My jaw locked. High-tensile wire didn’t need teeth to cut.
"Get him back to the vehicle and apply pressure," I said, my voice dropping into the flat, quiet register that kept the air in the room steady. “Bravo team, redirect to the eastern wash. They’re dropping cable across the service track to foul tires and force us out on foot. They want us chasing the fence breach. It’s a decoy.”
"Then where?" Daniel asked, looking up from the screen.
"The animal corridor," I said, grabbing my rifle from the rack by the door. The steel of the receiver was cold, the bolt sliding forward with a heavy, mechanical snap. "They used the lodge timing to pull us wide. They know we have twenty guests sitting on their luggage waiting for a clearance. They're timing the push to our distraction."
The flight could wait. The corridor couldn’t. Now the service cut was breached, the road was a tactical liability, and Juliette was still inside the compromised perimeter. Exactly where fear could find her.
"Stay with the server logs," I told Daniel as I hit the screen door. “Find out whose access opened that gate.”
Gravel kicked under my boots as I crossed to the jeep. I tossed the rifle into the passenger rack and started the engine.
The jeep caught on the first turn, vibration punching through the wheel. I cleared the main gate before the dust from the operations yard had even settled.
The brush along the eastern wash was a wall of gray-green thorn. Branches raked the truck panels in dry, metallic bursts. An impala bolted from a thicket at thirty meters, its white tail a flag against the shadow before it vanished into the leadwood.
My radio hummed. "Alpha to Station. We have movement east of the wash. Two individuals on foot. Carrying packs."
"Do not chase," I said, my left hand steady on the wheel while the truck bounced through a dry rut. "Hold the corridor. Let them run away from the animals."
"They're dropping gear," Elias reported. His voice was more stable now, the adrenaline leveling out. "Bolt cutters left on the track. One vehicle engine starting up toward the boundary line."
“Let them go,” I said. “We don’t chase past the boundary into the dark. Secure the equipment. Check the line for secondary sets.”
We flushed them before they reached the corridor.
One truck made the boundary, but they left the cutters, the wire, and half their plan behind. The animals kept moving. The guests stayed inside. Mbeki kept his arm.
Three hours later, I pulled back up to the lodge entrance. Dust grayed my forearms. Mbeki’s blood had dried stiff on my right cuff.
The lodge lounge was dead silent.
The guests were there, but the panic had been drained out of them. Victor—the idiot who had spent the last twelve hours threatening lawsuits over his missed connection—sat in one of the leather chairs, a cold cup of tea in his lap, staring at the floorboards. Graham’s phone was face down on a side table.
Juliette stood near the reception desk.
Her dark hair was pulled back hard enough to show the strain around her eyes. A guest staging list sat in her left hand, a pen between her fingers. Pale but steady, she wasn’t smiling, and she wasn’t looking to anyone for approval.
I noticed the pen before I noticed anything else.
She hadn’t clicked one in days. Not really. The absence had become its own data point, one I’d been stupid enough to like. Around me, her hands had gone quieter.
Not now.
The pen shifted between her fingers once, tight and controlled. She didn’t click it, but she wanted to.
Sarah was beside her, looking at Juliette like she had personally cleared the roads.
Juliette looked up as the screen door slammed behind me. Her eyes went down to my sleeve first—the brown crust on the khaki fabric—and then up to my face. Her jaw tightened, a small, nearly invisible twitch in the muscle near her ear, but she didn't move toward me. She didn't ask if I was intact.
I stopped five feet from the counter. The scent of her reached me through the sweat and dust, clean and sharp and completely out of place against the blood dried on my sleeve.
"The eastern line is clear," I said to Sarah, though my eyes stayed on Juliette. "The road team is moving the drifts now. We’ll start vehicle staging in ninety minutes."
"I'll update the drivers," Sarah said. She took the clipboard Juliette handed her, her fingers brushing Juliette’s with adeference she usually reserved for the reserve owners. She vanished into the back corridor without another word.
The lounge emptied itself through omission. The guests stayed where they were, but their attention had drifted toward the luggage piles near the doors.
