Page 63 of Rooster's Remorse
I didn't pass it by being clean. I passed it by saying the truest thing I've got out loud in a room where I've got no standing.
"Okay," Amara says. "Bring her in."
Mila comes in and reads the room in one pass—every face, both hands she can see, the two doors—and sits where Amara points and lays both palms flat on the table.
She doesn't look at me.
She's had a day and a half of practice at not looking at me since the courtyard and she's good at it.
I let her not look at me, because I've got no right to be looked at.
"Tell them about the ground," Amara says.
She builds it out of the air.
Six hundred acres, the house at the center, the client building north of it, the equipment shed, the two bunker mouths.
The guard rotation. The count Wes runs twice a night and the four who don't.
Flat and exact, the way she did it in the office, and fourteen people go silent while a hundred-pound woman lays out a property she was captive on.
Then Imani turns the laptop around with a satellite image on it.
Mila stops.
The map in her head and the map from the sky don't line up, and I watch it reach her—her jaw goes tight, her eyes cut back and forth across the screen, her hand comes half off the table.
The shed's in the wrong place.
The road doesn't run where she put it.
"No." Her finger goes to the screen. "That's wrong. The shed's here. It has to be here, the light off it came through the vent at this angle, it can't be over there?—"
"It's over there," Imani says, gently. "You built it from sound. Sound bends around things."
Mila stares at the screen, and I can see it coming apart under her, nine years of a map she trusted with her life, wrong.
"The wash," I say.
Every head turns.
"There's a wash." I'm up and around the table before I ask myself if I'm allowed, and I put my finger on a gray line running through the image that nobody's looked at twice. "Dry most of the year. Runs northwest to southeast across the whole county. If the property backs up on it—" I look at her. "Did the ground drop off behind the bunkers? Past the fence line. Did it fall away into something?"
She's looking at me.
First time since the courtyard, and it goes through me, and I keep my face on the map.
"Yes." She says it slowly. "The ground fell away. West of the far bunker. I heard water down in it twice in nine years, both times in August."
"That's the wash." I trace it. "Floods in the monsoon, dry the rest of the year, eight feet deep, and it runs right past the back of that property. You can't put a fence across a wash that survives a flood season, so there won't be one." I look at Amara. "That's your way in. Not the road. You come up the wash on foot from the southeast in the dark and the ground gives you cover the whole way, and nobody watches it, because to them the wash is nothing. It's the desert."
The room's gone quiet in a new way.
"How do you know it's there?," Razor says.
"Because I grew up twenty-five minutes from that dirt." It comes out rougher than I want. "It's my county. I pulled a truck out of that exact kind of ground in a flash flood when I was nineteen. I've walked the bottom of a dozen washes with a shotgun looking for quail, I know how they run and where they let out and what grows down in them. I spent ten years not letting myself think about one foot of that place, and it turns out none of it left me. It was all still in there waiting."
She's still looking at me.
