Page 71 of Easy, Tiger

"Oh, very predictable." Reclining back against the tent wall, I warm to the performance. "They mark the same trees every season. Nolan showed me claw marks on a massive oak about two miles north of Devil's Gap. Said his father's generation used it, his grandfather's generation before that."

The oak exists, but it's in completely the wrong direction from where the enclave actually travels. Let him waste time stalking an empty forest.

"Fascinating." Cold satisfaction creeps over him, mirroring the triumph of a predator who believes he's finally cornered his prey. "You're being remarkably cooperative, Halsey."

I shrug as if resignation has replaced defiance. "I'm being practical. You clearly know more about this than I do. Fighting you seems pointless."

After another twenty minutes of detailed misinformation about feeding schedules and pack hierarchies, Nico starts organizing his gear with frantic, jerky movements. The storm is worsening, and his window to reach Devil's Gap is closing.

"I need to scout the pass and set up the nest before the vanguard arrives," he says, grabbing his primary rifle and his main satellite phone. He glances at me, considering. "I'd tie you to a tree, but I need my bait alive, not frozen to death in a blizzard."

He gestures to the howling whiteout beyond the thin tent flap. "Don't even think about trying anything clever. With your hands bound, you wouldn't last twenty minutes in that snow. You're staying right here."

"I won't, not in this weather. I've never been this high up. I'll be dead if I try to leave."

"Smart girl," he mutters, ducking through the tent flap into the swirling snow, leaving his heavy backup comms bag behind, arrogant enough to assume a tied-up city artist wouldn't know the first thing about military-grade shortwave radios.

The moment he disappears, I roll onto my side and work my bound hands toward his pack. The zip ties bite deeper into my wrists, but I power past the discomfort, letting Nolan's wilderness training take over. Focus on leverage. Find the weakness in any system.

His satellite phone sits in an exterior pocket, reinforced and probably expensive as hell. Managing to work the battery compartment open with my fingernails, I pop out the power source and palm it. The phone's exterior is completely undamaged, but it lacks the power needed to send a single signal.

Next, his GPS unit. The batteries are arduous to remove without tools, but I can access the waypoint menu. Years of digital illustration work taught me to navigate complex interfaces quickly. Deleting three of his saved coordinates, I alter the elevation data on two others by several hundred feet. Small changes that will send him scrambling up cliffsides to vantage points that don't exist.

The radio equipment takes more finesse. I can keep it running long enough to avoid his detection while introducing subtle problems. A loose connection here, a slightly bent antenna there. Nothing obvious, purely enough interference to make communication unreliable when he needs it most.

While sorting through his secondary comms bag, my fingers brush against a spare short-wave radio. Powering it on and switching to voice activation on Owen's open frequency, I wedge the radio deep behind a supply crate where the mic will pick up ambient noise. Now the enclave will hear every frustrated word Nico mutters.

My fingers work frantically through his gear, making small adjustments that will compound into major problems. Every time he leaves me alone, I'll find something new to sabotage. Death by a thousand tiny failures.

Nolan will approach this mountain by outsmarting a man with a rifle through cunning strategy. That is how he is built, ever since the day he chose patience over instinct with me. He'll chart Nico's patterns just as closely as he documented mine, waiting for the moment his opponent's guard falters before he moves. If I want to survive this, and if I want the enclave to survive it too, I can't sit here being something worth rescuing.

I have to become a variable Nico never accounted for, whether that means a dead battery when he needs to call for backup or false coordinates during a retreat. I need to be a flaw in a plan he's spent a decade perfecting—small enough to evade his detection until it's far too late to matter.

This is how I become part of Nolan's plan instead of simply waiting inside someone else's.

26

NOLAN

The smoke finally thins enough to see, and what's left behind is worse than empty. A wide swath of churned, packed snow cuts away from the camp toward the treeline, deep tread marks carved into it, already softening under the storm's pace but unmistakable for what they are.

Raising my radio to my mouth, I force my voice level. "Owen. He's got her on a snowmobile, heading northeast out of the camp. He had one staged."

"Copy that. How much of a lead?"

Following the tread marks a few yards further, I gauge how quickly the storm is already swallowing the edges. "Fifteen minutes, maybe more. Storm's picking up faster than I expected, and the smoke took longer to clear than it should have. A machine like that, he could be miles out by the time I catch this trail on foot."

"Fifteen minutes is nothing for you."

"Fifteen minutes against an engine is different math than fifteen minutes against a man walking." The wind has already started erasing the tracks entirely in the open stretches. I force myself to breathe, to think past the roar in my chest telling me to run blind into the storm. "Teams converging on my position now. What do you need from me?"

"Eyes on every ridge between here and Devil’s Gap. If he's smart, and he is, he won't stay predictable for long."

"And radio silence on this channel unless it's urgent. I don't know what frequencies he's monitoring."

"Understood. Sadie's got the town locked down. Nobody's wandering into this."

"How locked down?"