24
WRECKER
The ranger station was a memory now, smoke on the ridge and a busted door left for the next storm. We’d moved downhill to an old toolshed near the creek, close enough to hear the depot’s trucks if they rolled before dawn.
The safe house used to be a toolshed with ideas. Now it was a rectangle of blackened studs and a tin roof that popped when the wind remembered it. We’d hosed it down till the steam quit lying. The air still tasted like battery smoke and wet plywood.
Ghost took first perimeter. Ranger took second. Cap paced a groove from the door to the table and back, jaw working like he was chewing through rope. Doc had gone quiet, doing his inventory thing, which is how he prays. I tried sitting. The chair creaked like it was filing a complaint. I got back up.
We’d lost Amanda in that soup a few hours ago. “Lost” as in smoke stole her path and the ridge swallowed her. Not the other kind of lost. Couldn’t think that word and keep my hands still.
Scout ran loops in my head anyway. Same feeling: you look left, look right, and the person who kept your temper honest is gone. Different day. Same stupid ache.
The handheld sat dead center on the table, screen cracked, battery taped in with a strip of gaffer. We’d tried the MC relaytwice since we set up. Static and crosstalk. Watcher had been stepping on the frequency since dawn, playing DJ over anyone he didn’t own.
“Say it,” Ranger said from the doorway. He didn’t turn around.
“I’m not saying it,” I said.
“You’re thinking it.”
“Thinking isn’t saying.” I rubbed the heel of my hand over my eye. It came away gray. “We don’t eulogize without a body.”
Cap stopped mid-pace and braced his palms on the table. The tendons in his forearms stood up like wire. “Doc?”
Doc closed the med kit lid with a click. “Two rounds left for the big gun. Low on gauze. Out of glamor,” he said, meaning miracles. “I’ve seen worse. I don’t like it.”
“Copy,” Cap said, which is what he says when he wants to punch a wall, but the wall hasn’t earned it.
The handheld woke up like it had heard us say “out of glamor” and wanted to disagree. A chirp. Then another, low and stubborn, as if the thing were knocking from inside a trunk.
Ghost slid back into the room like he’d been waiting just outside for the cue. He didn’t look at the radio. He looked at our faces first. Good habits.
The chirp again, clearer. A short-burst packet, not voice. The kind of thing Scout liked to use when she didn’t want anyone but us to hear the hello.
I felt my ribs get bigger and smaller at the same time. “Up,” I said. Ranger closed the door with his shoulder and killed the outside light. Cap reached without looking and lowered the blackout curtain.
I thumbed the side switch and rolled us down the dial, past Watcher’s spooled-out garbage and the weather band, to the thin lane where Scout lived when she needed to move without beingseen. Another chirp. Then a tone, three quick, one long, three quick. Her signature. Except she wasn’t the one in there.
I thumbed transmit. “Say again.”
“I’m in.”
Every head came up like someone had yanked a wire. Ranger’s went first. Ghost’s eyebrows didn’t move but the air around him did. Cap’s eyes cut to me.
I kept it flat. “Identify.”
“Freight front. Northern depot. Don’t come for me.”
The room froze. For a second, nobody breathed.
Ariel’s voice came first, rough from smoke. “We thought you got taken. You were in the woods. There was gunfire, how are you, where the hell are you?”
Static crackled, then Amanda again, quieter, like she was crouched under a desk. “Not taken. Not yet. When the smoke hit, Doc and I split at the bend. I doubled back.”
“You what?” Cap said.
“I could see the trucks pulling out,” she went on, fast but steady. “Half the drivers bailed, half stayed. They were yelling about needing to restage, get manifests reprinted, move the convoy before daylight. Nobody was checking faces, just counting clipboards. So, I grabbed one and walked with them.”
