Behind me, the door opens.
“Zane.”
Ryder’s voice carries that tight control he leans on when things start slipping.
I don’t turn right away.
“Pickup,” I say, still looking at the screen. “Older model. Heavy suspension. It sat low when it took off.”
Finn’s footsteps close in. “You can tell that from dirt?”
I hand him the phone instead of answering. He studies the footage, then looks up at me with a sharpness behind his usual expression.
Ryder steps closer, eyes already moving over the details, taking it in, fitting it into the bigger picture he’s building in his head.
“Tell me we can find him,” he says.
There’s no hesitation in my answer. “We will.”
Because that part is simple.
Inside, The Hollow has shifted.
It happened fast, almost instinctively. Doors locked. Movement controlled. The energy tightened, becomingpurposeful; the building itself understood what it needed to become.
Finn’s pacing again, the restless kind that means he’s trying to outrun something he can’t.
Ryder stands too still.
That’s where I focus.
I set the laptop down, pull up the footage on the bigger screen, and run it frame by frame. Aurora crosses the screen, hands tucked into her jacket, head slightly tilted, thinking about anything softer than the space she’s walking through.
Then she’s gone.
“She disappears at the blind spot,” I say, mapping it out as I go. “From there, he had two clean routes out of town without giving us a full plate.”
Finn leans over the table. “So we guess which one?”
“We don’t guess,” I reply, bringing up the map. “We narrow.”
I zoom out, layering what we know over what we’ve seen before.
Cole doesn’t improvise. He reuses what works. Patterns matter with him.
“Short-term hold,” I continue. “Somewhere controlled. Somewhere he knows we’ll need time to reach.”
Ryder nods once. He’s following.
“Storage units north of town,” I add, pulling them up. “Old service roads off the ridge. A couple of structures that stay off the grid if you know how to use them.”
“He won’t use anything too exposed,” Ryder says.
“No,” I agree, adjusting the list. “He’ll want time. Control.”
Time to make a point.
Time to make us react.
