They hit the trees at a near run, breath coming in foggy bursts.
Dawn filtered pale through the branches, but it didn’t touch the forest floor. Under the canopy, it was all shadow and green and the soft, muffled crush of their boots in snow.
“Pav—”
“Quiet.” Sharper now.
She shut up, but her ears strained.
Nothing. Just wind.
She jogged to keep pace. He was setting a pace that was faster than her feet wanted to go, and he wasn’t adjusting for her. The man from yesterday was gone. The one who almost smiled when she threw his words back at him.
This Pav was operational, and frightening in a way she hadn’t experienced. His eyes moved constantly, scanning the canopy, ground, and flanks.
Thirty minutes in, a stitch consumed her side. Her mouth tasted metallic, and she regretted every gym session she’d ever skipped. Pav looked barely winded. She suppressed a sting of irritation. Didn’t he get tired?
I can’t go on like this.
“Pav.” She grabbed his bicep.
He spun, catching her against his chest, one hand firm at the back of her head. “Shh. Listen.”
A sound.
Faint.
It threaded through the trees from somewhere above and behind, slipping between branches, impossible to place.
She fought to slow her breathing to listen better. But blood thundered in her ears. She dragged in a breath, forced it quieter, tilted her head?—
Nothing. Just trees.Endless suffocating trees.
The buzz grew. Closer.
His hand eased away, shifting to her wrist.
His face had gone remote, all that quiet precision narrowing to a point. Eyes cutting through the canopy, tracking something.
He knew what it was.
“Move.”
He dragged her off-line into denser cover, forcing her through branches that clawed at her clothes and skin, shoving her down behind a wall of dense pine.
He pressed between her shoulder blades, forcing her into a crouch.
“Stay down. Don’t move.”
Her breath fogged fast and shallow, her mouth bitter from effort. The sky above was a pale, distant gray through the lattice of branches.
Sound warped and echoed. Everywhere and nowhere.
A dark shape darted across a gap in the trees. Compact. Fast. Four rotors glinting through the branches. Searchlights snapped on—white beams slicing through the forest, cutting between trunks, sweeping.
Hunting.
A small black pod hung beneath its body. A camera. Thermal, maybe.
