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)
He rerouted. When I told him the third pursuit vehicle was coming from the north and the town was between us, he didn't calculate the odds of getting through Millhaven without civilian casualties and decided the odds were acceptable. He didn't weigh the tactical advantage of a populated area against the risk to bystanders and pick the option that served our mission. He said "alternate route" before I even finished the sentence, like the possibility of running a high-speed pursuit through a town of two thousand people wasn't an option that existed in his operating system.
That matters to me. More than I expected it to.
Because the version of this story that Poe would tell, the version that the Maddox crew would tell, is the version where the mission comes first. Where the objective justifies the means. Where the people you're trying to save are worth the risks you take in the process, and those risks sometimes include other people who didn't volunteer to be part of the calculation.
I grew up on the periphery of that logic. I heard it in the conversations Poe had with Arrow late at night when he thought I was sleeping. I heard it in the justifications that followed the jobs that went wrong, the ones where "collateral" was a word that showed up in the after-action report and got treated as a line item instead of a life.
I never fully accepted it. That's one of the reasons Poe kept me out. Not because I couldn't handle the operational side. Because I asked questions about the operational philosophy that he didn't want to answer.
Render didn't treat Millhaven as a calculation. He treated it as a constraint. A hard line. The town existed and therefore the town was off the table, full stop, no analysis required. The logging road was worse tactically. The mill site was a dead end. The river crossing nearly killed us. Every choice he made after "alternate route" was a choice that accepted higher personal risk in exchange for zero civilian exposure.
I want to ask him about it. Whether it's principle or instinct. Whether the Maddox crew as a whole operates that way or whether Render is an outlier. Whether there have been times when the line didn't hold, when the mission and the bystanders ended up in the same place and the mission won.
I want to ask, but the forest is cold and our clothes are wet and the man walking ten feet ahead of me is carrying the only bag we’ve got left with the economy of motion that says he'll walk twenty miles or forty or a hundred if that's what it takes to get us somewhere safe.
The questions can wait. The walking can't.
Mile eight, by my rough count based on pace and time. We've been going for nearly three hours. My legs are numb from the knees down, a combination of cold and fatigue that makes each step feel like I'm walking on stilts made of wood. Render's pace hasn't slowed but I catch him favoring his right side in a way that tells me something is bothering his left leg. He hasn't mentioned it. He probably never will.
"We should stop," I say. "Five minutes. Check the equipment."
He looks back at me. Assesses. I know what he sees: a woman in soaked clothes with blue lips and a determined expression that's doing most of the work of keeping her upright. Whatever calculation he runs, the answer comes back in my favor.
"Five minutes."
We sit on a fallen log in a small clearing between two ridges. The sun is lower now, the light turning gold in the way it does when afternoon starts thinking about giving up and becoming evening. I pull the laptop from the sealed bag and open it.
It works. The screen lights up. The ghost layer is still running. The Orchid channel is still active, still receiving, still invisible.
The relief is so intense it feels physical. A warmth that starts in my chest and spreads outward, counteracting the cold in my clothes for just a moment. This machine is our lifeline. Everything we need to find our friends, plan the rescue, and coordinate with Knight and Dean is on this screen. If the river had killed it, we'd be starting from nothing.
"Check the channel," Render says. He's standing beside the log, scanning the trees. Even during a rest stop he doesn't sit.
I check. There's a new packet from Orchid. Timestamped forty minutes ago. She's still sending. I decrypt it with fingers that are stiff and clumsy from the cold and the data unfolds on the screen.
New intel. Ross is increasing security at the facility. Two additional guards added to the night rotation. A scheduled "transfer assessment" is set for seventy-two hours from now, which Orchid believes means Serafina is evaluating whether to move everyone to a secondary location.