Ghost hit the first two switches and killed half the room. The click sounded like louder things. The space heater died, and the sudden absence of useless warmth made the cold honest again.
I stayed long enough to sweep the desk for anything with a name on it, then palmed the fuse box cover and snapped all of it down with my knuckles. Dark.
Wrecker stood by the door and looked at the radio one last time like he wanted to stab it or hug it or both. He left it. Proud of him.
We slipped into the hallway and out the back like the building had learned how to keep secrets. Boots on concrete. Then boots on dirt. Then quiet.
The creek took us like it’s taken men longer than any of us have been alive. Cold up to the ankles. Stones slick enough to make you honest. We moved in a line: Ranger and the kid and Doc and the sisters, Ghost sliding the rear like a shadow that had opinions. Wrecker beside me.
“Think they have the station surrounded?” he breathed.
“Think they will,” I breathed back. “Give them five.”
He nodded. We didn’t look back. Looking back is for when you don’t have work in front of you.
At the bend, Ranger lifted a hand. We stopped. The sun was trying to be a thing through a mean layer of cloud. It failed. The ridge kept its secrets in a dull strip of light. From where we were, you could just see the roofline of the station through the pines.
A voice carried. Not the radio. The real kind. Men giving each other directions like they liked the sound of their own authority.
“North side clear.”
“Bay clear.”
“Check outbuildings.”
I felt Ariel flinch in the water next to me, then reset. Amanda’s grip on her hand stayed high and tight. Doc’s handhovered at a distance where it could become pressure if either of them listed.
We moved again. South. Then east at the cut where the creek loses interest in being a creek and turns into mud and bad ideas. The fire road met us the way bad roads do, sullen, rutted, useful.
By the time we hit the trucks, the men on the ridge had settled into their version of caution. Ghost slid behind the wheel of the back vehicle, heart rate the same as if he were making tea. Ranger and the kid took the lead truck. Doc beeped the flashers twice in that pattern we always use when we want the other car to know we’re still in the same story.
Wrecker looked at me over the hood. His mouth did a small shape that said what he didn’t.
“Yeah,” I said.
The radio in my pocket woke up long enough to sing static and one more line of someone else’s plan pushed through the noise.
“Green light holds,” the voice said. “Ridge units advance.”
Ariel met my eyes. She didn’t ask. She already knew.
“He found us first,” I said.
And that was the whole problem.
