I touch the bark, and the tree tells me what the men didn’t: someone plans to come back or wants us to think so. Either way, it’s a sentence we’ll finish for them.
Scout checks in. “Ridge bow,” he says. “Guardrail chipped, paint smear at shoulder. Rebar cage below smells like God’s dirty sink. I got a thread. Canvas, black. Bleach. She went water.”
“Good,” I say, and sound like a man who just let pain live in his mouth. “Follow the bank east. Two bends. Willow that refuses to die. Crawl-out there. Find drag, find palm stars, then,”
“Then Ranger station,” he says, eager, proud. “I’m already,”
Static eats him. Not a squeal, not a fade. A clean cut like somebody pinched a wire. The kind of silence you get when a hand covers a mic, or a signal hits a wall you didn’t build.
“Scout?” Doc says, voice low and wrong. “Say again.”
Nothing. The rain remembers how to be loud. Somewhere far off, a drone whines the way money does when it’s bored.
“Give it a count,” I tell myself, and give it one. Two. Three.
“Scout,” Ranger tries, calm as a doctor. “You got cute, I’ll tan what’s left.”
Nothing. Then the wrong thing, somebody else’s carrier whispering across our frequency for a blink, a voice that isn’t our boy’s: “…ridge post, clear, hold,” Cut.
Ghost adjusts the strap on his rifle like it chafed him personally. “We going?”
“We’re going,” I say. “Ghost with me on the ridge road. Ranger holds the cabin and the road cut. Doc keeps the world talking and records everything we don’t want to forget later.”
“What about the radio?” Doc asks, chin at the towel-wrapped set on the table.
“It stays.” I plant it back under the wood box where it belongs and kick the box until the gap vanishes. “If we die stupid, I want someone else to read our homework.”
We load fast. The truck grumbles awake. Ranger ghosts back into the trees, one with the sort of patience I kept thinking I’d outgrow and never did. Doc slings the scanner, tucks a second into his pocket, because paranoia is a hobby that pays. Ghost climbs into the passenger seat and refuses to put on his belt on principle. I shoulder the bike, and the rain kisses my knuckles.
Before we go, I put a hand flat on the jamb where Cap would have. The wood is cold and remembers all the hands it has held, hers, his, men who came to take. “Be here,” I tell the house, ridiculous, and the house pretends it doesn’t hear me, which is the same as agreeing.
I kick the bike to life. It answers like an old sin, faithful, ugly, true. The road out is slick, and the trees tuck their heads as we pass. I taste the salt of my own bad choices in the back of my throat and grin at it.
“Scout,” I say into the mic, steady and mean, “you better be on the other side of this silence.”
The ridge lifts its back, and the world narrows to a wet ribbon and the math of a day that ran out of patience hours ago. Behindus the cabin keeps our secret under cedar and dust. Ahead, a boy with too much promise just vanished into a place that eats it.
We ride.
