Sam took the Jeep down the east slope, both hands on the wheel, watching the road intently. There was scree the whole way and the front end of the Jeep slid on every switchback. She rode the wheel against it and let the engine, growling in 4L, do all the work.
No one talked. Marcus sat in the passenger seat with his hands in his lap. Vlad was in the back, the tablet lighting his face. She caught the glow of it in the mirror every time the road straightened out. She’d get car sick immediately if she was staring at the screen like that.
She’d asked for the silence at the pass. She had it now.
A rut caught the left front and dropped it and she rode it down, foot off the gas, back on.
The ridge behind them had stopped being black. It wasn’t light yet, but it was less dark. Morning was coming.
Five miles of this to the Spur. Strip the Jeep. A mile through the timber to come out on the road somewhere that didn’t point back at it. Then the road, in the open, all the way down to Timberline.
They would be walking that road in daylight.
Marcus shifted in his seat. He’d lasted eleven minutes.
“When Seth can’t reach any of us,” he said, to the windshield. “What happens?”
Sam kept her eyes on the road. He wanted to know if he was still in trouble.
“I told you at the pass,” Vlad said from the back. The typing didn’t stop. “Six o’clock. Nobody picks up.” A pause. “Then he starts thinking. Seth is not stupid.”
Marcus didn’t answer. He put his hands back in his lap.
Marcus just couldn’t keep his mouth shut — one text to Seth, uncoded, at three in the morning. Vlad couldn’t stop watching — three years of it, and she’d found out about it a little while ago.
Every channel you have ever used, he’d said to Marcus.
He hadn’t said only Marcus. She wondered if Vlad was monitoring her also. He probably was.
She’d built a company with both of them. She’d trusted them. She had to trust them.
The grade steepened through a stand of dead timber. She stopped thinking and drove — low, slow, both feet ready, as the Jeep crawled down over the roots.
The Midland Grade Spur opened on the right, a gap in the spruce off the old grade. She turned in, cut the headlights, and took the last hundred feet on the parking lights until the branches were dragging down both sides. She stopped and killed the engine.
“Battery,” Vlad said.
“I know.”
She got the multi-tool out of the door pocket, where it always was, and popped the hood. She found the negative terminal by feel. Her hands wouldn’t close on the tool. Two hours on the wheel and they were shaped like it.
She grimaced, put the tool in her palm and used her whole arm. The nut was cold and it didn’t want to move. When it did, she jolted and it slipped. She took a deep breath, backed it off and worked the cable free. Everything electrical died and darkness surrounded her. Vlad must have started packing his stuff up.
The engine block ticked while it cooled.
She stood there holding the cable. Ninety seconds and she could put it back on. She coiled it, tucked it under the hood liner where the weather wouldn’t get at it, and shut the hood quietly with both hands.
A hermit thrush opened up in the spruce above her. Another one answered from down the slope. She knew they started about half an hour before the sun.
Marcus and Vlad got out and pulled the packs. Marcus took the heavy one without being told. Vlad zipped the phone bag into his jacket.
“Vlad,” she said.
He stopped and turned toward her.
“Three years on Marcus,” she said. “Every channel he ever used.”
“Yes.”
“Only Marcus?”
It was dark enough under the trees that she couldn’t see his face.
“Yes,” he said.
She wanted to ask him how she was supposed to know if he was lying, but she didn’t. Vlad walked over and handed her a tablet. She knew it ran Mirage and could only connect through Vlad’s antenna.
She put it in her pack without turning it on.
Marcus was already moving, the heavy pack riding badly on him. Vlad followed without a word.
Sam went last, where she could see both of them.