“The drone can see through the fog?”
“Not as clearly as if there was none, but yes, it’ll find our heat signatures.”
“And it’s armed?”
“No. They’ll locate the target with the drone, close in on it, and then switch to the thermal scopes on their rifles. It only has a range of a mile, maybe a mile and a half, so they’re not far behind.”
“They’ve found us?”
“Not yet. It’s still sweeping back and forth. If they’d found us, it’d be hovering. But it won’t be long.”
“We need to run, get to the village.”
“We can’t outrun them, Amelia, not on this terrain, not over six miles, and don’t forget they have the pickup. Plan B—we hide out overnight while we come up with a Plan C.”
“Not keeping track but I think we’re up to Plan L or M.” She looked around, not that she could see much. “There are a few rocks. I haven’t seen any with overhanging ledges to hide under but…”
“Not out here. It’s too exposed. Our best chance is to get back to the abbey.”
“The abbey? No. Tom—no. We’ve got this far, we need to keep going. How about… Don’t moors have, like, prehistoric stone huts? Little caves? We could hide out for a couple of hours, and then?—”
“Not this one. There’s no shelter out here, not from above, not for miles. It’s a matter of time before they find us. They’ll start with the road and sweep out from there. They can cover far more ground than we can.”
She gazed along the road in one direction, and then the other. “But they could be anywhere.”
“The position of the drone gives us a clue. It comes into view occasionally. But we don’t need to outrun the drone so much as the guy with the rifle following along behind. One of them will be operating the drone, the other shooting. Hard to do both.”
She looked along the lane. “If we go straight back to the house, they’ll definitely find us.”
“We’ll loop back through the moor. It’s a longer distance, but we need to keep at least a couple of hundred meters between us and the road. Plus, there are deer and wild sheep. Their heat signatures will act as decoys, to a point.”
“So, what? We’re supposed to go back to the abbey and hide in the dark and wait for them to just appear in the room and…?” She broke off. If she kept going it would be obvious that she’d started to cry.
“Amelia.” He took her arm and drew her in. “I know the idea of that freaks you out. But I will keep you safe?—”
“You can’t!” she said, shaking off his arm. “You can’t keep me safe. A bullet will slice through you just as easily as it slices through me. Don’t promise me that.”
“You didn’t let me finish. I’ll keep you safeas best I can. That’s as much as I can promise. The abbey has hiding places within hiding places. We’ll hunker down for the night and come up with a new plan in the morning. If we’re lucky they won’t even know we’re in there. You said safety is relative, yeah?”
“Yes, but?—”
“We’ll be safer trying to make it back to the abbey rather than continuing along the road. Relatively.”
“If it’s all a risk, I want to risk going for help. They might not catch up to us. They don’t know for sure we’ve left. We could split up—I go along the road and you through the moor. They can’t follow us both.”
“Amelia…”
She halted and turned toward him. “I can’t go back, Tom. I can’t hide, knowing they could appear at any time. I’ve made it this far. I was just starting to feel like I was out of danger,relatively. Now you’re here and we might as well keep going, together. Please, Tom.” She held out a hand. “Hiding is freezing. I don’t want to freeze. I’ve spent a year frozen and freaking out, and I’m over it. I need to keep moving.”
“You can’t compare this to the robbery. With the robbery, you had no options. You had a gun to your head. Your ability to control the situation was taken away, and nothing you could have done would have made it turn out differently. With this, we can buy ourselves time and options. But we need to keep safe.”
She started walking, already feeling like the argument was lost. He was just another factor out of her control. “Every step we take to the village gets us closer to safety.”
“Then why are you heading back to the abbey?” he called softly.
She halted. “What do you mean?”
“You’re walking towards the abbey.”
