. I’m tired of the bullshit.” She set the cup down. “That’s mine. Marcus.”
He sat up straighter.
“Okay. I own the text. I’ve said that, and I’ll keep saying it. I put us here. I’m not going to pretend the last two days are anybody’s fault but —”
“Stop.”
He stopped.
“You’re apologizing,” she said. “I didn’t ask what you’re sorry about. I asked what you aren’t saying.”
Marcus looked at the fire for a while. When he started again his voice had less air in it.
“I didn’t text Seth because I thought he could help. I texted him because I wanted to tell somebody.” He was looking at the coals. “I was alone, in my house at three in the morning, thinking about the biggest thing I’ve ever experienced.” He shrugged. “I wanted somebody to know.”
Samantha kept her eyes on Marcus.
“There’s another one,” he said. “When I got up there were three sets of lights stopped on the road down there. They’d been there for a while. I watched them, and then I made coffee and I didn’t say anything.”
She was standing before he finished.
She walked to the edge of the timber. The basin was coming up out of the dark — the road a pale line along the near shore. Two and a half miles down and a thousand feet. No lights were showing, but that told her nothing since something parked down there with its lights off was invisible from up here until the sun got on it.
“Anything there now?”
“I can’t tell,” she said. “That’s not the part that matters.”
She came back and stood over him.
“You saw something and you sat on it because you didn’t want to be the guy who panics.”
“Yes.”
“Marcus, somebody could walk up here from that road in a few hours.”
“I know.” He put his palms on his knees. “Last one. I’m going to keep thinking about who we could sell this to. I can’t stop doing it. It’s going to be in my head every day and some days I’m going to bring it up.” He looked at her. “You should know that before you decide anything.”
“Okay,” she said.
She sat down on the log again and turned to Vlad.
“I have nothing,” he said.
“Vlad.”
He stared straight ahead. She waited.
“Last night after you were both asleep I figured out a way out of here,” he said. “The drainage drops south below the camp. If someone comes up the trail, I would bolt down the drainage. If they are smart enough to watch the drainage I cross the ridge to the next one. It is a good route for one person moving fast in the dark. I looked at it for a long time.”
He set the cup in the dirt.
“I did not leave, but I thought about it.”
Marcus didn’t say anything.
“Is it still good?” Samantha said.
Vlad looked up at her and almost smiled.
“In the dark. For one. Not for three with packs.”
“Then it’s the bail-out if the trail goes bad. Now we all know it.” She pulled her knees up. “Anything else.”
“Yes.” He said it fast. “I do not know the next move.”
The fire ring had one thin line of smoke coming off it.
“You are both waiting for me to tell you what we do next, and I have nothing to tell you. I know networks. I know how to disappear. But I don’t know what we should do next.” He looked at Samantha. “I feel like the stupidest person in this camp right now.”
“Well,” Marcus said. “That’s the first useful thing anybody’s said all morning.”
Vlad made a sound that was almost a laugh. Samantha laughed for real.
“New rule,” she said. “Anything you know that would change what the other two would do, you say it. In real time. When you think of it. Not when it’s convenient, not when you’ve figured out how to explain it. Immediately.”
“Yes,” Vlad said. Then: “I am changing something I said at the Spur.”
Samantha waited.
“I told you that if I decided I needed to watch you, I would not ask you first.” He was looking right at her now. “I will tell you before. Not after.”
“What about me?” Marcus said.
“You I will tell after.”
“Great.”
“Say it,” Samantha said. “Both of you. Out loud, so I can hear how it sounds.”
Marcus said, “Everything gets said.”
“Everything that matters gets said,” Vlad said.
“No.”
He looked at her for a second.
“Everything gets said.”
“Everything gets said,” she said.
She stood up and got her pack. Her bladder had been screaming at her since somewhere around Marcus’s three sets of lights.
“Ten minutes,” she said. “Water, food, boots. And we’re not crossing that road today.”
Marcus started to ask.
“Because we don’t know what’s parked on it, and we’d be walking down an open shoulder in daylight to find out. We stay in the timber and we move south above it.” She got the strap through the buckle. “That costs us a day of food. I’d rather be hungry.”
“Okay,” Marcus said.
Vlad was already kicking dirt over the ring.
She had told them about the camera. She had told them about Leadville, and how long she had stood there with the cable in her hand.
She had said everything gets said, but she had not told them about the algorithm. It was in her head where it was going to stay. Marcus could talk about buyers until he was old. Vlad could rebuild the whole thing over a weekend if she ever explained it to him.
It had been hers alone for two years. She liked being the only one who knew it.