DAY 3
They went over Hope Pass a little after nine and were down the far side by noon. Twin Lakes was two ridges and a day behind them now. They took a break for lunch on the way up out of Sheep Gulch. Vlad was keeping up, but Marcus had not said anything in an hour.
Samantha stopped in a stand of krummholz. Vlad sat down on a rock without being told and had the antenna out and connected before she got her pack off.
“Twenty minutes,” she said.
“Ten.” He did not look up.
She ate a bar and watched the drainage below them and the one past that, both empty. The helicopter sounds had stopped a while ago. Marcus had flopped down and now lay flat on his back with his forearm across his eyes.
“Sam.”
Vlad had the tablet turned toward her. She had to crouch and put her hand over the screen to see it.
It was Marcus. A pretty headshot from a recent conference, where he was looking slightly off-camera and laughing at something.
Under it, her.
She was seventeen. Her hair was flat-ironed and parted in the middle. She was wearing an orange finisher’s shirt from a trail race in Buena Vista, three sizes too big. She had a closed-mouth smile because she’d had braces on her bottom teeth.
“Fuck,” she said.
“It is the only one,” Vlad said. “I looked.”
“I know it’s the only one. I made sure it was the only one.” She took the tablet out of his hands. “That’s a school picture. I was a child. I had braces.”
“Yes.”
She looked at it again, properly this time. Her hair was silly and she had fifteen pounds she no longer carried. Nobody working a register in a mountain town was going to get from that girl to the woman standing in front of them.
Then she looked at the photo of Marcus. It was a dead ringer. Even his hair was the same.
“Vlad, do you have a way to shave Marcus’s head?”
“Yes.”
“What the fuck are the two of you talking about,” said Marcus, but he didn’t move.
She kept scrolling. The photos were everywhere. Some were simple — just Marcus and a seventeen-year-old in a race shirt. Others were more creative — a still of Highway 82 with cruisers on it. Another had a map of Colorado and a red dot on Basalt.
She handed the tablet back to Vlad.
“Who do you think put these out there?”
Vlad clicked around.
“It looks like it all sources from a group in Boulder. The Front Range Alliance for Universal Digital Sunlight, 11,341 followers. The text is a paragraph about a secretive quantum lab operating without oversight in a valley full of billionaires.”
“Anti-surveillance,” she said.
Vlad made a small sound through his nose.
Marcus had come up onto one elbow. He was looking at the tablet from four feet away.
Vlad turned it toward him so he could see.
He looked at it for a few moments and then lay back down with his arm over his eyes.
“That’s the one from Denver,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“I picked that one. I paid a guy to shoot forty of them and I picked that one.” He was quiet for a second. “It’s on the About page. It’s the first thing you get if you search me.”
“I know.”
“It’s a good photo.”
“It’s a very good photo,” she said. Marcus laughed, and then groaned.
She read the caption under the pair again, and then she said it out loud.
“Two.”
Marcus took his arm off his face.
“Every photo says two founders. The post from FRAUDS says the two founders of Basalt Labs.”
“You’re not in it,” Marcus said.
Vlad was rolling up the antenna cable. He didn’t respond.
“Vlad. You’re not in it anywhere.”
“No.”
Samantha checked the timestamps. The oldest post went up at 21:40 the night before. The lights in the basin came a few hours after that.
“Ten minutes is up,” she said.