The second vehicle is on the river road. I get this from Danny, who is still running the potato stall. He has the observational skills of someone who has spent a decade watching traffic.
“Police on the river road,” he says, when I lean on his counter. “Two of them. Walked toward the pier path.”
My jaw sets. “How long ago?”
“Five minutes.”
Five minutes. The pier path is seven minutes from the pier at a walk.
I pull my phone.
Ryan and I have a system that predates text messaging. I mean this almost literally, because we built it before I trusted technology with anything I cared about. So it runs on a combination of pack bond signal and a six-word shorthand that requires contextto read and sounds like nothing if intercepted.
I send three words:River path. Two. Active.
The bond shivers, Ryan receiving, adjusting.
Then I put the phone away and I go back to what I do, which is move through the carnival ground like I own it, because I do, and know where everyone is, because I do, and make sure that when the law enforcement presence expands from information-gathering to active search, they run into a carnival that is helpful and cheerful and utterly unaware of what they’re looking for.
I find Jenny at the noodle stall.
“Late-night rush coming,” I tell her, which is our staff shorthand fordraw the crowd toward this end of the row.She’s done it before for operational reasons. She doesn’t ask any questions.
I find the stage manager and make a request, which he grants, because I know him and he trusts me and also because the request is reasonable. The band, which has been doing quiet late-night material, shifts into something with more energy.
The crowd responds. They always respond.
The food row gets busier. The game alley lights go up. The late-night crowd redistributes toward the center of the ground, away from the entrance, which puts more bodies between the law enforcement positions and the pier.
Not obstruction. Nobody’s blocking anybody. Just the natural flow of a carnival crowd doing what carnival crowds do, which is moving toward the warmth and themusic and the good smells.
I do all of this in about twelve minutes.
Then I find my position at the edge of the game alley, where I can see the main entrance, the river path access, and the central stage, and I wait.
Archer finds me at the thirteen-minute mark. “She’s with Ryan,” he says. He’s positioned himself against the prize stall wall, which gives him sightline to three of the four approaches.
“Where?” I ask.
“Not the pier. Ryan moved them.” He pauses. “Tristan’s with them.”
“So it’s us,” I say.
“It’s us,” he agrees.
We stand in our positions. The game alley runs around us. The operators are still working, the crowd is still playing, nobody at this end of the ground has any idea that the energy of the night has changed completely.
I’m good at being somewhere and not looking like I’m doing what I’m doing. This is my skill set.
Archer is good at being a wall. Quietly, without announcement, he has positioned himself at the game alley entrance in a way that means anyone coming in this direction has to go through him or around him, neither of which is fast.
We don’t talk.
We don’t need to.
The bond runs between us, and through it I feel theedges of Ryan’s presence. He’s focused, steady, doing whatever he’s doing with Lola and Tristan somewhere in the carnival’s quieter spaces. Tristan’s warmth. Lola, at the very edge of what I can read.
I still can’t believe she finally told us.
