Cold Springs (28 page)

29

Pérez's feet were bleeding.

He had walked for maybe an hour, but had only just hit the road, if you could call it a road—a two-rut path, sprouting weeds in the middle like a hairy spine. The gravel and mud were no kinder on his feet than the fields had been.

He tried to concentrate on the morning, which was really very fine—cold, but sunny. It made Pérez think of a winter day in Monterrey, back at his family's ranch. This place was greener, but otherwise much like home. Better than the fog of Mill Valley, that damn hilltop house of Mr. Z's.

Pérez stumbled along, cursing his luck.

He should've taken the clean shot at Chadwick when he had the chance, last night in the woods, but something had failed him—some unwanted twinge of conscience.

It bothered him that Chadwick had read him so well. Pérez wished he were the type who could track down a man who'd just released him—put a bullet in his head. But he couldn't do that. He couldn't even muster anger at Mallory.

He consoled himself with the thought of a payoff. Now that he understood the truth, the knowledge would be worth something. He could turn the tables. He could become Samuel. The idea made him smile.

It was God's will he had spared Chadwick's life. In return, Chadwick—the deluded bastard—had unwittingly given him knowledge, a way to make money. Chadwick was in enough danger—he didn't need Pérez's help to die.

Pérez would kill no more. He would demand his cut of the millions, and he would get it. He would return to Monterrey a hero, live out the rest of his days on the ranch, free of debt.

His wife, Rosa, would take him back. He would be with his children again, two boys he had not seen since they were babies. They would be scared of him at first, maybe even angry, but eventually they would understand why he had left for so long, to provide for them.

He would spend the rest of his life making amends. He was still young. He would enjoy many winter mornings like this, in his own fields, teaching his children to ride and to shoot.

He was so focused on the horizon, wondering where the muddy path would lead him, that he did not hear the vehicle behind him until it was almost on top of him.

It was a new blue minivan—out of place on the country road. When Pérez saw the driver, he frowned. He had not counted on this—but he could handle it. Cool and dumb. He had not yet played his hand.

The van stopped. The driver's window purred down.

“What the hell you want?” Pérez demanded.

“You were not easy to find.”

Pérez spat into the dust. “You got something to tell me?”

“You've walked far enough. You want a ride?”

Pérez thought about that, knowing he should refuse, but that would look bad. And his feet hurt. There was no danger here—just some bullshitting, some posturing, a test he knew he could pass.

He nodded, stepped around the front, and the van started moving forward, bumped gently into his legs.

Pérez glared through the windshield. He stepped back, not amused by the joke.

The van lurched forward again, and again bumped Pérez's legs. But Pérez didn't move out of the way. It was not in his nature to back down. He tapped his chest with his fingers. “What the fuck?”

And then he read the situation—a heartbeat too late—just as the driver punched the gas.

Pérez clawed at metal, felt himself being spun around like a child in a blindfold game, and then he was looking at the cold blue sky, his arm held up by a barbed wire fence, several barbs sticking in the skin of his forearm. His legs were numb. He couldn't move.

He heard the van's door open and close. He imagined the porch of his ranch in Monterrey. He imagined that the steps coming toward him were his wife's.

The driver stood over him—an outline rimmed in the sunset. A voice from high above said, “I could've been gone by now, Emilio. But I wanted to see you kill Chadwick. You disappointed me.”

Pérez imagined the sounds of the children he had not seen in so long. He saw the sunlight catching the edges of Rosa's cotton dress, triangles of red fluttering around her legs.

“And now you've figured it,” the voice told him. “You and the girl both. I can tell in your eyes.”

Pérez tried to speak, tried to tell Rosa he loved her, but no sound came.

“Let me help you out here, Emilio,” the voice told him. “Let me give you a lift.”

Pérez heard thunder. As his eyes went dark, he felt a small warm spot on his forehead, as if someone—perhaps a child—had planted a kiss there.

30

“You have two choices,” Hunter said. “Your teammates left an hour ago. You can still log your solo trip, make the pickup area by noon tomorrow. Or you can sit it out, restart Black Level with the group below you. Do you understand?”

Hunter and Leyland studied her, measuring her, waiting.

Mallory's cheeks still burned from the dressing down they'd given her. They had wasted no time reasserting their authority, yelling twelve hours of freedom right out of her head. They gave her no apology or chance to explain, nothing to eat, no time to rest. They made her change into her spare set of Black Level fatigues—still stiff, still smelling of her own sweat and campfire smoke. Then they force-marched her across the river, through icy water up to her knees, all the way back to base camp, the exact place where Pérez had started shooting. Now she stood at attention, her pants cuffs freezing to her ankles, the wind making her eyes water.

It was crazy, pigheaded stubbornness for Hunter to bring her straight back to this clearing, as if nothing had happened, and offer her a solo hike the same day she'd returned from running away.

But she understood why he was doing it. Changing in the lodge, she'd overheard bits and pieces of his conversation with Leyland—about the police, the FBI, her mother. She knew Hunter was trying to protect her—to keep her in the program. And she wanted that. She wanted it badly.

She didn't even mind their drillmaster abuse. It was reassuring compared to running from Pérez, or being with Chadwick—feeling so afraid and angry she'd almost confessed what she half remembered about the night Katherine died.

She wasn't safe—not here, not anywhere. At least in the woods she felt as if she were being given charge of her own fate. Hunter's word—accountability. Mallory liked the fact that Hunter had jogged her out here before giving her the choice, too. It made it clear what he expected her to do.

Footsteps crunched in the woods and Olsen appeared, jogging up the path from the main lodge, out of breath, a supply pack in her hands. No one acknowledged her, but Mallory could feel Hunter's disapproval radiating toward the counselor. Back at the lodge, he'd said her name through gritted teeth, wondering where she was, why she was late, as if Mallory's return was an appointment they'd planned for. Mallory realized they probably blamed Olsen for letting her get away in the first place—the chaos when Smart was shot, Olsen leaving her to tend him.

Hunter kept his eyes on Mallory. “Well?”

“I want to log the solo trip, sir.”

Some of the tension in the air dissipated. Hunter nodded.

“Miss Olsen,” he said. “Prep her and get her on the trail.”

“Yes, sir.”

Hunter and Leyland retreated toward the river.

“At ease, Zedman.” Olsen forced a smile, but she looked like she hadn't slept any more than Mallory had. “We've got a lot to do.”

“How is Smart?” Mallory asked.

The skin around Olsen's eyes tightened. “He'll be fine. His parents pulled him out. He's on his way back home to Iowa.”

Mallory stared at the remnants of the shelter Leyland had built as a demo the night before. She told herself Smart's absence wasn't her fault. He wasn't her best friend, or even a friend at all. But the few weeks she'd known him seemed as important as all the years she'd been at Laurel Heights, and his absence hurt. After getting his mouth taped, getting his ridiculous torch hairdo shaved off, slogging through the obstacle course and the barracks-building and the ropes course—after all that, Smart had been whisked back home to goddamn Des Moines. He'd gotten shot because of her, and she had run in the other direction.

She wanted to cry. She hated the fact that she'd gone outside the program, caused a part of it to unravel.

“Come on,” Olsen told her gently. “I've got a new piece of jewelry for you.”

Olsen led her to the burned-out fire pit. She opened her pack, told Mallory to hold out her hand, then snapped a metal cuff around her wrist. The thing was dull gray, with a single, green blinking light the size of a pencil point. There was no visible latch, and it was too tight to slip off.

“GPS locator,” Olsen told her.

“In case I run away again,” Mallory guessed.

“All the black levels wear them for the solo trip.” But Olsen's tone made it clear that the runaway factor had been discussed. Hunter's decision to send Mallory out hadn't taken so much trust, after all.

“We'll track your position,” Olsen continued, “make sure you're moving in the right direction. But mostly this is in case of emergency—a broken leg, something you absolutely can't handle alone. If that happens, press the light. You'll need to use something pointed to do that—a stick, or your knife. The button will turn red, and Dr. Hunter will send somebody to extract you.”

“Extract me,” Mallory said. “Fun.”

“It would mean starting survival training over from scratch. Not graduating with your team. And it might take us up to half an hour to reach your position, so the button is no substitute for being careful.”

Mallory pulled at the bracelet, already wishing she had a hacksaw, but Olsen didn't give her time to dwell on it.

They started reviewing the basics of the solo trip—the first-aid pack, the emergency procedures. Mallory remembered it all. She knew how to use the snakebite kit, the epinephrine pen. She could dress a wound in her goddamn sleep. Her backpack would hold nothing but one ration bar, her med kit, and an ultralight Polarguard sleeping bag. She would be alone for twenty-four hours, heading east, directly away from the only public road, into the heart of Hunter's empty kingdom. She would cross the river once. And if she did everything right, sometime tomorrow mid-morning she would come across a small dirt access road used only by Cold Springs. That was her goal. Someone would be waiting to pick her up.

It didn't sound all that difficult. It was hard to believe the high-and-mighty Survival Week had boiled down to just this—a lot of preparation for a single day and night alone.

“Trust me,” Olsen said. “It's enough.”

She offered one last item—Mallory's survival knife. Except it wasn't really Mallory's. It was new. Hers had been borrowed by Chadwick, buried in the side of a sniper.

Mallory fingered the new blade. She remembered attacking Olsen—stabbing her in the shoulder with that stupid dinner knife she'd found. That seemed like it had happened to a different person, long ago.

She slid the hunting knife out of the sheath, pinched the clean new point. She balanced it, the way Leyland had taught her, then threw it at the nearest tree. It bit into the wood at a bad angle, like a loose tooth, and immediately fell out.

“Knife-throwing is just for show,” Olsen promised. “You won't use it.”

Mallory almost asked about Pérez. What if he came after her? What good would a blinking light and a knife do her then?

Olsen seemed to misread her expression. “You still mad at me?”

Mallory wasn't sure what surprised her more—the question, or the fact that Olsen truly seemed concerned to know the answer.

She
had
been mad at Olsen, after that night at the ropes course. It seemed a stupid matter now—the torn strap on her harness.

She had blamed Olsen for that.

She had spent years blaming everyone for everything. Pérez. And Chadwick. And her parents. And Katherine—Katherine most of all.

I had reasons,
part of her argued.

Her fears, her failures, her sorry excuse for a childhood—what if it
was
someone else's fault?

A small hard feeling started building in her—like Hunter's voice, like his crazy, pigheaded stubbornness. It didn't matter whose fault it was. She had no choice but to accept it and go on. She had a goal—Gray Level—and it didn't matter if they shot at her friends or made her father disappear or tried to kill her. If she didn't make this final trip, Katherine won, and she lost.

“I'm not mad,” Mallory said softly. “Not anymore.”

“That's good. I was worried about you, Mal. I'm glad you're all right.”

It sounded like cheap throwaway sympathy, the kind anybody could say, but Mallory could tell Olsen meant it. She remembered that tenuous thread of understanding that had seemed to link her to Olsen during counseling sessions—that closeness that she'd been so afraid of.

“Whatever happened?” Mallory asked. “I mean . . . about your stepdad?”

Olsen stared at her for a moment, as if translating her question from a different language. “My stepdad?”

“The story you were telling us. That day in counseling.”

Olsen bent down and picked up Mallory's knife. She looked at the blade, picked a tuft of splinters off the tip. “When I searched for my stepdad, I found out he was in jail, Mallory. He got a new girlfriend when he left my mom, and he was in jail for molesting a young girl, his girlfriend's seven-year-old daughter.”

Mallory blushed. In a way, she was sorry she had asked. But also, she was awed that Olsen would tell her. It wasn't the kind of thing you told someone . . . unless you really trusted her.

“You didn't want to tell your mom that?” she asked.

“No,” Olsen answered. “She would've gotten mad at me, refused to believe it. People like my stepdad, they don't become that way overnight. They repeat their pattern. Over and over. I didn't want my mother to know.”

“Because . . . Oh.”

“Not me,” Olsen said. “Not me. But I have a little sister . . .”

She paused, weighing the blade just as Mallory had. “I
had
a little sister about your age, Mallory.”

Mallory was silent, thinking about the story, liking Olsen sharing it with her.

“I need to tell you something,” Mallory said. “A dream I had.”

Olsen examined the knife absently. “Oh?”

Then Leyland's boots crunched in the leaves. “Time's wasting, counselor. Come on, Zedman—move! Long day ahead of you.”

Hunter and Leyland were both standing over her. The moment for secrets was gone.

Olsen rose, gave her one last look of encouragement. “I'll see you on the other side, kiddo.”

She turned the knife handle-out, and offered it to Mallory. Her hand was trembling, and Mallory knew it was from anger.