Page 98 of Travis
“I know that, Sera.”
She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes for a second, then dropped them. “If you go down, the pipeline doesn’t just continue. It continues with Kindt knowing someone tried to stop him. He increases security. Changes routes. Tightens everything. Every pattern I’ve mapped, every vulnerability we’ve found, it all becomes worthless because he rebuilds around the breach.”
“So either I stop and kids get sold, or I keep going and eventually he becomes impossible to stop.”
“Yes.”
“That’s not a choice. That’s two versions of the same failure.”
“I know.” Her voice was smaller now. Not steady, not composed. “I don’t have an answer. I keep running it, and I can’t find one. And I’m scared because I’m supposed to be the person who finds patterns and solves things, and I can’t solve this. I can’t make the math work where you’re safe and the kids are safe and Kindt goes down and nobody goes to prison.”
She stopped. Swallowed. Her eyes were wet, and she wasn’t hiding it.
“I just keep looking at you and thinking about what happens when one of these threads catches up to us? And I know you’re thinking about the boy with the dinosaur shirt, and you should be. But I’m thinking about you in a cell or you in the ground, and I can’t breathe around either one of those.”
The room was quiet. Above us, something fell off a counter with a distant clatter. Kitten.
I wanted to tell her I’d figure it out. That I had a plan, that I’d find the angle neither of us could see yet, that the man who’d built this compound and run solo operations for eighteen months could engineer his way out of this, too.
I didn’t have any of that. I had a wound along my ribs that was still healing, a network that was hunting me, a federal agency that was hunting me, and a woman sitting three feet away who couldn’t find a pattern that would save us.
“I can’t keep going,” I said. “Not the way I’ve been doing it.”
“But you can’t stop.”
“No.”
She looked at me across the space between our chairs. The overhead light caught the bruising still fading across her right knuckles, the hand she’d used to hit a man in a gravel lot because I’d been too reckless and too broken to avoid needing rescue.
We sat there with the weight of an impossible choice between us. Two people who could see every variable and couldn’t solve the equation.
The feeds scrolled on the monitors around us. Kindt’s network moved in the dark, and somewhere out there a van was on a road and there were children in the back, and nobody was coming for them.
We had no answer.
