“That’s not happening.”
“Why?”
I look at her.
“If you have a plan, tell me what it is. If you’re still working on one, say that. Give me something I can work with.”
“When there’s a plan,” I say, “you’ll know.”
The most honest answer I can give her. She draws a slow breath and holds everything behind her face. She’s been running angles since the truck—quiet, patient, never the same one twice. Looking for the soft spot in me.
There’s no soft spot. I don’t tell her that. I don’t need to.
“I need to use the bathroom,” she says.
I look around the cave, frowning.
The cave does not have a bathroom.
A person being kept needs a bathroom. That’s not complicated. I’ve run surveillance holds for weeks. Tracked wilderness for months. I’ve thought through every problem keeping her here creates except the most basic one.
“There’s no facility in here,” I say.
“I figured as much. So…what? You expect me to go in the corner? Because this place is going to smell like a latrine before long.”
“I’ll take you outside.”
“That’s the first useful thing you’ve said.”
I cross to her and bind her wrists—not too tight, but tight enough to matter. She flinches, then goes still and lets me work. That sudden switch from fight to flat. I’ve seen it before. In people who learned somewhere that resisting costs more than it buys. I don’t like what it tells me about what she’s lived through.
I roll the boulder and take her down the path to the tree belt, twelve yards out.
I check the rope length. The sightlines back to the entrance. The approach from below.
She’s looking at me.
I’m facing her.
“If you’d like to watch me pee,” she says, “I can give you a minute to decide.”
I turn.
“Thank you,” she says to my back.
“Sure.” I shift my feet.
“I had a functioning toilet yesterday morning.” Her voice comes from behind the trees. “A door that locked from the inside. Tea.”
I watch the ridge. Nothing on the slope. Sky going gray at the far end, maybe forty minutes to first light.
“You’re holding a rope attached to a person, and that’s messed up. I hope you know that.”
The Syndicate will have been on the roads since midnight, spreading south and east. Buys time. Not much.
“Are you looking at the ridge so you don’t have to look at me?”
“Yes.”
