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She takes several quick steps forward. “Serena Harper!” Her whisper-yell echoes off the walls. “I knew those slutty little glasses were a thirst trap you’d fall straight into! Sleeping with the enemy? In a B&B? The scandal!”

“Tamsin, shut up,” I hiss, lunging forward to grab her arm. “It’s not what it looks like. We were working.”

“Oh, I’m sure you were working. Working on evaluating his anatomical load-bearing capacity,” she whispers loudly, a wicked glint in her eye as she lets me usher her toward her room. “Was it a deep dive? Did you penetrate his firewall? Explore his back end? Gain authorized access? Did he show you his... hard drive?”

“None of those things.” I’m practically shoving her through the doorway now. “Please stop talking before you wake up the entire county.”

I finally get her inside and click the door shut, leaning my forehead against the wood. My chest is tight, and my head is spinning, but the dread that usually sits like a stone in my throat has started to dissolve.

10

RECOVERY OF SUBJECT

SERENA

By the time I reach the ridge line, my lungs are burning. The climb has left a steady, searing ache in my lungs, which I’m currently using to drown out the considerably less manageable churning of my own thoughts.

Step. Breathe. Scan.

My feet hit the hard-packed dirt in a punishing four-count rhythm. One-two-three-four. Again. Again. Breaking the pattern makes something beneath my skin tighten, so I don’t. At this point, the run feels less like exercise than debridement.

I stop at the crest of the ridge, hands on my knees, sweat dripping onto the rust-colored shale beneath my sneakers. The earth here is hemorrhaging oxidized ore, a deep, dried-blood red that stains the soles of my shoes.

It’s been years since I stood on this ledge, and the terrain no longer matches what I remember. The public path has been swallowed by an aggressive overgrowth of chokecherry and invasive bittersweet.

I check my phone. Zero new notifications. The lack of updates from the lab has my intercostals locked in a state of near-constant tension. If the DNA comes back unusable after spending so long in acidic soil, then everything Baryn and I pieced together last night is still built around a body we can’t definitively prove belongs to Casey.

I look toward the old quarry floor, five hundred feet below. There’s a shortcut—a narrow, treacherous goat path that used to lead down to the water’s edge.

Every step down requires a new assessment of what’s willing to hold my weight. The shale is loose, a billion tiny slate razors waiting to slide.

I’m halfway down the embankment, my center of gravity low, when I realize the shortcut has changed along with everything else.

A new perimeter fence—industrial grade, eight feet of chain-link topped with a nasty, shimmering coil of razor wire—now carves a line across the canyon floor, cutting off the path back to the main trail. It’s marked with a faded, leaning sign: HAZARD ZONE. NO TRESPASSING.

I reach the bottom, skidding to a halt on a flat concrete pad that looks like it once supported a generator. To my left, the sheer rock wall I just scrambled down. To my right, the flooded mine shaft, its water ink-black and perfectly still. Directly ahead, a chain-link fence cuts across the narrow strip of ground between them.

I follow it toward the rock face. The fence appears to have been installed to block access to the shaft, probably after someone decided hikers and abandoned mines were a likely unfortunate combination.

I find the opening—a place where a fallen hemlock has crushed a section of the fence inward. It’s a tight squeeze, but my curiosity is a predatory thing.

I slide through, the wire snagging the shoulder of my t-shirt, and step onto the other side.

The view is spectacular. From here, you can see the way the iron veins bleed into the water, creating a marbled effect that is both beautiful and utterly unsettling. I spend five minutes photographing it from increasingly unnecessary angles until I have twelve nearly identical images and the Compliance Department finally agrees that I have documented it sufficiently.

Then, I hear it.

Whirr. Clang.

A heavy, motorized sliding gate—the only other exit from this fenced-in wedge of rock—shudders to life fifty yards away. I watch, paralyzed by the sheer irony of the timing, as the steel bars grind shut. A red light atop the gate post blinks three times, then stays solid.

I turn back to where I entered, but the shift in the shale from my descent has done its work.

A fresh slide of loose rock has piled up against the hemlock, sealing the gap. I look up at the embankment I just came down. It’s forty feet of steep incline, composed entirely of loose stone. Descending it was reckless. Climbing back up without a rope is functionally impossible.

“Great,” I mutter, wiping red dust from my palms. “Stellar work, Serena. Top-tier.”

I look at the fence. Razor wire lines the top, the barbs long and surgically sharp.