Chapter 2
Travis
The first ten miles were always the worst.
Not because of the road. Highway 93 at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night was empty in the way that only Montana highways could be—two lanes of nothing stretching into more nothing, the center line pulsing under my headlights like a weak heartbeat. No traffic. No witnesses. Just the dark and the distance and the low hum of the engine doing exactly what I needed it to do.
The road wasn’t the problem.
The problem was my body, which had started its mutiny before I’d even reached the car and was now fully committed to the cause. The hives had settled into a steady burn across my chest and arms, and my hands were locked on the wheel hard enough that my knuckles ached.
I’d learned not to watch them. If I watched, I’d see the tremor, and if I saw the tremor, the operational part of mybrain would start logging it as a variable, and I didn’t need more variables.
A semi passed going south, and the headlights hit me like a wall. I felt them in my teeth. The whole cab went white for two seconds, and every nerve I had fired at once—threat assessment, escape routes, distance to the shoulder, angle of approach. By the time the truck was past and the dark came back, my heart rate had probably added another ten points to whatever number Maude was documenting.
My body thought I was dying.
This was the part I couldn’t train out. I’d tried. Eighteen months of this and I still couldn’t make my body understand that headlights weren’t hostile, that open road wasn’t exposure, that the black tree line wasn’t a firing line.
My brain knew the difference. My brain had logged every mile of this route, cross-referenced every patrol schedule, calculated every variable down to the minute. My brain was operational.
“Route update,” Maude said through the earpiece. “County patrol completed its southbound loop four minutes ahead of projected schedule. You have a wider window at the substation. Adjusting timing now.”
“Copy.”
I passed the junction at mile forty-two and turned onto the first logging road. The pavement gave way to gravel, and the trees closed in on both sides. It was darker here. Quieter. The headlights caught nothing but dirt and pine trunks and the occasional reflective flash of animal eyes in the underbrush.
“Fifteen miles to the staging point,” Maude said. “Thermal signatures at the target location are unchanged. Five confirmed, two consistent with adult males. Three smaller signatures in the northeast corner of the main structure.”
Three.
I didn’t let myself think about that number. Not yet. The number went into the operational box where it stayed useful and didn’t become anything else.
“Vehicle status at the location?”
“Van is still in the gravel lot. No additional vehicles have arrived since your departure. No movement outside the structure.”
“Time estimate for the move window?”
“Based on pattern analysis, between two and four a.m. You have approximately two hours.”
Enough. Barely, but enough.
I turned onto the second logging road and killed the headlights. Drove the last four miles on night-adapted eyes and memory, the route mapped so thoroughly in my head that I could have done it blind. The gravel crunched under the tires, and the trees pressed in, and the dark was total.
I left the vehicle at the tree line and went the rest of the way on foot.
The building sat in a clearing about three hundred yards ahead—a low cinder-block structure that had probably been a maintenance shed for the logging operation that once ran these roads. Single story. Flat roof. Two windows on the south side, one on the north, a metal door facing the gravel lot where the van sat dark and silent.
I’d been studying this place for six days on satellite feeds. I knew the angles, the sight lines, the dead spots.
I knew that the north window of the shed had a broken latch that hadn’t been repaired because these people didn’t plan to be here long enough to care. I knew the generator on the east side ran a single interior light, and the fluorescent buzz it produced was audible from fifty feet.
I could hear it now. That thin, high hum cutting through the night silence. My skin registered it before my ears did—aprickling awareness that ran down my arms and settled in my jaw.
This was the thing nobody would ever understand about what was wrong with me. The hypervigilance that made pulling up at a gas station feel like an ambush was the same wiring that made me exceptional at what I was doing.
Every sound too loud, every shadow too sharp, every shift in the air pressure catalogued and cross-referenced against threat profiles I couldn’t turn off in my brain? That was my agoraphobia at full blast.
