Marcus sat on the couch with his bad foot up on a milk crate and sweated through his shirt. Doug’s woodstove had made the cabin too hot, but Marcus just sat and suffered because he wasn’t going to ask someone to crack the window.
He had spent his whole adult life being the person other people asked for help. It had been a long time since he felt like he was on the outside of a decision loop. What he wanted was back in. Not forgiven — he could do without forgiven — but back to being involved in the plan rather than someone they were planning around.
Samantha was asleep on the floor against the base of the couch, on a sleeping bag Seth had dug out of a closet, Cooper stretched full length beside her with his chin on her ankle. He knew she was pissed at him. That was fair.
Seth had the contents of all four packs out on Doug’s table in rows and was moving things between two piles. He’d found a headlamp somewhere and had it on even though the overhead light was fine, and every so often he aimed it at a label and read the small print.
“This is four years expired,” he said, to nobody, and dropped a foil packet in the left pile. Then he picked a water bottle and two ibuprofen off the table, came over, and held them out. “Take these. You’re no good to the watch rotation if your foot’s running the show.”
“There’s a watch rotation?”
“There will be.” Seth went back to his piles.
A week ago Marcus had thought of Seth as nothing more than a check writer. Their funding. Sure, he was smart, but so were a lot of people. Now he was sorting their food by headlamp in a borrowed cabin. Marcus thought he knew how to read people. He’d read Seth wrong.
“Seth.”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you. For today.”
He started to say when this is over, I’ll make sure you’re taken care of — but then realized how much of an idiot that would make him sound like. He clamped his mouth shut.
Seth looked up like he’d braced for the rest of it and the rest hadn’t come. “You’re welcome,” he said, and went back to the piles.
Vlad came in from the dark with the four phones in a gallon freezer bag and Doug’s framing hammer. He set the bag on the hearth bricks and looked at Marcus, which was Vlad asking.
They’d been off since the first night. That was the one rule Marcus had actually kept — his own phone off, in the bag, the whole time. But off was a thing you could undo. An off phone could be turned on in a weak minute at two in the morning to tell your mother you weren’t in a ditch. Vlad was proposing to make that impossible. Marcus was glad Vlad was asking him permission, or at least including him in the decision.
“Do it,” Marcus said.
His phone had his whole working life on it. Every deal he’d ever closed, every founder he’d talked off a ledge, his mother’s voice saying his name on a dozen voicemails he’d never deleted, the entire apparatus of being someone who could reach, and be reached, by anyone. Sure, all the stuff that mattered was in the cloud, but the concept of not having the physical device was jarring.
Vlad hit the bag four times, flat, with no wind-up. The plastic crunched and then went quiet.
Marcus was surprised by how much it hurt. He kept his face still and let his foot throb in time with his pulse.
Vlad didn’t sit. He described the next move standing up — the red truck, the route south in the dark, who slept and who drove. In the middle of it he added the new rule Marcus knew was coming. Nobody contacts anybody outside the four of us. Ever. Until this is over and all four of us agree it’s over. For any reason. And if you think you have a reason, you bring it to all three of us before you do anything about it.
Marcus had apologized in the kitchen. Vlad had apologized back, and Marcus had taken it for a thaw. Watching him now, Marcus understood the apology had been about Vlad’s tone. The trust under it hadn’t come back. Seth had trusted somebody today and it had saved all of them. Marcus had fucked up.
“I can tell you what’s coming,” Marcus said.
Vlad stared at him.
“Not from their side. From mine.” Marcus tipped his head at the black window and the whole invisible machinery of the world he’d come from. “You scrubbed yourself off the internet years ago, so you don’t think about this. I didn’t. That’s the hole we almost fell in today, so let me at least be useful.”
“Brett won’t stop. He’s already put anyone heard from Marcus? in front of everyone he’s ever met, and when he gets nothing he posts it again, louder, because to Brett silence is a problem you solve in public. My mother is calling down my contact list one name at a time. The press has my name. Our board is eventually going to start looking around and when Seth isn’t on the calls, they’ll look for him also.”
Seth had stopped moving things between the piles. Vlad hadn’t moved at all.
“None of it is a thing we can answer,” Marcus said. “That’s not the point. It’s like the weather. It just happens, changes, and happens some more. You two are watching for the people hunting us. Let me watch for the noise my own life is making, because it’s going to keep making it whether I’m in this cabin or not, and I’m the only one in this room who can understand if there is any signal in it.”
Vlad looked at him for a while. “Okay,” he said finally. It wasn’t warmth. It wasn’t even clear what he was saying okay to. But Marcus took it as acknowledgement that he could add something. Not much, but something. He looked over at Samantha. She was still out cold.
Seth zipped the keep pile into two packs and lay down on the floor by the door with his coat over him. Vlad took the chair with his boots still on.
“I’ll take first watch,” Marcus said. “I can’t walk, but I can sit here and look at a window.”
Vlad considered it a beat longer than a yes should take. “Wake me at two,” he said, and shut his eyes.
Marcus planned to be good at watching.
He leaned down and pulled the top of the sleeping bag up over Samantha’s shoulder, where it had slipped. She didn’t wake. He hadn’t expected her to.
Cooper got up from beside Samantha, crossed the room, and lay down along Marcus’s good leg with a sigh, his spine warm against the shin. Marcus put his hand in the fur and left it there. The woodstove ticked as it cooled. Below the cabin another train came up out of the tunnel and took its time going by. Marcus watched the black window for the weather he knew was coming, awake, with his hand on the dog, and for once said nothing.