“Hey, just clarifying,” I said as I held my hands up.
All eyes went back to Ranger before he sighed. “Marla has been through hell. I’ve had to use a lot of de-escalation tactics that we all learned in the military on her just to keep her calm so that she can become more familiar with this space she ran to.”
“She all right?” Cap asked.
Ranger shrugged. “Depends on how you define the word. She’s still in my closet. She refuses to come out. But I do have her eating a bit, and she is talking with me, finally.”
“Good,” Brutus said.
“I think that part of her unwillingness to talk was the fact that she was so dehydrated and malnourished when she first ran up on us. A week of eating and drinking some water seems to have brought back some memories.”
“Like…?” Doc asked.
“Like,” Ranger said as he slid his hand into his back pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper. He unraveled the folded article and smoothed it out on the table right beside where Scout dropped that stack of papers, “a trail drawing of the route she ran and what she saw from point A to point B, when she took off and started running for us.”
“You’re fucking kidding,” Cap said as he snatched the map right off the table.
Wrecker, Cap’s second-in-command, hovered over his shoulder to gaze at it himself.
“She remembered landmarks,” Ranger said, “she remembered the types of trees. It’s rudimentary, but her map alone makes it clear that she entered town from?—”
Cap slowly looked up. “The same side of town Ariel and I emerged from.”
Ranger nodded. “You said you and Ariel set a bunch of people free before you made a run for it, yeah?”
Cap swallowed. “Yeah.”
Ranger just sighed. “I think she may have been one of the people you inadvertently freed.”
Cap shook his head. “But that means she was on the run for?—”
The entire room fell silent before Ranger finally responded. “For a while. She was living in the woods, not realizing where she was for a while before she found the edge of the woods and ran into town.”
Cap mindlessly passed the map to Wrecker, who proceeded to pass it around to all of us. Even I got a look at it, and Ranger was right. The map was rudimentary, at best, but anyone who lived in Redd Valley for any length of time recognized the statues and the trees that got marked with spray paint every summer because of the kids that got bored just before school started back up.
“There’s only one problem,” Ranger said as I passed the map to Brutus.
“What?” I asked.
Ranger tilted his head. “I don’t believe she was being held where Cap and Ariel were being held.”
That snapped our president’s attention to him. “What makes you say that?”
“This,” Brutus said as he emerged from his darkness, pointing at the map. “I don’t recognize this.”
“What?” I asked as I came out of my corner as well.
We all gathered around him to see what he pointed at and… he was right.
“The fuck is that?” Wrecker asked.
“Hell of a question coming from the person that grew up here,” Cap muttered.
“Seriously,” Wrecker said as he took the map and oriented it in front of his face, “what landmark is that?”
Ranger piped up. “Want to know what I think?”
“Yes,” Cap said, “tell us your theory.”
