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Matt’s heart rate was beginning to pick up when they found an opening on the west side, near the wall of the ravine. James reported on the other guys’ progress from the northwest corner as Matt squirmed out.

“They know we’re in here, using willow brush and trying to approach us covertly. They don’t know we know they’re coming.”

“Shit.” Matt’s utility belt got stuck on a finger of metal. He tried to wrench himself free. He hated feeling like his legs were open to attack while his upper body was in the open. Well, sort of open—his head was mashed into the dirt wall outside the container. This was a graceful exit. “They had to have been following us.”

“I never saw them.”

Matt decided not to question James’s skills. For some reason he was hesitant to bruise James’s ego. Matt finally broke the small finger of steel holding him back and tumbled out. Okay, now he was eating dirt. And animal droppings? He got on his hands and knees and spit a couple of times. “How’s it look, now?”

“Hmmmm.”

“Hmmmm,
what?
” He demanded when James didn’t elaborate.

“They’re keeping an eye on the container, not moving. Feels like they’re waiting for something.”

“Like an airstrike?” That didn’t sound as sarcastic as it had in his head.

“No, like… backup.”

“Fucking lovely.” Matt spit one more time, then crept up and tried to peek over the top of the ravine on the west side. He couldn’t see jack, mostly because his head didn’t clear the top.

“Maybe you should let me keep an eye on them and you should be checking out other possibilities. You know, try and get in the open. Line of sight and all.” Couldn’t James pick up brain waves from a long way away? “Could the container be blocking you?”

James looked a bit startled. “Yeah. Not used to the range I have now. Wasn’t thinking.”

Matt crawled to James’s position as quietly as possible. He hadn’t been silent coming out of the container, but they subbed their voices to preserve every advantage they might have. James pointed out the other men’s positions, nodded at Matt and left.

Nothing happened in the five minutes James was gone, except one of their “guests” proved he was a fidgeter. The willow brush he hid behind kept wiggling.

James tapping on his shoulder startled him a little. Matt managed to stop himself from jumping. James gave him a disgusted look, but said, “Quite a few guys are coming right up the ravine, I think, from the south. Never saw them, but I was getting, I don’t know, a ricochet or something. Nothing from the west but some kids, I think we can make it out that way, if we can find someplace where those guys can’t see us.” He indicated their watchers with his head.

“You didn’t find a path out?”

“Thought we’d better move together, I don’t know how close the others are. Still don’t know my range.”

Crap. They moved to the southern edge of the container, closer to the unknown threat, but away from the known danger. They could only go so far before they would be visible to Mr. Shaky Bush, in the southernmost position. “Hey, can you get a read on the guy who keeps fidgeting? What’s up with that?”

“Um, something’s bugging him. Physically. Maybe bug bites? Or… bugs?”

“Can you try your mental judo on him? Make him more distracted? Might get more distance before we’re exposed.”

“I can try and amplify his agitation. You’ll have to search, though, ’cause I can’t do both at once.” There was a moment of silence. Then James broke out in a slow smile. Matt was a little dazed. Had he ever seen James smile before? He wanted to see it again. It was a great smile.

“Okay, got him.” Matt whapped himself upside the head lightly to get his head back in the game. James looked at him strangely. “Dammit, got distracted, lost him. Okay, got him again.”

Okay then, no distracting the psychic warrior. Matt moved south, keeping to the sparse vegetation as much as possible. Two meters past where they were visible to Mr. Fidgety, he found a tiny gulley in the side of the ravine. It was dry and sunk into the dirt maybe twenty-five to thirty centimeters. At best. Yay. Vertical belly-crawling.

When he turned back toward James, he saw the willow brush shaking so hard little clods of dirt were rolling down the wall of the ravine. Matt smirked his way back to James. “Found it; let’s go.”

They made it to the little wash without attracting the attention of the fidgeter, but James had sweat beading his forehead. Matt could feel his concentration half on following Matt’s boots and half on the guy he was distracting. “Shit,” James hissed. He must have lost it again. Matt was just in the wash, and James went for the land-speed record in army crawl and crowded in behind him, pushing the whole length of his body into Matt’s. His groin was against Matt’s ass, the muscles in his chest hard against Matt’s back.

Uhn. Matt tried not to shiver. And tried to refocus on the objective. What was it?

Oh, yeah.
Escape with life intact.

James nudged him to get Matt moving. He moved.

Once he reached the top of the ravine, Matt stayed flat and rolled away from the edge. James rolled up next to him without incident.

Then something hit Matt in the thigh. He was on his back, reaching for his weapon, searching the open space behind them.

A crowd of preteen kids was staring at them. A football was lying on the grass nearby. Fortunately, his hand was mostly hiding his weapon between him and James.

“Nice observational skills,” James rumbled.

“Hey, guys,” Matt was using his most engaging smile and his pleasant voice. “Um, we’re just playing some mock battle games in the ravine with our buddies.”

The kids all relaxed, and one tall boy held out his hand for the football. James sat up and reached across Matt to throw it to him, while Matt put his weapon in his back holster. “Who are you?” the kid asked.

“We’re from Boise,” James informed him calmly. “Came up for some new terrain. Needed a challenge.”

This was apparently believable, judging by the way most of the kids started to wander away. “Wanna help us out?” Matt asked.

The kids’ eyes showed interest. “Sure,” a smaller girl said. Matt bet she was the one really in charge here. She had a look of Anais about her. “Whaddya want us to do?”

“When they come up here looking for us, tell them we went upriver. They’ll probably try to claim we’re criminals, fake you out, but don’t buy it. They’re just trying to win. There’s like ten of them and only two of us.”

Was that a guess or did James know how many were coming?

The kids all liked the idea of messing with the grown-ups, so James and Matt took off west with their full cooperation.

“How do you know they weren’t just messing with us? They could tell those guys anyway.”

“They won’t. They thought we were cool.” James had a smug quirk to his lips.

Duh. Mental judo.

They put off parsing out the near-ambush until they were the hell away from Emmett, and had at least a little breathing room.

So they kept moving, Matt musing over James’s ability to express emotion with, apparently, the use of only three facial muscles. Well, except for that smile in the ravine. Otherwise, the man was all subtle lip quirks and snorting. The scariest part was Matt had been around him less than two days and already understood most of them.

Chapter 8

M
ATT
knew he and James had to talk sooner or later about this morning. “About my check-in….”

“Yeah?” James was wary. “I’m cleared, right? I’m me?” He sounded as if he knew he wasn’t.

“Well, sorta.” Another snort, a sort of weary-sounding one. “Your scans didn’t match the file prints, at least not initially.”

James was silent, waiting for the explanation.

“When you lay the file print over the scan I took, the blood vessels match exactly, but the scans also have way more vessels. And if you lay the new vessel patterns over each other,
they
match exactly.”

James was silent so long Matt wondered if he was going to have to explain it more clearly. But then James said, “Well, fuck me pink. They put the implant on my retinas?”

“Seems like something got added in there, doesn’t it? Pink? Really?”

“How does that not fuck up my eyesight?” James mused. Matt shrugged. It was getting near his special order check-in time. They had to find a secure place to stop for a while.

“It doesn’t, and we have more immediate problems. I’ve been ordered to com again at 1030.”

James raised an eyebrow, but started visual scouting. Soon, he pointed out an almost dry creek bed that led up to the bench formation north of the river. “We could probably follow that, stay out of sight, find a good, defensible position not too far from the river.”

After they started up the narrow valley, James got nervous. He started falling behind, and holding his head funny. Still and cocked, like a dog sniffing the air or listening to some noise out of human hearing range.

Matt stopped. “Okay, what is it, James?”

“I think… they’re closing in on us pretty fast all at once. Coming up the river behind us. The echo is different. They seem kind of, I don’t know, satisfied, or gleeful. Expectant.” James looked a little spacey, like he was focused on something not quite there.

Matt took his word for it. “So, whadya think?”

“I think we should get up past that bend, let them pass us, then go back to the river and backtrack. Maybe. If I can determine their proximity.”

Fuckity-fuck. He was working with a faulty psychic.
Just when you thought you had the advantage.
Judging from the sharp look James sent him, Matt guessed he’d let that sentiment leak out. He sighed, turned, and kept going.

They were staying to rocky areas, trying not to leave a trail, when James stiffened.

“What?” Matt felt James’s alarm instantly.

“Listen.”

He held his breath, ignored the heartbeat in his eardrums. Okay, insects buzzing, water running in the creek bed, and…, “Fuck!” His voice came out nearly a whisper.

Dogs. Baying, hunting dogs. Hunting them?

“Get in the water.”

“They’ll know we went this way.”

“Got a better idea?”

“Fuck.”

Soon they were slogging at a near run in the water, and Matt’s right quad was burning. It reminded him of why, even when his leg seemed mostly normal most of the time, he hadn’t been welcome to stay in Special Operations Unified Force, even in gray ops. It still just wasn’t quite
right
. It was good, even amazing compared to what vets got a century or even twenty-five years ago, but it wasn’t the same as the real thing.

“Hold up here, Matt.” They had come around an oxbow in the creek. James grabbed his short-barreled shotgun from the holster he’d rigged onto his pack, and then shucked the pack into the water. He climbed out onto the bed and up the steep bank. James rolled onto the flat ground capping the bank, looking out over the downstream arm of the oxbow. “Shoot anything that comes around that corner.”

“Want my pistol? I can handle the twelve-gauge.”

“Don’t need accuracy,” James said, looking like a sniper to Matt. Well, one with a shotgun. James was lying still on the top of the bank, sighting the gun. Matt decided to shut up and let the man get to it.

He wasn’t totally prepared when James pulled the trigger. Their pursuers were closer than he’d realized, and it happened far sooner than Matt expected. And
damn
that thing was loud. The yelping and screaming that followed was almost louder.

James slithered back down and grabbed up his pack. “Run,” he said tersely. So they ran. Within three hundred meters, the creek valley began to widen, increasing the chances they’d be spotted. Matt made for the small farm he saw ahead to the south.

“Find a vehicle, any kind.” James ordered. Matt used little caution approaching the outbuildings while James stayed crouched by the creek bed, looking back the way they’d come. His line of sight was truncated by a number of sharp bends.

Matt found what had to be the oldest hybrid vehicle he’d ever seen in the small machine-shed nearest the farmhouse. It was an old-style pickup that had “Chevrolet” impressed on the tailgate. The thing had to be at least eighty years old. Or older. Chevrolet had finally gone under (for the last time) in about 2030. Jesus, he hoped James had a clue how to operate this thing. There was no time to look for another option. Whatever vehicles were normally parked on either side of the pickup were gone.

He started back to tell James he’d found something, but remembered he could send him a mental message. Okay, this psychic thing was kinda handy. He flattened himself on the wall next to the shed opening and sent the info into the ether. Then he covered James—semi-crouched and ass-backward—up to the shed.

“It must be good, whatever it is. You felt dubious,” James said as he came in, blinking rapidly to adjust his eyesight from outside to low light.

Matt wondered what dubious felt like. “Yeah, it’s good. I hope you really can drive anything, ’cause this is way beyond me.”

James whistled when he caught sight of the automobile. “It’s been a while, but I drove an early twenty-first-century pickup once. As long as I don’t have to hotwire it, I’m good.”