When supplies ran low, I drove forty miles to the nearest generic non-small town store, bought ground beef, noodles, rice—everything required to keep him fueled—and came back to cook in bulk: bolognese, lasagna, more chili, portioned, stored, cookies and his preferred Hershey’s lined up within reach of his left hand where he would find them without looking.
Efficiency mattered. Disruption slowed him down. Slowing him down meant risk.
When he started sending me guard rotation data and images pulled from feeds, I spread paper across the table in the far corner of the panic room and mapped routes by hand, marking patterns, timing gaps, and noting inconsistencies, building a structure I could work with.
One detail stood out.
To me it looked as if Noah was hunting for a way out.
Was he planning to try to escape? That wouldn’t end well if he was still wearing that collar; he wouldn’t get far. From a humane perspective, would he leave his pregnant sister there? If the plan was to run and get help, who would you run to? Caleb was adamant that no one could be trusted, and Noah might run straight to local law enforcement and never make it past first contact.
All this discovery ran in parallel to the rhythm of Caleb’s typing, syncing with the lines I drew, the quiet of the room broken only by keys and the occasional shift when I adjusted something for him.
This was how it worked: him inside the system, me outside it, with both of us locked on the same objective.
I’d already built a plan for infiltration, mapped entry points and fallback routes, identified where I would extract, but the blind spot sat wrong in my head, and I needed Caleb to see it. Noah was inside, and that meant he had access to information neither of us could reach from here, and if that gap was intentional, then it wasn’t just an opportunity; it was something I couldn’t ignore.
I waited until his hands slowed enough to register me. “There’s an irregularity in Noah’s guard rotation,” I said.
He didn’t turn his attention from the screen immediately. “There are a lot of irregularities in everything.” He sounded tired.
“This one repeats,” I replied. “Every third cycle. Same blind spot.”
That got his attention. He turned, eyes sharpening as he tracked what I was saying. “Repeats how?”
“Too clean,” I said. “He’s looking for a way out.”
Caleb leaned back slightly, processing, fingers flexing as if he wanted to get back to the keyboard but couldn’t yet. “You don’t know that.”
“I know patterns,” I said.
“Okay.”
“I’m going to head over there and talk to him.”
“You’re what now?”
“He could give us valuable intel.”
Caleb dragged a hand through his hair, tension threading through him now. “If you’re wrong, then walking in there exposes us to them.”
“I won’t be wrong.”
“That’s not good enough,” he shot back, quieter but sharper. “Not with this.”
I held his gaze. “If he’s creating an opening, we use it. If he isn’t, I adapt.”
“‘Adapt’ how? You’re not killing him, Novak!”
I stared at Caleb. “I don’t killeveryoneI meet,” I offered.
Caleb exhaled hard, looking back at the screen for a second before returning to me. “He wouldn’t get far,” he said. “Not with the collar. Not without help.”
“Exactly. If he’s leaving his sister to go for help and encounters one of the cops on the list who takes him out, then we can stop this.”
“And if you see him and he panics, or if he thinks you’re part of it?”
“I control the approach.”
