22
CAP
Ranger Station 12 looked like every other ranger station I’d ever seen, cedar siding, bad coffee, a cork board with sun-faded flyers, except for the blood smear drying on the back step and the wet footprints we’d been making since 3 a.m. The space heater clicked like it was thinking about helping. It didn’t.
Ariel sat on a wool blanket by the radio desk, wrapped in a ranger’s parka two sizes too big. Her hair was a wet snarl, river water still darkening the ends. She’d stopped shaking an hour ago and then started again for no reason except that bodies do what they want after they’ve lived through something they shouldn’t. I stood near enough to catch it if she slid off the stool. Far enough to give her space if she needed to breathe without my shadow.
Headlights bumped up the access road a little after dawn. One truck. Then two. The sound rolled in, low and sure. Wrecker’s horn tapped twice and died.
“Door,” I said.
The ranger, kid, maybe twenty-two, cheeks windburned, fumbled the deadbolt and pulled it wide. Cold came with the Crew like a friend who doesn’t knock. Wrecker crossed first. Big, damp jacket. Eyes that scanned and counted before theysoftened. Doc on his shoulder. Ghost behind them, quiet as always, and Ranger last, shutting the world out with a flat hand on the frame like he owned doors.
Amanda didn’t wait for introductions.
She came in on a short breath that broke in the middle and was halfway across the room before her brain caught the rest of her up. “Ariel!”
Ariel stood too fast and almost took the stool with her. I caught the stool. She caught her sister.
They hit each other like magnets. No choreography. No soft-focus movie hug. Just hands and elbows and a sound that was too loud for the room. Amanda crushed Ariel into the parka and Ariel’s fingers hooked hard into the back of Amanda’s jacket like she could borrow spine by proximity.
“You’re okay,” Amanda said. She said it twice, like the first one needed a backup.
“I’m here,” Ariel said into her shoulder. “I’m here.”
Doc put a hand on my arm and squeezed once. He didn’t need to say it. He said it anyway. “Good work.”
“Not done,” I said. Because it wasn’t.
Wrecker gave me a look that carried three weeks of lost sleep and a nod at the same time. “You look like shit,” he said.
“You smell like a truck stop,” I said back. It passed for I’m glad you made it.
Ghost peeled off toward the windows, taking angles. Ranger cleared the back hall. Professional habits make rooms livable. The ranger kid hovered by the coffee maker like his job was to exist near caffeine. He wasn’t wrong.
When the big sound of two people remembering the other one was alive settled into the small sound of clothing and breath, Amanda pulled back just enough to see Ariel’s face. She cupped both sides like she was making sure it attached at the top.
“I thought you were dead,” she said. No decorations. Just the thing.
“Me too,” Ariel said, and then she laughed, one hard bark at the ceiling because sometimes the body picks its own punchline.
Amanda’s eyes were red in the edges. She wiped them with the heel of her hand and then turned fast in that way she has where motion is grief’s enemy. She unzipped her backpack, dug, and pulled out a sheaf of paper so thick it made the desk thud when she set it down.
“Before I left,” she said, breath knocking words around, “I ran the freight logs from Scout’s last ping. Cross-checked the shell company names with the missing persons list out of the tri-county, then cross-checked that with warehouse leases. It stacks. The dates. The codes. The same numbers keep showing up when women disappear and when certain ‘donation’ containers move.”
She flipped through and stopped on a page marked in red. Ghost drifted closer without looking like he drifted closer. Wrecker did the same from the other side, thumb pushing the edge of a page like he was testing it for lies.
I leaned in. The columns were neat. The math wasn’t. “Humanitarian aid,” I read out loud. “Water filtration. Medical supplies. Blankets.”
“Yeah,” Amanda said. “All the warm fuzzy. Wrapped around a lie.”
She hit a line item with her finger like she wanted to bruise the ink. “Northern depot. Six arrivals in the last ten days logged as relief goods, all on the same hauler, all tagged with this vendor code. It’s one of the shells Scout flagged. This,” she flipped to another page “, this is the truck that moved ‘donation blankets’ the same morning Ariel was taken.”
Ranger whistled under his breath. “Neat little loop.”
Doc scratched his jaw. “Medical supplies make a lot of noise going in and out. People don’t ask questions when they think they’re helping.”
Wrecker tapped the page with a dull knuckle. “You saying that’s where they’d keep them? Or just where they pass through?”
