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The fact there were homeless people living at their desired spot felt like a bad omen.  They at least didn’t lose time traveling, since the cameras gave them a view.  The job had come in, they’d answered, and they maintained a fiction that they were situated a distance away and needed time to get set up.  They didn’t, so much, but having that buffer helped with certain situations, like being pulled into short notice clusterfucks.

Mia couldn’t see many scenarios where those emergencies were worth the added danger, or the lack of organization and time to think things through.

“Do you need me to do anything about Io?” Carson asked.

That modified logo on the back of that car had lurked in her nightmares.  She’d told Carson about it, long ago, and it had become a shorthand to refer to Natalie Teale.  Io.

“We can’t do what I want to do.”

“Leave?”

“Yeah,” she said.  “Can’t.  Not like things are.”

Carson leaned back in the passenger seat, sighing.  “Yeah.  Maybe if this job is a tidy one.”

He usually drove when it was an option, because her old head injury made her prone to highway hypnosis, and she’d never ever felt comfortable behind the wheel.  She could drive, she was driving now, but it wasn’t worth the tension, watching every other driver and every angle to avoid other people’s fuckups.

When she’d pulled around to get him, she’d been anxious enough she hadn’t even thought to get out and move to the passenger seat, before he’d climbed in, and then her focus had been on explaining.

“I assume you dug for information?” Carson asked.

“Some.  Basic.  She dropped off the internet a while ago and never really plugged back in.  Some ”

“Makes some sense.”

“Nothing in the news.  Nothing in public arrest records.”

“And non-public?”

“I can try and find out, but not from here.”

“Meaning we have to do this first.”

“Yeah,” she said.

At least there weren’t any cars on this stretch of road.  There were lots of logging trucks moving burned trees, though, which were nasty surprises.  Twenty or so freshly shorn trees, black and jagged, lashed haphazardly to the back of a truck that, more often than not, was barreling down the rural road at twenty miles an hour over the speed limit, going over the double yellow lines.  Given the winding roads, there’d be little to no warning.

Not so often she could expect them, but often enough to keep her on edge.  More on edge.

“Want me to situate myself?”

“Like you did at the bar, Saturday?”

“Yeah.”

“I’d rather you kept more of a distance, so we can use you if we have to.”

“Got it,” Carson replied.  He said it easily, like he didn’t have to even think about taking on that task, or consider what ‘using him’ might be.

Did it matter?  Or was he reading her tone?

If another woman was put in her shoes, would she know?

“Let’s focus on getting this done so we have elbow room, and ideally not a lot of people watching us,” Mia said.

“Sure.  Do we know anything about the client?”

She shook her head.

“You’ll figure it out.  You always do.”

Another logging truck roared past.  She saw it coming, at least, and there was no winding corner with loose adherence to the idea of lanes.  The real problem was the amount of ash and overly dry, dead plant matter that was kicked up into the air behind it.  A cloud of airy black-brown dreck.

Camrose really needed a good drenching with rain.  As things were, it felt a lot like the damage was continuing to spread, without flame, blown by the wind.

Their destination was an artifact of what Camrose had been before the development group had started plopping down cookie cutter homes.  Well before the political movement had started diversifying those homes and making it a community, when there had only been a couple hundred people living just far enough away from the city that it was inconvenient to travel in to attend school or anything like that, this had been a community center.

It hadn’t really been used for partying, like some of their other locations- or at least, not in the conventional sense.  Some teenagers had claimed it to run a Christmas event, and back in its last days as a community center, it had been where people had gathered indoors to hold a little farmers market thing.  Decorations had been tucked away behind the Christmas things, and then revealed when some stuff had been taken away.  Santa backed by cutout pumpkins and turkey.  A peek of a Halloween decoration behind that.  Red and green fuzzy streamers had fallen down, the elastic strings snapping with age, and draped over folded tables, including one with a bunch of picnic baskets with faded fall leaf and picnic table colors and textures on the inserts.

It was spacious, and the fact she wasn’t wading through ankle deep cans, discarded clothing, and other trash meant she didn’t have to worry about stepping on a hypodermic needle or something.  But it was situated on a road surrounded by dense woodland and there were only two ways in and out.  If someone came from one direction, they’d have to make the call on whether to pack up quickly and hide, pack up and make an escape the other direction, or stay operational and risk that person coming straight for them.

On a trail camera feed, she watched the wind blow a car-sized mass of detritus from the recent fires down the road, having to convince herself it wasn’t someone.

Carson got the generator running, and stretched out the cords.  She plugged herself in.  Laptop, extra monitors, and various other resources, setting up close to the door, just in case.

“We’ve got eyes,” Carson said, watching more distant roads on his own laptop.

He sent her the images, without her having to go over.  The first ones were blurry.  One shot was good enough to get her started.

This wasn’t someone from recent news, scrambling to get clear before the hammer came down.  This was someone with money, who wanted a better package.  She’d discussed it with Carson, but it was a weird ask, with this amount of money, so soon after the issues with their last client.

She had other resources, and pulled out a spare drive, plugging it in, before decrypting it.  It was dense with information, with PDFs, records, and loads of video, a lot of it virtually useless.

Everything was organized, tagged, and easily referenced.  Some of it was systems she’d set up years ago and then abandoned.  All the way back when she’d been starting out.  Mia had warred with herself, debating quitting this and digging in deeper, that question of money, survival, and getting set up for Ripley pushing her ever so slightly in the one direction.

When she’d been feeling nauseous from the internal debate and worries someone would come after her, she’d channeled that into figuring out the lay of the land.

Who were the players in this game?  What gangs?  What groups?

Some of the largest bodies of work had been with some of the predecessors to the predecessors of the Civil Warriors, who were getting international news, now.  They’d had people out here.  Hell, they might’ve had people come through this very community center.  Satellite maps showed the scattered buildings, rectangles of insulation, plywood, and other material that had been quickly thrown together, like trailers in a trailer park, but a little bigger, a little less mobile.

With Ripley suckling at her breast, she’d tracked them, found out where they lived, who they associated with, and how they were structured.

Not them.  That group had collapsed.  Anyone worth talking about had moved elsewhere.  There were a few bottom feeders in Camrose who supplied meth and fentanyl to the locals, but she figured they barely had any communication with others.

She quickly deprioritized that group.  Not erasing them from consideration, but sorting them to the bottom of the pile.

The driver had white or light brown skin.  Thick eyebrows – she used her old tag ‘tghbrw’, or thighbrow, because they were maximum thickness.  Language from an era when she’d wanted her work to be incomprehensible even if someone could crack her system.  Bald.  30+.  Head shape was a ‘mo’, evocative of her boss from her first ever job, Moe, his head had a particularly rounded top, strong jaw, pointed chin.

She’d still been a few years out from her head injury, and the person who’d hired Mia on had talked a lot about accommodating her disability, the job being low-key, stocking shelves, and all that.  Then she’d been handed off to Moe, who hadn’t been accommodating or low key.

It had demolished her fledgling confidence to the point she’d panicked at the idea of working any kind of structured job, minimum wage or nine to five in an office.

The guy in the passenger seat was younger, eighteen to twenty five, white or light brown skin.  Black hair.  Too young to be in this file.

The RX Rego they were in looked like a sports utility vehicle crossed with a limo.  There was room for another four people to sit in the back, in seats that faced one another, or didn’t, with space to stretch legs out or lie down.

“Expensive,” she noted.

“Rare?  Could you track it down?”

She went back to the earlier photos, where the images of the driver and passenger had been blurrier.  The license plate was still blurry, and not at a great angle, but she could make out the basics.

“Out of state license plate,” she noted.

She kept an eye on things, glancing over to the trail cameras every time the vehicle approached a good distance, then turning her eye back to the screens to do her digging.  Looking for thighbrows with the right headshape.

The information was years old, but it still helped her connect things.

“João Silva Ribeiro driving,” she confirmed, as the vehicle pulled into the little road that would take them to the cabin.  She took a screenshot off the feed of the trail cam, which got a much clearer picture now that the vehicle wasn’t racing down the road.  “He was a reliable gun for his gang, back when they were called-”

“The Crazy Kitchen.”

“Yeah.”

“Very briefly the Crazy Cousins.  Just The Kitchen now,” Carson said.

He’d lived in the city, before.  He’d operated in and around those circles, without being so immersed in them that there was a history.  Or so he said, with nothing she’d found indicating that was a lie.

“If the contact is who we think he is, then this is the group that crushed his old gang, then agreed to leave him be.  Let him run his car shop, with some side businesses.  Like us.  People coming on occasion to collect their dues.”

“Messy,” Carson said, voice soft.

A dozen possibilities ran through Mia’s head.  She didn’t like the idea that their contact could have some form of resentment against them, or fear that they’d realize the shortcuts he was taking, and then pit them against other people he resented.

This was the blind spot.  So much about those she dealt with was her operating in the dark, keeping to the darkness herself, dealing with others doing the same.  Then the law was its own blind spot, a theoretical investigation honing in on her with every infinitesimally small mistake she made.  But she’d dwelt on that too much, recently.

She had to focus on this.  Research from eight or nine years ago had let her find the driver today, and maybe through that, she could get more information five or ten minutes sooner than she otherwise might, and maybe that would give her an angle, or early warning about problems.

João S. Ribeiro had an online presence, but it was thin.  Photos on his MyFace page were from last summer, then maybe one photo every three years, mostly with family.  But his friends list was public and she could find his nephew.  The kid in the passenger seat.

The problem with this kind of analysis was that it let her draw her lines of red string between people, but it was equal opportunity.  A friend of a friend of a cousin who he’d talked to at a party once could be a contact just as easily as anyone else.

Mia focused on last names, referred back to her old files and research, and was ready in the minute it took them to reach the cabin.

With that, it took her five seconds to identify the man as he stepped out of the back.  He was alone.  Ordinary.  On the attractive side of average, square-ish build, hair wavy with the gray that shot through it giving extra visual texture to it.  Suit jacket, dress shirt, no tie.  He looked like he could be an enforcer or bodyguard himself, except for his posture.  Not straight-backed enough.  A bit of a slouch.  He kept a phone to one ear, seemingly trusting João and Vitor to watch his back.

“Davie Cavalcanti,” she said.

“I know the last name,” Carson said.  “I don’t remember specifics.”

He could’ve been a dad picking up the kids at her school, and she wouldn’t have blinked.  Except maybe his clothes were a little too nice, maybe the car changed how she assessed his features.  Was that why she pegged him as ‘attractive side of average’?  Because his clothes fit him in a flattering way, and he had an expensive car a few paces away, two bodyguards with him?

Another flaw in her research was that there was a point where, when she was trying to figure out how people were arranged, it became far harder to pin down structure and hierarchy.

This was their clients doing their best to stay in the dark, as far as authorities were concerned.  It put them in the dark as far as she was concerned, too.

And time had passed.

“He’s top six, in The Kitchen.  Two other Cavalcantis are in the same position.”

“That’d be why, then.”

He’d graduated law school.  He didn’t have a social media presence.  Divorced.

“The contact just put out an emergency flag,” Carson said.

Mia walked over, arms folded.

“Davie is calling the contact.  Contact is calling us.”

If things hadn’t just gone tits-up, she’d cancel this job.  It wasn’t unprecedented to have a client want to make contact on some level.  Sometimes it was about reassurance.

Something told her this wasn’t about Davie feeling insecure.

“Okay,” she said.  She brought a pen and paper over.

It took a minute.  Davie, dropping the phone for a moment while the contact was making calls to them, walked into the cabin.

Things had been fixed and tidied as of yesterday.  The trap hadn’t been reset, nor had she replaced the box that would seal the bottom of the door, but she’d put an incendiary in there instead.

It was a placeholder, anyway.  It’d get the job done, it just might burn down half of her cabin with it.  If they ended up needing the emergency measure twice in a week, something had gone terribly wrong, and they were probably justified in picking up, getting the kids, and running, leaving virtually everything behind.

She watched him walk into the center of the cabin, looking around.  He put the phone to his ear.  Said something.

A few moments later, the call came through.

“Hello,” Carson said.

“You masked your voice.  I like that,” Davie Cavalcanti said.  He didn’t mask his voice.  “You worked for people I know.  Vitalcore.”

“Yes,” Carson said.  He glanced at Mia, who held up two fingers as she wrote something down.  Private.  Carson glanced at the paper as he said, “You can understand if we don’t talk about past clients.  Just as we won’t talk about you.”

“If you can’t say it, I will.  You worked for them twice.  They thought you were very professional.  I like that.  I’m very ashamed to be calling because I have to be very unprofessional.”

He didn’t sound ashamed.  Mia tensed.

“A change to the agenda.  I don’t want to disappear.  But I want a new life.  Open that door for me, give me what I want.  I’ll decide when I walk through the door to my new life.  I’ll pay you to be ready, be on call, clean up behind me.”

Too vague.  It risked entangling them.  Mia wrote down: no adjustments.

“We offer a set service, one without flexible agendas,” Carson said.  “If you want IDs and a passport out, there are others who can provide.”

“Including the individual who referred you.  I’m told you don’t know his name.”

Carson didn’t reply.

Davie Cavalcanti sounded faintly amused as he said, “He let certain individuals know someone paid him to get them out, but then broke the rules.  He had the head, he had the money.”

Paid us back out of his own pocket, but kept his own policies, still, Mia thought.

“I got curious.  I heard about you.  I’m thinking about retirement, Mr. Voice On The Phone.  The question of money is handled.  I want more than simple I.D. to go with it.  I want a life.  I’m told you provide that.”

“Yes,” Carson said.  “We provide that.  Not what you’re asking for.”

On the camera, the lights went out.  Barely visible with the light coming in through the curtains, João was scanning the room, with a phone out.

He passed the phone to his nephew.  The boy, thinner and more spry, got onto his belly, looking from lower angles.

Mia could hear João’s voice in the background, two words, but couldn’t make out the specific words.

The lights came back on.

“Then I rescind my request.  I’ll ask for something else.  My family.  Wife, son, two daughters.  Hmmmm… get them out in advance of my retirement.  I’ll follow within a month.  No surprises or sudden adjustments.”

Mia frowned.

Carson tapped the ‘no adjustments’ line on the paper, eyebrow quirked.

Then, reading her expression before she’d found the words or started writing those words, he said, “We’re inclined to say no.  We don’t like adjustments or surprises.”

“Then let’s treat this as something else.  A new job.  My family is on their way to me.  Wife, son, two daughters.  Get them out.  If I want out, I may reach out to you in two weeks”

Carson looked at Mia, shrugging one shoulder.

“I’ll cover up the hidden cameras too, if you don’t mind?” Davie said.  “It would be a professional courtesy if you tell us of any microphones.”

Mia nodded slowly.  She wrote down a number, then scribbled down questions and more information.

Carson frowned at the number.

“Four hundred thousand for four people.  Eighty thousand for you, in two weeks, if we come to another agreement.  We can give you a new identity, but you won’t be their birth father on paper.”

“That’s fine.”

“We’ll need to know their ages.  The cameras are for your protection.  As is the one microphone.”

“Of course,” Davie replied.  He sounded like he was having fun, somehow.  “I would have done the same, don’t worry.  But I will cover it up.”

Carson gestured at himself, then the camera.  Communicating…

Mia frowned.

“Silence on the other end?” Davie asked.  “Don’t be ashamed, Mr. Voice On The Phone.  You are professionals.  I understand.”

Carson gave Mia one long look.

She conceded the point, nodding.

Carson should go.

“I’ll come to you,” Carson said.  “I’ll clean up the cameras and microphones, and other measures we took.  You’ll need photographs, I’ll take those…”

“We have some.”

“Have they been used anywhere else?”

“No.”

“Were the taken at a Lardy’s, B-Fair, or Trinity’s?”

“I will have my man message my wife.”

“Do you have any identifying tattoos?”

“Yes.  But that can wait for two weeks, if we decide to work together.”

“Have your tooth impressions ever been collected in the commission of a crime?”

“I am a law abiding man, Mr. Voice On The Phone.  My man here is saying they went to a kiosk at a B-Fair.”

“Photos taken there have identifying marks at their border.  I’ll take my own photos when I come.”

Carson walked through the process.  The usual steps.

There was a break when Davie Cavalcanti had to cut the call to talk to his wife and give some directions, or reassurance.

“I don’t like you going,” Mia said, looking for her own reassurance.

“I don’t either.  But this is how we make nice and make sure there’s no hard feelings.”

“If you go and it turns out it’s an excuse to go after you, hurt you, acquire our services in another way, threatening one of us to get the other to do what they say, for free?”

“I’m good at reading people,” Carson said.  “And we’ll be careful.”

⬥

They were.  Davie and his men, which included two drivers, after one dropped off his family, and the nephew, all stood back by the car, Davie and the nephew smoking a cigarette and vape, respectively.

Mia watched through the cameras as Carson drove in, parked out of sight, then walked over, wearing a balaclava and mask.  He walked differently, carried himself differently, and the headgear had a bit of blond hair attached, suggesting something different.  His eyelids were taped.

It was minor, but it helped her feel better.

The son was the same age as the nephew, about.  Eighteen to twenty-five.  The wife looked about the same.  The first daughter was maybe fifteen or sixteen, and took after her dad, some, with light brown skin and dark brown hair.  The youngest was a little older than Tyr, very blonde, like her mom.

The entire family looked stricken with stress, the youngest daughter aside.  She didn’t know what was going on, but she picked up on the energy by being clingy, wanting to be carried like she was half her age, instead of six or seven.  It made Davie’s easygoing demeanor stand out all that much more when the rest seemed to be dealing so badly.

Carson brought each family member in, one by one.  The mom with the youngest girl, to get her to behave.

He sent the photos to Mia, encrypted.  She decrypted them on her end.

Families were hard, which was why the price was so high.  Normally for this price point, she’d be offering other services.  For now, she had to take one of the three families she’d fabricated and make the family fit it.

When you were playing with dolls, Ripley, I was playing house with data.  Fabricating lives, putting it together, making it make sense.

The youngest daughter would essentially repeat a grade, going in as if she was a year younger than she was.  The oldest daughter would be skipping ahead a bit, going the other direction.

She wished she could make the son into a girl for the sake of the paperwork, but she suspected that wouldn’t go over well.

You’ll find pride and respect are key when dealing with people like this.  Gang leaders, lieutenants, criminals of a higher level and status.  They’re tigers, and not caged ones in a zoo, either.  They radiate danger.  They devour.  Catch them at the right moment, show the right body language, tone, and deference, they’ll leave you be.  But be prepared for sudden violence.  The smallest thing could set them off.

It made her worried for Carson, as he went through the building, pulling out the cameras, microphone, the grapeshot explosive inset into the kitchen counter, the incendiary in the bathroom ventilation, and the mechanical tripwire at the top stair of the porch, where it led down to the parking area.

He put everything into a bag and carried it out.

The tiger didn’t pounce.  Davie waved goodbye like a dork.  Carson acknowledged him with a nod and a spoken word Mia couldn’t see, breath fogging up the mask he’d pulled back down, and then drove off.

She didn’t relax until he was a few miles away, clear of the forest, onto roads close enough to Camrose that he had choices in the directions he could take.

Nobody had approached the vehicle, so there was no tracer.

This was a fantastic job, a package deal, and it was a family, so she could feel good about it.  She should.  She didn’t.

Even if the interior of the cabin was a blind spot, now.

The trail camera gave her only a slice of a view.  Fitting for a guy in the upper ranks of a gang called The Kitchen, Davie cooked.  There was no point, from the time they’d arrived to the time the cooking was done and the main lights switched off, that the family relaxed.  Davie excepted.

Carson called, and after brief discussion, they decided he’d go home, relieve the babysitter, and take care of the kids.

As far as Ripley and Josie were concerned, she’d be working late at the hospital, making sure the computers were working in the morning.  Finnicky things.  It wasn’t even a rarity, that she had to.  She’d tweaked it to create that cover in the first place, but that was secondary.

A desk light illuminating her work surface, she printed out the necessary parts of her IDs and put them together, one eye on the cameras that watched the road.  The road connecting to this one saw only a few cars an hour.  This road didn’t see any, from the time they’d arrived.  If one came, she’d turn off the lights.

In the process of working on the ID for the youngest daughter, she felt a weird fondness.  There was one type of ID better than that of a full life lived, picked up where its prior owner had left off.  And that was a new life, fresh.

In her role at the hospital, she handled patient information.  That included the deceased, but it also included the births.

From the time she’d started doing this, she’d created new IDs from the ground up.  Birth certificates and more.  She’d done it standalone, and she’d done it to expand families and identities.  Preparing for scenarios much like this.

Nobody followed up on an extra son or daughter, really.  She could write them off, even, with a bit of work, to tie things up.  But if she needed an extra child and didn’t have one, that was much harder to explain away, when they didn’t have a birth certificate, records, or anything like that.

The youngest daughter would get one of those.

Something about how everything she’d done leading up to giving an innocent a real fresh start, it felt good.

Motion out of the corner of her eye startled her.

It had been fleeting.  She didn’t have the cameras inside to get a second chance.  A wild animal?  A pale deer?

She kept an eye on the other cameras that watched those roads.

The teenage daughter, backpack under one shoulder, jogged along the gravel road, looking back over her shoulder.  She’d eluded the man who stood guard on the porch outside.

Giovanna Cavalcanti.  She went by Gio.  Online, she was G.C. or ‘Gucci’.

Mia struggled to figure out what to even message to Carson.  What code sufficed for something like this?

If this came back at them, did she even want a vague or irrelevant text to Carson to raise any flags?

If she was being maximally paranoid, she wasn’t even sure about a call from a burner phone to a burner phone.

A runaway daughter.  Who would get blamed?  They would.

Mia finished the I.D.s, watching on the cameras to see Gio make her escape on foot.

On the cameras closer to the road, Mia could see how she ducked into the woods to stay out of sight at the hint of headlights.

Once she had a good idea of the direction Gio was traveling, she put her things away, hit the button to stop the generator, and hid everything she didn’t need.

She brought the things she did with a mind to lighten her load.  She and the runaway were sixteen miles apart, but she had studied the area around the cabin intimately, to know what was in play, the roads someone could take.  Topography.

Disliking driving meant she’d spent more time walking.

She left, to find someone in the dark who didn’t want to be found, while avoiding being seen by the people she really didn’t want to be found by, herself.

⬥

Easy.

Mia stopped to compose herself and watch, standing around one corner, listening to the girl crying.

One stop, to check cameras.

One trip down a road, which gave her a good vantage point under the brighter moonlight, to see down a long stretch of road, ash and dead leaves dancing along its length as a chilly wind blew.

Backtracking.

Gio didn’t look like an athletic girl.

With the hills around here, it was a lot of uphill and downhill.

Mia had figured she’d get tired.  Around the time she’d get tired, there was a sign for a campground.

Even if she didn’t have a tent, and if this place had shut down for the night, it had to sound better than sitting out in the open, where pursuers could catch her, or sitting in the deep woods, cold, with the possibility of getting lost.

In a central area of the campground, well lit, was a bathroom area.  A wall separated then men’s side from the women’s, and more panels blocked off the line of toilets from the shower area.  None of the stalls came down below thigh level, but Gio had pulled her feet up.

Mia wished Carson was here.

This wasn’t a strength of hers.

“Hello?” she asked.

The question prompted a gulpy sort of yell, followed by a sobbing response.

By the time she’d navigated to the last toilet in the row, she could hear the uneven, short breaths, that seemed to be getting shorter by the second.

“Ow,” Gio said.

“Let me in, miss, it’s okay.”

“Ow.  Owow,” Gio gasped.

“Miss?”

The door unlatched.  Mia opened it, to find Gio half-sitting on the toilet tank, feet on the seat, hand at her chest, hyperventilating.  She mouthed the ‘ow’ she’d been saying moments ago.

Her eyes tracked Mia, wide.  Scared.

Studying her.

“Miss?” Mia asked.

She knew Gio’s name, but saying it wouldn’t help any.  Better to pretend.

“Hurts,” Gio whimpered, then coughed, like she was trying to clear her breathing out.  But that became a kind of retching.  She hung her head over the toilet, awkwardly positioned.

Mia gathered up the girl’s hair in case she did throw up, as gently as she could, and supported her with another arm.

In moments like this, it was nice to be tall and broad in the shoulders.

A full-size teenage girl, most of the way to adult, felt small in her arms, like this.

Io is back.  The mess the contact started has drawn the attention of someone scary and the house of cards could collapse around us.

Mia shushed the girl.  The retching stopped.  The breathing stayed uneven.

When the girl shifted in her arms, like she was uncomfortable, or hyperaware again, Mia stepped back.  She saw Gio shivering, and pulled off her jacket, draping it over the girl’s shoulders before retreating.

She left the way out of the bathroom stall open, and slumped down, sitting awkwardly with that partial, raised wall behind her, digging into the middle of her back.  The thing had been built so staff could quickly look under the stall and section dividers and make sure nobody was inside.  It hadn’t been built for sitting.

Mia got her water out, and handed it over.  Gio drank greedily, resupplying what had been lost in the hiking, the sweating in fear, the crying.

“You’re scared of something or someone,” Mia said, voice soft.

The change in breathing even that simple question brought on suggested it wouldn’t take much for Gio to start panicking again.

“Police are out of the question, or you’d have called them already.  Is there anyone else in danger?” Mia asked.

She thought of the mom and the youngest daughter.  The son.

Gio considered for long seconds, eyeing Mia warily.  “No.”

“Brother or sister?”

“Brother.  He can handle himself.  He stayed because he was worried about me.”

“Okay,” Mia said.  “Do you have a place you’re going?  My husband has my car, but if you need to get somewhere…?”

“Away.”

“Anywhere?”

“You shouldn’t…” Gio replied, and her voice got fainter as the words came out, like the air had escaped her lungs some other way.  “You don’t know how scary he is.  What he is.  Even you helping me right now might put you in danger.”

“I’m a mom,” Mia said, giving Gio an apologetic expression.  “I have to.  I can’t walk away from someone in distress like you.  So let’s solve this.”

“There’s no solution.”

“Sure there is,” Mia replied.  Her tone changed as she said it.

These were the words she’d been rehearsing.

Every time I talk to you.

The tone of those words in her head.  What she’d hoped to one day instill, on some level.  Whether Ripley’s and Tyr’s involvement in this stopped at a bookshelf with a hidden space behind it and a richer, more secure childhood, or something all-in.  A professional identity and reputation built that could extend over generations, skills and resources, passed on.

All meant for Rip and Tyr, but she used that here.  “First off, do you have a phone?”

Gio shook her head, frowning a bit.  “I left it behind.”

“Okay.  That’s fantastic.  You’re smart.  Any other devices?”

Head shake.

“Is he the type of person who’d give you something with a tracker in it?”

“I- yeah.”

“Have you received any jewelry as gifts?”

Gio blinked a few times, then pulled off a bracelet.  Then a necklace.

Mia pointed at the toilet.

“I didn’t even think.”

“Anything you’re wearing with hard surfaces.  Shoes?”

“I don’t-”

“Take them off?”

Gio did.

Mia took a second to examine them.  They were a thin material.  The soles were the real concern.

“You can wear them, but it’s a risk.”

“I don’t want to… no risk.”

Mia nodded.  She put the shoes aside.

“Shorts, let me see?”  It was hard to see in the gloom.  If it was denim, Mia would have been more concerned.  “Feel around the edges, any bulges.  It wouldn’t be large.”

“Not feeling anything except seams.”

“I’m going to give you an address.  It’s a place teenagers party.  I’ve got some supplies stashed out there, in case I’m ever in a pinch in this neck of the woods.  It’s got food, water, pads, basic toiletries- toothbrush, deodorant.  About five hundred dollars in spare cash.  There’s a space blanket, a change of clothes- probably big for you, but a t-shirt is a t-shirt, sweatpants are sweatpants.  It’s all under the counter, locked with a trick combination lock.  You open it like a safety cap, crush it down and twist, keep twisting.  Either direction.  Repeat that?”

“What?  Who are you?”

“You need to listen, prioritize.  Remember what you need to remember,” Mia said, maintaining that even, calm, instructional tone.  “You’re frazzled, panicking, your mind is going to go in circles.  The moment I’m gone, you’re going to talk yourself out of things.  Anxiety’s a bitch, but biology gives us anxiety for a reason.  Sometimes you need it.  Channel it.”

Gio stared at her.

“When you’re on your own, wondering what’s up, deciding if you should listen to me, think it through.  If I was a danger, I wouldn’t be leaving you alone like I’m going to.  Okay?  I’d be grabbing you and calling someone.”

Gio shivered visibly, like she was cold, but it wasn’t the cold.

“Look, I have stuff stashed away, you can take it.  The combination lock.  How do you open it?  Do you remember what I said?”

“Crush and twist.  Like a sap- safety cap.”

“Where is it?”

“Under the counter.”

“It’s not easy to spot, I put it out of the way of any teenagers who go digging around.  It’s there.  If you want, take that stuff, go.  Stay off the beaten track, maybe even camp in the woods.  Nights are cold but you can get by.  Or.”

Gio frowned.

“Or, stay there.  Don’t use the lantern, don’t use the fire.  Stay under the blanket and wear extra layers.  I’m going to leave, I’m going to go back and do the work I’m meant to be doing.  I can’t help you if I don’t help and protect myself.  I do that by going by my usual routine.  I or my husband will come to you.  We’ll take you home.  You can camp out for a while, watch TV, movies.  You’ll stay out of the way, out of sight.  Absolutely no phone calls or social media, for your safety and ours.  After a little while, we can get you fixed up.”

Or we bail.  Extricate ourselves.

But that was complicated to articulate.

Gio was studying her.  Eyes traveling over every microexpression on Mia’s face, no doubt.

Mia got her bag, pulling it around.  She saw Gio tense, as if Mia was about to pull out a gun.

Paper.  She drew a map.  Roads.

“If you take this road, it’ll keep you off the main track, and it’ll get you to the gas station.  It’s dark, no streetlights, it’ll be scary, but the moon is out.  Here’s some very illegal bear spray.  There shouldn’t be any wild animals, but just in case.”

She pulled it out and held it for Gio to take.

She wondered for a long second if Gio would take the canister and spray her.

The teenager rested it on the toilet paper dispenser.

“Go to the gas station, get the stuff.  Then decide, either go, and keep going.  Do your best.  Or stay, I’ll give you a place.”

She handed Gio the paper, returned the water, then straightened, closing up her bag.  “I need to cover my own tracks.  The sooner I get back and the sooner you get going, the safer we both are.  Let’s assume there was a tracker in your shoes or jewelry.  We don’t want to be near here.”

“You wouldn’t get involved if you knew anything about who he was.”

“I’m treating this as if he was the scariest, smartest person in the world,” Mia said.  “You do the same.”

“What’s your name?”

“It’s a liability for me to tell you.  If you stay at the gas station, I’ll tell you in a few hours.”

Gio seemed almost reassured by that.

“On that note, give me my jacket back.  There’s nothing identifying, but-”

Gio nodded.  She pulled the jacket off.  Mia took it, and shook it out.

She watched the teenager go.

Mia gathered herself up, then took a different road out of the campground.

It wasn’t a short walk back to the abandoned community center.  Things took a second to boot up after she got the generator in place and booted things up.

She called the phone for the cabin.

A jangling ringing in the middle of the night.

Mia’s heart pounded.  She opened applications on her computer, getting ready.

When Davie picked up, she said, “Your daughter ran away.”

“A female distorted voice this time.”

“Partner to the person you talked to yesterday.  Is that important?”

“No.  I guess it isn’t.  How did you know?”

“Cameras on the road.  You don’t have long if you want to catch her.”

Davie threw a lid at the front door.  It banged.  The two men who were standing outside, mid-shift change, came in.

“She’s going southwest,” Mia said.  “We can message you as updates come in.  We’ve got eyes on the main roads nearby.”

“No need.  We can find her,” Davie said.

“You can reach me through our mutual contact if you need, then.”

This was stupidity.  Something like this when so much else was happening.

She called Carson.  Burner to burner.

“I’m here.”

“I need you.  The eldest daughter took a hike in the middle of the night.  I don’t think she’s planning to return.”

“Did she now?”

Hike.  Their key word for assisted escape.

“Yeah,” she said, voice soft.  “It’s not great.”

“It’s fine,” he replied.  “I know you.  You’ve got this.  I’ll get an emergency babysitter and come to you as soon as I can.”

“Alright.”

That wasn’t a prearranged code, but the way he said it… it might as well have been.

Davie sent two of his men off in separate vehicles.  Making his moves in the dark.  Ones he seemed very secure and confident in.

Mia did the same, but with her field of expertise.  For right now, she prepared a program that would make a frame by frame edit of timestamps on her videos.  Because the man who’d had the teenager so scared would ask.  She’d need to have an answer.

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