Page 20 of Make Them Pay

Unit seventeen. He punches a code into the padlock, rolls the door up just enough for us to duck under, and pulls it closed behind us.

The interior is dark until he finds a switch. Industrial fluorescent tubes flicker on one by one, filling the space with the harsh, flat light of a place designed for storage, not habitation. The unit is the size of a single-car garage. Concrete floor. Metal walls. No windows.

But it's stocked.

Metal shelves line the left wall, loaded with cases and containers in the organized, labeled manner of someone who inventories his emergency supplies the way other people inventory their kitchens. I see ammunition boxes. A change of clothes, sealed in vacuum bags. Water in gallon jugs. MREs. A compact medical kit that's more comprehensive than the one we've been carrying. And at the back, resting on a low shelf beside a folded cot, a second laptop and a satellite uplink unit in a hardened case.

"You have a backup everything," I say.

"Backups have backups." He's already pulling the vacuum-sealed clothes from the shelf and tossing me a set. Dark pants. A thermal base layer. A hoodie three sizes too large that must be his. "Change. The wet clothes will drop your core temperature faster than the walk already has."

I don't argue. I take the clothes and turn my back to him and strip out of the soaked jeans and hoodie. The cold air hits my bare skin and I clench my teeth against the shiver that runs through me. The thermal base layer goes on first, tight and warm, the fabric wicking the residual moisture from my skin. Then the dry pants. Then the oversized hoodie that falls to mid-thigh and smells like laundry detergent and something else. Something I'm starting to associate with him, not soap, not cologne, just the ambient scent of a person whose clothes you've been near long enough to catalog.

When I turn around he's already changed. Black pants. A dark thermal shirt that fits closer than the one he was wearing before and shows the lean frame of his shoulders and arms in a way the previous layers obscured. He's organized the rest of the supplies on the table with the same efficiency he brings to everything: ammunition to the left, food and water in the center, electronics to the right.

The cot is small. Built for one person. The cold floor is exactly as unforgiving as the cabin's was.

"I'll take the floor," he says. Before I can open my mouth.

"Your left leg has been bothering you since mile six. You're sleeping on the cot."

"It's nothing major. I caught it on a rock during the crossing."

"Then you're sleeping on the cot with your leg elevated. That's not a suggestion."

He gazes at me the way he did in the cabin when I set my conditions on the first night. Like he’d give me the world if I only ever asked for it.

"Fine," he says.

I take the floor. He hands me a sleeping bag from one of the shelves, rolled tight and vacuum-sealed. When I unroll it the insulation expands and the fabric is warmer than anything I've slept on in a long time. I stretch out against the wall opposite the cot and pull the bag up to my chin.

The fluorescent lights are too bright. Render kills them, leaving only the small emergency LED on the uplink charger, a green dot in the darkness that gives the room a faint underwater glow.

I hear him settle onto the cot. The frame creaks once under his weight and then goes quiet.

The storage unit is colder than the cabin. Harder. Less like a place and more like a container.

My brain catches the association before it can spiral. Container. Metal walls. No windows. The similarities are there if I look for them and my brain is looking because my brain is always looking now, scanning every environment for the pattern that matches the worst thing that ever happened to me.

But this container has a door I can open. Has supplies and weapons and a man on the other side of the room who gave me the car keys and the directions and the freedom to leave when I wanted to run.

The difference matters. I hold onto it.

"Render."

"Yeah."

"The town. Millhaven. You rerouted around it without even thinking about it."

He’s silent for a long moment. Right when I’m certain he isn’t going to answer me, he says, "I thought about it."

"For how long?"

"About half a second."

"What was the other option?"

"There wasn't one. A pursuit through a populated area with armed hostiles behind us isn't a calculated risk. It's a decision to treat civilian lives as acceptable loss. I don't do that."