“Twenty minutes away.You said that yourself.Twenty minutes is a long time when someone’s shooting at you.”
Kari remembered the night at her house.The automatic weapon fire tearing through the walls.The windshield shattering.The terrible, specific knowledge that the person inside wanted her dead and had the tools to accomplish it.Ben’s voice on the phone—Stay on the line, stay down—and the sirens that had taken twelve minutes to arrive, each minute marked by gunfire and the diminishing space between herself and a bullet.
“I survived that,” she said.
“You survived because you were lucky and because Ben called it in and because whoever was shooting was sloppy.You told me that yourself.”Ruth picked up her mug and took another sip.“Don’t count on the same luck twice.Don’t count on facing sloppy people next time.And don’t walk into the desert alone and expect the desert to bring you back just because it has before.”
They sat with that.Kari drank her tea.It was chamomile, the kind Ruth made from flowers she grew and dried herself, and it tasted the way the reservation smelled after rain—earthy, specific, a flavor that belonged to a place.
“Your mother was brave,” Ruth said.“She was also stubborn and proud and she confused being alone with being strong.Don’t make that confusion, Kari.The people in that house came here because they chose to.Paul, your father, the lawyer, the FBI woman.They know what they’re walking into.You don’t get to make that choice for them by leaving early and going by yourself.”
Kari looked at the sky.The Milky Way hadn’t moved, because it never did, because the galaxy operated on a timescale that made human decisions look like what they were—brief and small, consequential only to the people making them.
“I hear you,” she said.
Ruth looked at her for a long time.Then she finished her tea, set the mug on the porch railing, and stood.She put her hand on Kari’s shoulder—a brief, firm pressure—and went inside.
Kari stayed on the porch.She listened to the silence, and she thought about her mother, and she thought about the plan, and she thought about the people asleep in the house behind her who had chosen to be here.
Ruth was right about Anna.Right about distance and safety and the confusion between being alone and being strong.Right about all of it.
But Ruth didn’t know about the bodycam.
Kari had bought it three days ago in Albuquerque—a small unit that clipped to a vest strap, recorded locally to a memory card, and could broadcast a live feed to a paired device within a two-mile radius.If she went in alone, wearing the camera, Ben could see everything she saw.He could guide her through the airfield in real time, not from memory but from a live image.And if she encountered Devco’s security, if something went wrong, the camera would capture it—evidence that couldn’t be lost or suppressed, transmitted to Ben the moment it happened.
One person, moving fast, with a camera and a radio and a guide who knew every corner of the facility.
She’d tell Ben in the morning.He’d try to talk her out of it.He’d fail, because he’d understand the logic even as he hated it, and because he’d know that being the voice in her ear was better than being nowhere at all.
She’d go an hour before the agreed-upon time.The others would follow on schedule, Daniels and James and Marshall’s team, and by the time they reached the property, Kari would already have what they needed.Or she’d be in trouble, and they’d come for her.
Either way, she wouldn’t be alone.Not completely.Not the way Anna had been.
That would have to be enough.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
She told Ben at four in the morning.
He was already awake—she’d known he would be.He slept lightly since the airfield, a habit that federal detention hadn’t improved.She found him in the kitchen, sitting in the dark with a glass of water, the faint green glow of the ankle monitor’s LED the only light below the table.
Kari sat across from him and laid it out.The bodycam.The early departure.The logic of one person moving fast versus three people moving slow.She kept her voice low because Daniels was asleep in the next room and James was on the couch six feet from the kitchen doorway, and because what she was asking Ben to do—be her eyes and her guide while she went alone into a place that had almost killed him—deserved privacy.
Ben listened.He didn’t interrupt.When she finished, he sat with it for a long time, long enough that the silence took on its own texture—not agreement, not refusal, but the quiet of a man weighing what he owed to the person across from him against what he owed to himself.
“Ruth talked to you,” he said.
“She did.”
“And you’re doing it anyway.”
“I’m doing it differently.Not alone—with you.With the camera.With the team behind me.”
“An hour behind you.”
“If everything goes right, they won’t need to be there at all.I collect the samples, document the site, get into the airfield, get out.Thirty minutes on the ground, maybe less.”
Ben turned the glass of water slowly between his hands.“And if everything doesn’t go right?”
