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Mia looked back at Carson as he came through the door, then returned her eyes to her work.  He came up behind her, leaning over her shoulder, and placed a kiss on the side of her neck.

“Sorry,” she murmured.

“Have you gone to see her?” he asked.

“No.  Only for the initial conversation.”

“There was someone at an intersection.”

He had his hand up and ready before Mia had even tabbed over to the overhead map.  Like he read her mind.  Once the screen was up, Carson stabbed his finger at one intersection south of them.  “Parked in the parking lot outside the coffee shop, which is closed.  Pre-morning hours, watching.”

She didn’t have any cameras there.  She’d thought about it, but there hadn’t been any good vantage points, and any surface that did work was compromised- too much risk that someone would go to do infrastructure work or a cleaning after a wildfire season like this one, and spot it.  The trail cameras were easier to hide, and easier to excuse.

“It wasn’t one of the three men he had with him last night,” Carson said.

“So he pulled in others.”

“Yeah.”

Mia frowned.  “It wouldn’t be only one new person.  The intersection’s a good spot to watch.  I’d say ninety percent of the traffic going through the area passes through it.”

“Lonely roads,” Carson remarked.  “Not many people passing through at this hour, so they would’ve taken note of me.  Maybe literal notes, scribbled car model and license plate number.”

She checked other cameras.  “Car?”

“Chevron Midas.  Twenty-tens.  Black.”

It was at least a car that had a recognizable profile.  Conveyed wealth, as the name suggested, but looked like a halfway point between a hearse and a SUV.  Slashes of gold at the front grille, modest decoration elsewhere.  Large enough to have two or three bodies in the trunk.

She pulled up three video feeds, placed one feed in each quarter of the monitor, and then brought the map over and got a street view, placing the marker in the parking lot.

“Other corner.”

She moved it.  She quickly bound a key to a button on each of the three video players.

“I came straight here.”

“Thank you,” she said, quiet.  Each press of the button moved things forward ten seconds on each of the feeds.  She could estimate the time Carson would’ve arrived, then move forward until she saw Carson coming down one of the roads, toward the intersection.  Into the blind spot.

She watched Carson go up the road, toward her.  Then she kept watching.

“No follow,” Carson noted.  “I checked.”

“I know.  Question is, is he still there?”

“I wasn’t going to pass by him when I headed back out.  If he’s paying attention, he’d wonder where I went, that I spent so little time there.  I could cut through the campground?”

“Avoid the campground.  That’s where I found Gio.  Let’s not link ourselves to it.”

“Gio,” Carson said.  “Right.  Okay.”

“She’s terrified, and not in the way every kid who runs away would be.  She knows who her dad is.  Her brother might know or assume she’s running.”

“Okay.”

“I really am sorry.  Complicating things like this.”

“It’s fine.”

Is it fine?  Mia wondered.  Carson’s arms felt heavy at her shoulders as he leaned over, watching.

“I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I went to her,” she said.  “If I was going to turn her in, or…”

“Really?  Because I know you, Mia.  I figured it’d be something like this.  I’m not surprised.  We’ll figure this out.”

She rubbed at her hands and wrists.  Was she getting so old, that time at the keyboard would make her hands stiff?

She resumed going through the videos, skipping forward in ten second increments until she was caught up to present.  In one, a Chevron Midas that might have been black or another dark color was traveling off in the direction of the gas station where Gio was.  Had to be the guy.

“How long after I passed by did he leave?” Carson asked.

“Recently.  Eight minutes.”

“Different road, eight minutes is longer than a phone call to the boss.  So probably not responding to me.”

“Yeah.”

On another feed, a minute later, the car passed the gas station.

“How exposed are we?” Carson asked, with a different tone of voice.

“Gio’s suspicious.  She saw my face.  I told her about the emergency stash at the gas station.”

“She’s in the gas station that a twenty-tens Chevron Midas drove past just now?”

“Yeah.”

“If our man Davie has manpower, it might not be long before he checks every spot a runaway might hide.”

“I am concerned they’ll start checking.  If she’s waiting for us, that’s dangerous.  If she waits too long, she might leave.  That’s dangerous too.  If we go to her, we risk getting spotted on the way.”

“Dangerous,” Carson echoed.  “Do you want me to go through the woods?  I can take a safe route, avoid main roads and drive down the trail.  Approach the gas station from the woods behind.”

“No.  Because if I was Davie, I’d want control.  Control over every variable.  I’m guessing we won’t have to wait long before he tries to control us.  He’ll want a face to face meeting.”

“We say no, of course, right?”

“Right.  Then we’ll have to see what Davie does.  Does he force us to show?  Does he try to get control over us some other way?”

“There’s a few ways he could do that.  Pressure, leaning on the contact, anyone who’d work with us.  Making us out to be the bad guy, unprofessional somehow.”

Mia nodded a bit.  Not one she’d thought a lot about, but that would hurt.  It wouldn’t get her out of hiding, but it’d hurt.

Anxiety chewed at her.

“Finding us somehow.”

Mia shook her head a bit.  “I’m less worried about that.”

“Pushing a boundary.  Ask us for a service where it would be weird to say no, then crossing a line.  Like asking me to come pick up the hidden cameras and traps, except not keeping his distance when he does.”

She nodded.  She could see that.

“What’s your line of thinking?” Carson asked.

“I’m thinking he’s not that hands on or aggressive, yet.  There are other ways to make us his.  Pieces in his corner.  Being unreasonable, expecting us to scramble to be the reasonable professional.  Being overly professional.  Implying it’s our fault for letting her go, um, there’s-”

“Then what?” he asked, absently, then said, “Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“There’s others.  What are you asking?”

“Let’s say any of those things is true.  What do we do if he tries to control us?”

Mia, even as her headache buzzed, could draw out a flowchart in her head.  What might happen, how Davie might approach this.  What Gio might do.  She had ideas for steps to take.  In the walk back from the campground to her setup here, she’d organized one, wrestling with the anxiety that wanted to take her mind into loops and spirals.

She’d forced her head to go down the list, making that flowchart in the same way she’d searched out new things to try to recite in her brain, to distract herself from the headaches and anxious thought patterns from The Fall forward.  She’d gone through her favorite books, putting them into her head until she could say chapter one started with the basilisk in the lightless forest, and ended with it seeing the world.  Chapter two started with the angry shopkeeper, and ended in blood…

It was only in her early twenties that she’d found the concept of memory palaces.  She’d never really been able to make those work, but she’d made her own system, more by brute forcing it into her brain.

This is why I wanted to instill some of these lessons in you early.  You’re brilliant, Ripley.  If you can tap your strengths like I tapped mine, without the things that hobble and weaken me, you could conquer the world.

You too, Tyr.  You’re a force of will.  We’ll see where your strengths lie.

“I changed timestamps around, to create a different narrative.  It’s a good answer in one or two of the routes he might take, and it can be used to buy us time in others.”

“Hmm.  I might need you to explain that one to me.”

“Okay.  I haven’t watched all the way through.  It’s hard to do that without taking an hour to study my own videos, after the edits.  But it’s an option.  I’ve altered some timestamps on video records, I’ve got two subtly different setups on two identical virtual machines, set on my laptop.  I can boot them up separately, if we’re put in a position where we have to show our work.”

“That’s making me more confused, not less.  Walk me through this.  She left, you… called him?”

“Went to her first.  Then I talked to him before I called you.”

“Yeah?” Carson asked.

The way he said that was curious.  She wondered if he’d rather she’d called him first, to include him.  Or was it a weird jealousy?  It felt weird to think he’d be jealous of anything about her, but part of that was that she didn’t really get jealousy.

If Carson cheated on her, she felt like the world would make more sense, not less.  She’d be unhappy, but… relieved?

“It made more sense,” she told him, echoing her own line of thought.  “Paranoia thing.”

“Sure.  Okay.”

“I didn’t specify time, I just said his daughter had run away, and gave a direction.  Southwest.  He said he had it handled, didn’t ask for details.”

“Okay.”

“I had her leave some things behind at the campgrounds.  Phone, jewelry, I suggested shoes, she left them.  They went straight there after I called.  Tracker.”

“What if she still had one on her?  In something she didn’t drop?”

“That’d be a worst case scenario, maybe.  One with a very small chance.  Unless it was implanted under the skin or she had tracers in every pair of shorts she wore, it didn’t make sense.  But if that happened, I could say she was traveling southwest when I called.  That I went to verify her identity, got her to let her guard down.  I’d play up the cameras being clumsy to work with, me being nonconfrontational and you as the one who’s running things. Act like I had good eyes on her.”

Carson sighed.

“It’s not perfect, but we could have squeaked by.”

“We both know it’d be me trying to handle that, right?  I don’t love the idea of having to lie convincingly to a man like that.”

“It would be best if it was you,” Mia said, quiet.  “But I was prepared to if I had to.  Sorted it in my head.”

She had a mental flowchart.

“Yeah,” Carson said, frowning.

“I’m okay playing up the awkwardness, emphasizing my unique set of skills.  Someone very good at what she does, less good at more mundane things, on the job while you get shuteye so you’re useful tomorrow.  I think, the way someone like that works, we’ve talked about this.  The psychology of gangsters.  Mob leaders.  I think Davie’s that type.”

“Pride.”

“Pride’s a big part of it, and fucking up, it demands a response.  I can see them forgiving an idiot if the idiot’s special, in their corner.  Because being an idiot makes me a non-threat and puts the responsibility back on him, and being a savant means I’m too useful to get rid of.”

Carson made an uneasy groaning sound.

“Am I that off?”

“Yyyyynno.  No.  I… no, my gut says you’re right in this case, with this guy.  I didn’t logic it out like you’re doing, I can’t.  I’m worried if you apply the same process to a very similar case, it could end up worse.”

Mia kept her face angled so she could look up and over at him, but otherwise keep her attention on the roads.  She took note of a car that came in, but didn’t leave the blind spot.

“You are a savant, but you’re not an idiot, you know?”

“I was an idiot, once.”  After The Fall.  Frustrated as hell, because I knew what I should be able to do and couldn’t.

“You had an excuse.  You know you’re brilliant, right?”

“I’m not,” Mia said.  “I’m not a savant either.  I’m average, and I work a lot because my anxiety doesn’t let me relax.”

It was not the first time they’d said words like that to each other.  Early on in the relationship, he’d treated it like a challenge.  Telling her she was smart, she was pretty, and more.  As if he could say those things often enough it’d batter down her defenses and she’d accept it as fact.  She’d freaked out at him after a few days of it.  Not in a cute way or an angry way, but in a ‘I am loud and saying words that make no sense, sobbing’ way.

She wasn’t sure if he’d forgotten that, if he was taking a new tack and trying to space it out and get it to slip past her defenses that way, or if he’d read books or talked to someone and found this was the best way.  She wasn’t sure which she would’ve preferred to be the case.  Each option felt bad in its own way.

A part of her wondered if her refusal to accept his compliment as truth was because wires in her head simply refused to connect after the brain injury, or if it was something more underlying that a therapist was meant to untangle.  It probably related to why her attraction to Carson and Carson’s attraction to her was permanently askew, as far as her mental framing went.

She closed her eyes, re-centering.  Her headache burned, a tire fire at the back of her brain that hadn’t gone out in decades, smoke spreading out to the rest of her brain to require that extra bit of regular effort to do even basic things.

But just like a morbidly obese person could have incredibly strong legs simply from lifting hundreds of pounds with the simple act of walking, she’d found it in herself to put her brain to work.

“Talking like that screws up my focus,” she said.

“Right.  Sorry.”

Don’t say sorry, when I’m the one who created this crisis.

Don’t compliment me, don’t smile at me, what the fuck am I asking of you?

“The only tracer on her was in something I had her drop.  Now I have a good sense of what he knows and how he’s getting his information.  I’ve edited the videos, timestamps and shifted the metadata on video feeds that fit our preferred version of events.”

The phone vibrating in Carson’s pocket made her stop midway through the explanation.

“It’s the contact.  Reaching out to us for Davie Cavalcanti,” Carson said.  “Texting directly.”

She frowned, reading as he showed her.

1090-###:
Can we meet up?  Easiest way to talk.

“Nah,” Carson said, already texting   He showed her the polite refusal.  She nodded.  He sent it.

1090-###:
He’d like to see the videos you mentioned of the incident last night.
The job is canceled.

No signals through the mutual code that Davi wouldn’t know.  Just… bad form.  No criminal activities were mentioned, even Gio being missing was skipped over.  But it wasn’t obfuscated in a way Mia liked.

What could she read into this?  Was the contact scared?  Had he tried to use the usual format?  Did he leave the book of shorthand at home?

“Job is canceled but…” Carson said, typing on his keypad.  “Half of the payment is expected.  We have devoted time and resources to this.”

“What are you doing?”

“Positioning us.  We’re professionals, we get paid.  That’s our number one concern.  If we start acting like it doesn’t matter, he’ll wonder why we don’t care more.  Why don’t we actually care more?  Because we know things and we don’t want to rock the boat.”

“So we rock the boat anyway?” Mia asked.

“Yeah.  As if nothing else is wrong.  I won’t push hard, we don’t know how volatile he is.  Fast response.”

The phone vibrated again.

“Tell me, don’t show me?  I don’t want to keep scrolling forward and take my eye off the screen, miss a frame of a car zipping by.”

“He wants to hire us to watch roads and keep track of things.  On top of the video calls from last night.  Should I tell him we don’t do that?  Prior obligations?”

“No.  We kind of have to.  Anything else is fishy.  It’s low-impact, doesn’t force us to show our faces.”

“Okay.  Get the details on what he wants.”

She was, through watching the cars, getting a sense of who Davie was, and how he operated.  What he saw.  She had her cameras, he had manpower.

Knowing the Chevron Midas was Davie’s man, watching a chokepoint for travel, with one eye on the present day, and the Stern pickup was there now, possibly relieving the previous guy, it gave her ideas about what moves Davie was making in the dark.

She could work backwards.  She had eyes.  Neither the Midas nor the pickup went to the cabin or interacted with Davie directly.  But both, it seemed, were in the parking lot of the campground together, with a third and fourth vehicle.  Another Midas and an off road vehicle of a brand she didn’t recognize.

The last point Davie knew where Gio had been.

Her eyes on the roads around the cabin and the places they liked to use as bases of operations were incomplete.  There were gaps.  It wasn’t meant for this.  It was meant to give her and Carson a warning if there were problems, and keep an eye on the people at or around the cabin.  Besides, she was watching by increments.  One button press, go back in time ten seconds, see the freeze frame images of cars on the road, extrapolate.

Still, while Carson tapped on the phone, she could work backwards.  She’d already kept track of the two vehicles that Davie’s drivers were in, and how they went up and down the roads toward and around the city.  She’d predicted that much with the route she’d given Gio.

Carson had taken forty minutes to get to her from Camrose.  The new vehicles had been a little faster, coming direct from the city, down the highway.

The pickup and both Midases were doing sweeps.

The off-road vehicle?

It didn’t head for any roads.  It went for high ground, overlooking everything.

There.  In the midst of her skipping backward and forward across scenes, moving between cameras to the roads the cars she was tracking might have taken, a black spot, nowhere near the road.

She rubbed at her stiff hand.  Repeatedly hitting the same keys wasn’t helping.  She tapped a key, then hit space, to let the video play.

Blink and you’ll miss it.

“Bird?” Carson asked.

“How sure are you that you weren’t followed?” she asked.

“I was careful.  Why?”

She wasn’t looking for cars.  Starting from the time that offroad vehicle had showed up…

“What brand is that?  The car, truck, whatever you want to call it.”

“AP.  All-purpose, originally.  I think that’s an electric version.”

It had showed up, reached a clearing closer to the mountain, overlooking everything…

And a few minutes later, black smudge on one camera.  One camera with a view of a long, straight section of road a mile away caught another clearer image.

“Drone,” Carson said.

“Multiple,” Mia replied.  “That’s a cheap camera drone.  Punch in the coordinates, send it out.  You get about thirty minutes.  Account for a few minutes travel time, it’s not a lot.  There was a lot of alarm in the news a year ago.  Drones getting cheaper, enforcement falling behind.  Creeps looking in through windows with them.  Tracking kids on the way home from school.  Stalkers.  A lot of it was alarmist, but that gets things done.  There was talk of bans.”

“Which is why you didn’t get any yourself?”

“Part of the reason.  Give me your phone?”

“Communicating with our guy about instructions.”

She held out her hand.

He handed it over.

“Run out to the car, get something?  Text along the way.  Keep your head down.”  She put it on video record, then, leaving it recording, switched back to the text messaging app.  “Go fast.”

Carson went.

Mia kept checking the cameras.

They’d lost this game.  She had her cameras.  Davie had resources.

Carson came back in, carrying water, phone in hand.  He thumbed his way back to the video replay, and played it, laying the phone down.

Directly above them, stock still.  A black shape, like a rectangle with the corners rounded off.

“Fuck me.  I was followed.”

“That’s why I didn’t invest in them,” she said.  “If they get noticed, the person you’re watching realizes they’re being watched.  Breaks a core rule.  Once they know you’re watching…”

“I don’t think our guy cares that much if we know.”

“No.  The AP Electric has spare batteries,” she said, glancing over websites and social media.  It’s popular for people who like to go camping and don’t want the outdoors, or to be disconnected from anything, or go without luxuries like electricity, comfortable seats you can sleep on, and a satellite connection to the internet.”

“What does that leave, campfires and shitting in a hole?  Wait, outdoor fires are banned.”

“Doesn’t stop some people.  Has spare battery packs, easily swapped.  It’s possible to use the engine like a generator.”

She didn’t have eyes on the sky, but when she did, she was reliably seeing the drones.  Some settled to roost in spots.  Some hung in the air.

She paused a video feed and pointed at one.  “See that?”

“Janky,” Carson remarked.  “Damaged?”

“There was noise about banning them, then a whole contingent of people decided to rebel against that censorship and mass produce them.  It was a whole thing for maybe a week in the tech world.  But a week of every big name in the field and a bunch of hobbyists all working to see what they could do to circumvent and challenge the ban gets you a lot of recipes to make your own.”

“Which our guy did?”

“Which does require a bit of know-how, if you’re also hacking together and implementing the systems to deploy the drones to locations and pilot them.  We have a drone hobbyist, I think.  And why would Davie have a drone hobbyist on call?”

Rhetorical question.

“I guess we know who the contact sold the gun drone to,” Carson said.

From military supply and procurement, which Nathaniel was watching over and finding woefully lacking in oversight, to Nathaniel himself, taking advantage of that lack, murder a few people, sell to the contact, who sells to Davie.

“It’s too fast,” she said.

“What?  The drone?”

“The process.  It’s only been a few days since Nathaniel gunned people down with the drone.  Meanwhile, we’ve got this drone guy meeting up with Davie Cavalcanti’s people, working with them, everything flowing.”

“That’s fast, you’re right.  He might’ve known the drone specialist before Nathaniel did anything.  Before Nathaniel needed to sell anything.”

“Nathaniel was sounding the alarm about problems, and nobody was doing anything.  Maybe there were other gun drones hitting the black market, before this?  Or going direct to Davie?”

“Maybe,” Carson replied.  “We’re getting into a lot of speculation, now.”

Knowing those movements was useful in the same way that tracking his men on the ground was.  Bigger picture.  She could chase down some of those threads, study the news.

The real problem remained.  Gio was at the gas station.  The drones were in the air.  If she ran out of patience and left on foot, even cutting through the woods, Mia was worried the girl would be seen.

Davie’s men watched chokepoints.  If they tried to evade those men, it’d be noticed too.  Especially if a drone was tracking them.

“What do we do, then?” Carson asked.

“Exactly what he wants.  He wants the footage?”

“Yeah.”

Carson navigated to the text with the information.

She encrypted everything before sending it.  There was a usual password with the contact.  He’d try that first.

“I’m guessing he loaded the back of that vehicle with every camera drone he had.  Send out five, six, eight at a time?  Send out others to relieve them when the drone battery gets low.  Let’s say that happens every twenty minutes.  Charge them with spare batteries from the electric vehicle.”

“Could be out there all day.”

“The men on the ground are taking turns watching the chokepoints traffic has to go through, watching the roads out of this area, and doing sweeps.  She can only go so far on foot.  That gives them a perimeter to work within.”

“With eyes in the sky and boots on the ground to watch things.  They’ll check the buildings,” Carson said.

“Control,” Mia said.  “So we let him have it.  We play the professionals.”

“And Gio?”

“We’ll go to her when there’s an opening.”

“In a day?  Or half a day, two days?  Do we know?”

“Sooner than half a day.  The drone coverage is oppressive.  But it hinges on one thing.”

“The man.”

The phone vibrated.

New texts.  Carson picked up.

“He’s asking us to set up new cameras like the one you used.  He’s bringing more men into the area to sweep, as we get closer to dawn.  He’ll have some bring whatever brand we ask for.”

“Of course,” Mia said.  “We’re professionals.  We know nothing about the drone overhead, we do everything he asks, we get the job done.”

“What’s he seeing on the video?  You were going to explain.”

“I can only change the timing from the moment she left the tracker behind.  In reality, she cut southwest from the campgrounds, then headed east, to the gas station, taking the darkest road.  Changing timing, she disappears, appears on camera near the dark road, where she’s barely visible.  She steps off the road to avoid the headlights of an incoming car, and I cut it there.  Next we see of her is another brief clip of her moving out of the trees southwest of the campground, around the time of my call.  In the other video I sent him, I paved over her other appearances with footage that doesn’t have her.  It helps it’s dark.”

“She turned around, in this new narrative?”

“It’s a very dark road, and it leads away from the city.”

“He’s going to study that footage.  That’s a lot of exposure.  One weird cut, one detail that doesn’t fit the timeline, like a blotch on her clothes that disappears…”

“Not having any video would be more.”

“Yeah.  Okay.  We’ll deal with it if there’s an issue.  For right now…”

“Drone man.”

⯁

It was like threading a needle.  Timing, moving pieces.

How long would Gio wait?

There were eight cars in the immediate area, watching things, the first time drone man got restless.  The key times to watch were the times the drones were sent out to relieve others.

Being human, he had needs to meet.  Sitting on a high rise overlooking the light sprawl of cabins, rural roads, and remote buildings, he’d gotten peckish.  Or bored.  So he’d driven in to go get food from the coffee shop, a rushed run, with drones left at their perches.

Presumably, she figured, recording constantly.

Carson, picking up the cameras to install, dropped off at a location by one of Davie’s men, wasn’t in a position to do anything or make any moves.  There were eyes in the wrong places.  People in cars who’d note him going from A to B.

He did stop at a trash can that had been set up for cabin people walking the trails, disposing of car trash.  He left a trail camera in place, angled up.  Discreet enough, she had to assume.

Mia now had a view of the drones in flight.  Even at an awkward angle, even past the trees, she could see them.  Especially the one watching her location.  It looked like Drone Man had spent the night flying them through the trees, then kept those recorded routes for future drones.  In daylight, unless someone was specifically looking at the rise he was deploying from, or if that someone was at a spot that was being monitored, looking to the sky, it was easy to miss.  Easy to explain away.

This was oppressive.  They were exposed.

And Mia was focused.

Drone man returned to the high rise, rushing a bit, to keep to the twenty-five minute schedule.  For roughly five of those minutes, some drones were flying out to their destinations, and once they were there, others were called back.  If he’d been delayed, some drones might have lost their batteries.

Someone else might have contrived to create that delay, somehow, but she wasn’t that type.

That exposed her, and it raised questions, and suspicion.   Mia watched and waited, pausing the video on the best image she had of the man, for clues.  Nothing, except a massive bag of things from the coffee shop.  Big breakfast for a skinny guy.

They wouldn’t have another opportunity for hours, she figured.  In the meantime, two more people came.  A lot of their focus was in the wrong direction, thanks to the change-up in timestamps.  Checking all the potential hiding spots closer to the city.

Very few people stopped in to see Davie.  One brought him breakfast and coffee.  Everything happened by other channels.  In a way, he was minimizing his own exposure.

He was exercising his control, too.  Asking for more cameras.  Asking her to give him access to the feeds.  She did, minus the camera from their car.

The next opportunity came fifty minutes after the last.  She’d expected longer, and was caught off guard.  She’d coordinated timing with Carson, planning to have him set up cameras closer to here later, during Drone Man’s run for lunch.

But Drone Man packed up.  Most of the drones were pulled back in.

Had something happened?  Mia double checked that Gio hadn’t been found.

A bathroom break.  A massive breakfast and a lot of coffee for a guy who’d woken up in the middle of the night.  He thought he’d be longer than the twenty-five minute window, so he wasn’t confident about leaving drones in the air.

Leaving Mia to work with intuition.  What remained?  Drones, she guessed, that weren’t flying, to conserve battery life and stay out of view, but were recording.

Eyes on her, no doubt.  There weren’t many eyes on Carson, who was further out, closer to the city, the direction Gio was supposed to have gone.

A few other major locations.  If eight had gone out and five had come home… one on her, that left two.

She used a map, and judged where the gaps the guy wanted to leave the drones at might be.  The road leading to him.  The town hub, if it could even be called that, with the coffee shop and parking lot by the intersection.

She called him, and she told him what he needed to know.  There were parts only he could know, too.  The cars that were watching and following.

She told him what roads were clear.

“Do I have time?” he asked.

“Barely.”

“Driving now.  Can’t drive too fast or I’ll draw attention.”

“Yeah.”

“Mia?  He’s got another drone setup down this way.”

“You saw one?”

“Yeah.  They’re not tracking me, at least.  They’re focusing a lot more of their efforts on the wrong area, which is good, but… lots of people.”

“Understood.”

They weren’t even a priority

She couldn’t even watch Carson, because she’d given Davie access to the feeds.  So the route she’d given him avoided any road she could see.

It did mean he had to cut back behind the gas station.  That, even from the closest camera-free road, was a fierce hike through dense woods, that took five to ten minutes on its own.

Driving took up more time.

Her neck was tense, her mouth dry.

She’d done what she could.  Threading this needle, to get one teenage girl out from an area with heavy surveillance.

She watched as the drone man came back up the road.  Too fast.  He couldn’t spend twenty minutes having a messy breakfast shit in a coffee shop bathroom?  If he’d pulled the drones back, even he’d thought he’d be longer.  That had been less than ten.

The drones flew out.

Even if Carson pushed it…

It took time for the drones to get where they were going, tracing their zig-zagging recorded routes around treetops.  That was the only mercy.

With the passing minutes, a feeling, like guilt but worse, settled in her.  Dread.  Despair.  Too complicated to pin down.

The phone rang, and she didn’t want to look, in case it was Davie, asking where Carson had gone, or telling her Carson had been seen taking a weird route.

No, she had to wrestle with that anxiety, to steer her head around, like she’d told Gio to do.  Davie wouldn’t call.

He’d send people to bring her in for questions.  Or murder her.

She picked up, managing her breathing.

“Hey babe,” Carson said, his tone artificial.  “You asked for something, I’m forgetting what it was.”

“Sex in the woooooods!” a man hollered, beside the phone.  Someone else laughed.

Rationalizing where he had to be…

“Muffin,” she told him.

“Blueberry?”

“Yeah.”

“Gotta get you out here.  Good day for a hike.”

Good hike.  Code.

“Sex in the woooods, whoo!”

“Sometime,” she said.  “Not when we have work.”

“Not when we have work, she says,” he said.  Someone groaned loudly.  “I’ll catch you in a minute, then.”

Mia closed her eyes for a few seconds.

If hike was code for disappearing someone, a good hike meant a good disappearance.  He had Gio.  He’d convinced her to come with him with very little warning or time to negotiate.

Then he’d swung by the coffee shop as cover for why he’d come back this way, and casually joked around with the very people that were looking for the teenager?

With Gio in the trunk?

He’d have to have left her there, while going inside to get coffee, muffin, whatever else.  With at least two people in the parking lot, watching out for people coming and going- not that it was that valuable a task, considering it was daylight, there was a lot more traffic, and they thought the girl was elsewhere.

Which would be why it was two immature kids, by the sounds of it.

Carson arrived, pulling around the side of the building.  Mia watched the drone on the screen.  If it flew around for a better vantage point…

She got up, and hauled a window open.  It hadn’t been open in so long that paint had fused into frame a bit.  At least she was stronger than average.  It came apart in gummy stretches, with horrible noises.

Carson shut the trunk, circling around to the front door of the community center.

Gio appeared, sweaty, flushed, and looking very tired.

“She was asleep,” Carson said.  “I didn’t find her on my first look, I almost left without her.”

“Did a good job hiding, huh?” Mia asked.

Gio’s attention was on the laptop and extra monitor, and all the wires.

“I grabbed her off the ground.  She came nicely once I told her I was with you.”

By the look in the girl’s eyes, Mia wondered if she just hadn’t had any fight in her at all.  If she’d spent it, getting this far, spent it hiding out, stewing in the awful emotions, the terror.

“Who are you?” Gio asked.

“Maybe the only people who could have gotten you out like this,” Mia said.

She let the words hang.

Gio seemed to accept that.

“Eight drones out at a time, ten cars with his people in them, and this isn’t even the area his attention’s on.”

Gio looked a little confused by that.

“Misdirected him,” Carson said.

Gio seemed to digest that.  Anxiety creased her face for a moment, as she started to articulate something, and then she stopped.  Her eyes settled on the screens.

“I told you he was intense,” she said, belatedly.  “Really though, who are you?  Vigilantes?”

“No,” Mia said.  “We’ll explain later.  For now, find another hiding spot, in case someone drops in.  We’ll know if they’re coming, but still.  Let me ask you, though, who are you?”

“You mean why do they care this much about me?” Gio asked.  “It’s not that complicated.  He’s intense.  You don’t even know.”

“Let’s start with your name.”

“Oh.  Gio.”

“No,” Mia said.  “That girl is dead, gone, disappeared, as of the moment a trail camera caught its last image of her.  You get a new name.  One that means nothing to him or that girl you used to be, or anyone that girl knew.  Think about that in the next little while, okay?  Come up with some names?”

“While you rest,” Carson said.  “Get back to sleep, if you can, the next little while will be very dull.  Scary still, but dull.  When we wrap up here, we’ll bring you back with us.  You’re as safe as you can be in this moment.  Mia is good at what she does.  You get safer with time.”

Mia rankled a bit at the compliment.

“I don’t think I do.  He won’t stop or ease back.”

“Go rest,” Carson said.  “I’m going out to work for the boss man.  Brunch break over.”

Mia nodded.

Carson drove out.  Mia got the teenager settled, letting her eat a breakfast sandwich and juice and use the bathroom before curling up in the dark space behind a painted wooden cutout of a Christmas elf with a massive head, beneath a cheap plywood table, silvery ‘space blanket’ draped over her.

I’m getting a sense of how dangerous this man is, Mia thought.  Don’t worry about that.

A lot of Mia’s focus had been elsewhere.  On the roads, comings and goings.  Davie Cavalcanti had stayed at the cabin, occasionally stepping out to the porch to make a call or smoke.  Not so pertinent.

The teenager didn’t need to see the stretch of video where the young man who had been her brother came out to the porch with Davie, head down, footsteps small and shuffling, face and lips so swollen he couldn’t help but drool, blood in the drool and in his hairline- with one spot where there wasn’t any hair at all, just raw skin, mottled in black and white on the screen.  More torture than a beating.

There hadn’t been anyone else inside.  Davie’s doing.

If Mia hadn’t seen, she couldn’t have guessed anything had happened.  The man carried on, deploying an army to reclaim what was his.

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