Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 64044 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 320(@200wpm)___ 256(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64044 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 320(@200wpm)___ 256(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
“It’s enough if I don’t miss.”
The SUVs are gaining behind us. Black and menacing. Render handles the car beautifully, using the curves to keep distance while I monitor the road ahead.
We’re running. We’re alive. But as of a few minutes ago, we’re truly on our own.
7
Render
The sedan has about four more minutes of this kind of driving before something structural gives.
I can feel it in the steering. A looseness in the front end that wasn't there when we left the cabin, the kind of play that says a tie rod or a control arm is operating past its tolerance. The rear window is fractured but holding. The engine temperature gauge is climbing because I've been running at redline for three straight miles on a road that was built for logging trucks doing thirty-five, not a sedan doing eighty.
The SUVs behind us have the advantage of weight and power. The curves are where I gain ground because the sedan's lower center of gravity means I can push through turns that the heavier vehicles have to brake into. But the straightaways are killing us. Every time the road opens up they eat the distance I built on the last bend.
Enley is on the laptop. Working. Not screaming, not freezing, not doing any of the things that someone with two weeks of field experience should be doing while bullets have recently been fired at the vehicle she's sitting in. She's pulled up the ghost layer and she's doing something with the routing that I'll ask about later when we're not being chased.
"Third vehicle," she says without looking up. "Coming from the north. The intercept shows them coordinating on a radio frequency I can see but can't break in real time."
A third vehicle means they're trying to box us. Two from behind, one cutting ahead to close the gap from the front.
"Where's the intercept point?" I ask.
"Based on their speed and the road geometry, about six miles ahead. Where the forest road hits the junction with Route 11."
Six miles. At our current speed, about four minutes. The same four minutes the sedan has left before the front end makes a decision I don't want it to make.
I take the next curve at seventy and the rear tires break loose for a full second before the tread catches again. The forest blurs past. Pine trunks like vertical bars in a cage that's moving too fast to count.
"There's a town," Enley says. "Millhaven. Population around two thousand. It's on Route 11, about a mile east of the junction."
"I know Millhaven."
"Then you know there are people there. If the third vehicle is coming from the north and we're coming from the south and we both hit Route 11 at the same time, the town is between us."
The implication settles into my chest like something cold and heavy. Millhaven is a nowhere town. A gas station, a diner, a small grocery that doubles as the post office, and a handful of houses clustered along a two-block main street that might have thirty people on it at any given time on a weekday morning. Thirty people who wake up and go to work and buy milk and argue about property taxes and have absolutely no idea that a convoy of armed vehicles might be about to blow through their town at highway speed with gunfire as a possibility.
These are the calculations that don't appear in the mission briefing. The ones that live in the space between the plan and the reality. Serafina's people are contract operators. They follow targets. They don't care about backdrop. They don't account for the gas station attendant who steps outside for a cigarette at the wrong second, or the mother loading groceries into her car in the parking lot of the only store in town, or the kid on a bicycle who takes the long way home because the weather is nice.
I care. That's the difference between what I do and what they do, or at least it's supposed to be. The Maddox crew exists because the systems that are designed to protect people like the ones in Millhaven are too slow or too compromised or too constrained by the rules that let monsters like Serafina operate. We work in the margins because the margins are where the damage happens. But the margins have geography. They have addresses and populations and people who didn't choose to live in the crossfire.
If I lead this pursuit through Millhaven, I'm making that choice for them.
"Alternate route," I say. "Before the junction. Anything."
Enley's fingers move on the laptop. "There's a logging road. Unmarked. About two miles ahead on the left. Satellite imagery shows it runs roughly parallel to Route 11 for about three miles before it dead-ends at an old mill site."
"Dead end."
"Dead end for vehicles. The mill site is on the river. If we go on foot from there, we can cross the water and come out on the other side in a different grid square. The pursuit vehicles can't follow across the river."