Page 34 of Make Them Pay

“Seventeen hours,” I say. “I need to be ready.”

“You need to eat first. And drink more water. And let me check that shin wound again before you put weight on it.”

“Enley.”

“Don’t argue. You were out for ten hours. Your body doesn’t care about the timeline. It cares about fuel and not collapsing when we’re trying to get six people out of that facility.”

She’s right. Lately she’s been right about almost everything.

I eat two meal packs without tasting them. I drink more water. I let her check the shin wound. The infection is calming. The ointment is working.

She kneels on the concrete to change the bandage. Her fingers are careful on my skin. Not purely clinical. Not charged the way they were when our hands met over the laptop. Something quieter and more honest. The touch of someone who crossed a line with you and isn’t pretending it didn’t happen, but also isn’t ready to talk about it while there’s still a rescue to finish.

“Enley.”

She looks up. Kneeling at my feet, pink-tinged hair falling across her face, green eyes steady and clear and full of every hard choice she made today.

“When this is over,” I say, and the words feel heavier and more personal than the last time I said them. “We’re going to have a conversation that doesn’t involve any of this. No networks. No rescues. No teenagers’ bank accounts.”

The corner of her mouth lifts, just a little.

“I’d like that,” she says.

She finishes the bandage, stands, and goes back to the table. I stay on the cot for another hour. Not because I can’t move. Because the hour is a quiet gift she’s giving me without saying so. Sixty more minutes for my body to keep recovering.

At midnight I get up. The dizziness is gone. The fever’s gone. My body feels used up, but the important parts are working again. I can walk. I can think. I can shoot straight when it matters.

I join her at the table. She shifts her chair to make room without looking up. Our elbows don’t touch this time. There’s a little more space than before. Not the old careful distance. Just enough room for both of us to work while the clock counts down to the moment when the digital side and the physical side become one, and we find out whether the plan we built together is strong enough to bring our people home.

Just a few hours left.

Before we start the final preparations I send a short message to Knight on the hidden channel.

Three words.

We’re a go.

14

Enley

The final preparations settle into a steady rhythm. Pack. Check. Recheck. Load. Count. Verify. The quiet physical dance of people getting ready to walk into a building they might not walk out of. I should be terrified, but instead I’m determined. I think Render makes me braver. I’d never tell him that though.

Knight came back an hour ago from his last look around the facility. He brought a hand-drawn diagram of the perimeter that shows more than any satellite picture ever could. Guard positions marked with careful X’s. Camera ranges sketched as soft dotted lines. The six-minute blind spot confirmed with exact times from three different watches. He drew it on the back of an empty meal pack because that was the only paper we had. The precision of those lines, done with a plain ballpoint pen on cardboard, tells me everything about the man who will soon cross that fence line with us.

Render sits at the table loading magazines. The ammunition from the storage shelf fills four of them. It’s more than the handful of rounds we had after the river, but still less than either of them would prefer. Knight brought his own supply: a rifle, a sidearm, and enough rounds for both. He never explains where things come from. With Knight, the things we need simply appear.

I’m on the floor running final checks on the systems I’ll control during the breach. The tablet I’ll use is simple and strong enough to keep the connection from two hundred yards away. Render tested it twice. I tested it three more times. Everything’s ready.

The storage unit feels tight with quiet tension. Cool metal walls. The soft buzz of the generator. The faint click of magazines seating into place. I’ve never been in a room like this before. Poe always kept me on the other side of the wall. The safe side. The side where little sisters taught themselves code in empty apartments because their brothers wouldn’t let them into the rooms where the real work happened.

“Tell me how the team started. How did you all become vigilantes?” I ask.

Render and Knight stop working and stare at me. They glance at one another, and then Render sets a magazine down.

“It started with Arby Kate,” he whispers. “You remember her murder.”

“How could I forget?” I remember the live. I’d never seen it but had heard about the horrific nature of her death. How she went live on Youtube and men entered her studio and brutally murdered her while the whole world watched. Juno’s sister. She was devastated. We all were.