Page 18 of Make Them Pay

Ten rounds in my magazine minus five fired. Five rounds left.

No satellite uplink. No backup burner. No secondary bag. No vehicle. No safehouse.

We're on foot in wet clothes in late autumn with limited ammunition and a laptop that may or may not have survived its first river crossing.

I look at Enley. She's wringing water from her hair, jaw set, eyes already scanning the tree line ahead of us.

"What now?" she asks through chattering teeth.

“Southeast. There’s a second safehouse.” I run the map in my head. We're approximately eight miles from the nearest road. The second safehouse is a storage unit complex on the industrial side of the city, another twelve miles past that. Twenty miles total, most of it through forest, in wet clothes, with limited supplies.

"Twenty miles," I say.

She nods. Like twenty miles is a light stroll in the park.

"Then we better start walking."

I sigh, and we start walking.

The forest takes us in. The sound of the river fades behind us. The cold seeps through our wet clothes and into the muscle underneath. I take point. She follows close enough that I can hear her breathing, steady and controlled even through the shivering.

Behind us the sedan sits dead in a clearing beside a rusted mill. The cabin that kept us safe for a few days has been found and compromised. The external drives are formatted and lost. The secondary bag is lying on the ground where we dropped it during the sprint to the car.

We've lost the safehouse, the vehicle, and a third of our equipment.

But the laptop is still in the bag. The Orchid channel is still active. The intelligence we gathered is still in our heads, in the systems we built together, in the shared understanding of two people who spent days learning each other's patterns well enough that running through gunfire together felt less like chaos and more like choreography.

I look back once. Enley is right behind me, arms crossed over her chest against the cold, jaw set, eyes forward.

She catches me looking. And my system runs a degree hotter, and for a split second I think about kissing her.

Then, I turn forward and keep walking too.

Twenty miles.

8

Enley

The first five miles are endurance. The next five are stubbornness. The last ten are something else entirely.

We walk in single file through forest that doesn't care about our situation. The trees don't thin for us. The terrain doesn't flatten. The cold in our wet clothes doesn't ease even when the weak afternoon sun breaks through the canopy in scattered patches that warm nothing. My jeans are heavy with river water and they chafe with every step, a raw friction along my inner thighs that I file under problems I'll deal with when I’ve got the luxury of caring about comfort.

Render sets a pace that's aggressive but not punishing. He checks our direction using landmarks and the angle of the sun because the GPS on the laptop is a risk we're not taking until we're sure nobody's tracking our signal. Every thirty minutes he stops, listens for sixty seconds, scans the tree line behind us, and then moves on. The stops feel military in their precision. I wonder how many times he's done this before. I wonder where he’s learned to do this. How many times has he walked out of a bad situation on foot with limited supplies and the landscape for cover. The ease of his movement says it's not the first time.

We don't talk much for the first hour. The energy cost of conversation on top of the energy cost of the hike feels extravagant. But the silence isn't empty. It's occupied by the sound of our boots on the forest floor and the drip of water from our clothes and the slow, settling knowledge that the life we built in the cabin is gone and whatever comes next has to be built from less.

The second hour is when the thinking starts.

Not the tactical thinking. That's been running in the background since we hit the water. Routes. Resources. The list of what we still have versus what we lost. The practical mathematics of survival.

The other thinking. The kind that happens when the adrenaline burns off and the body is left with nothing to do but walk and the brain, no longer needed for immediate threat assessment, starts processing the things it deferred.

I keep seeing the man Render shot at the mill site.

Not the act itself. The act was fast and clean, two shots from a distance that should’ve been inaccurate but wasn't, and the man went down with the immediate finality of someone whose body stopped receiving instructions from his brain. I didn't see his face. I was behind the concrete lip, water spraying near my head, focused on the river and the crossing and the mechanics of survival. But I saw the shape of him. Standing. Then not standing. The transition between states happening in the space of a single second.

Render killed someone. Again. For me. Again. And I watched it happen with the same detached clarity I felt in the warehouse four days ago, the observation without emotional processing that I'm starting to recognize as a defense mechanism rather than actual composure.