“Then it’ll take longer.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I relent and put my hands behind my back. She binds them again. Tight but not painful.
I walk ahead of Naomi. In the silence of our journey, I take stock of just how terribly I’ve handled the situation. I let her get the drop on me and didn’t disarm her immediately. I let her take me hostage, and given what I revealed in my sleep, she knows more about me than I know about her.
I trudge through the mud, feeling the squelch beneath my boots with each step. My bound hands throw off my balance, forcing me to walk slower than I'd like. The rain has stopped now, but water still drips from the pine branches above.
My mind races through calculations. From here to my truck is roughly forty minutes at this pace. Forty minutes to decide whether this ends with blood.
I've been here before. That knife-edge between life and death. But it's been years since I've walked it with someone else, someone who might tip the balance either way. I need to figure out who Naomi Barrett really is and what she's done. Why a woman who handles a gun like law enforcement is wearing prison orange and running scared through the Montana wilderness.
There are only two possibilities, but both gnaw at me. Either she's a cold-blooded killer who's already decided I won'tlive to see tomorrow, in which case she'll put a bullet in my head before taking my truck, or she's not. Desperate enough to take a hostage but not hardened enough to execute me in cold blood.
She’ll only kill me if she thinks she has to.
If it's the first, nothing I say matters. If it's the second... well, that's more complicated. She suspects I might be connected to whoever or whatever is hunting her. She needed to be convinced otherwise.
I stay quiet. Waiting. Listening to her footsteps behind me, gauging her breathing, her distance, her attention.
Ten minutes pass in silence. Then fifteen. The forest breathes, coming to life around us, indifferent to our human drama.
"You don't sound like you're from Montana." She finally breaks the silence.
Well, that’s a good sign. If she were just going to leave a corpse next to my truck, she wouldn’t care where my twang came from.
I don't turn around, just keep walking. "I'm not. Texas."
"When did you move here?"
"Six years ago." I duck under a low-hanging branch.
"Why Montana?" She's fishing. Trying to build a profile?
I snort. "Why does anyone move to the middle of nowhere? To be left alone."
There's a pause. I can almost feel her weighing my answer, deciding whether it rings true or not.
“Is Barakesh where you deployed?”
I’m trained not to react, so I don’t. But it takes every scrap of it to keep my face from moving.So I was talking in my sleep.
I nod. “Yeah.” No use lying about that. Hopefully, she doesn’t know enough about that part of the world. That we weren’t supposed to be there. And if you look it up and read the official record, wenever were.
“Thank you for your service.”
Well we're getting farther and farther away from the cold-blooded killer scenario. I wouldn’t expect a murderer to thank me for my military service. Though I suppose it doesn’t entirely rule it out.
People are strange.
But it does confirm that she’s not military. It also hints that she’s not used to being on the wrong side of the law. She seems a little more relaxed by my answers, which is also good.
I decide to press my luck. “Where are you from?”
I risk a look back, and she glances at me. Her face is a lot less severe than it has been. Damn, it's pretty. “Virginia.”
“Been there. It’s beautiful.”
“It is.”
