Page 47 of Flames and Blood

“Sometimes. Boxes from a medical supplier, sealed, same rules. Food came separate, different firm.” He rubs his beard. “And once, a crate from a dressmaker’s. I remember it because it was the only thing in fourteen months that had a woman’s shop name on it.”

“When?”

“Around the same time. Spring.”

“You’re sure of the timing?”

“It’s the only crate I ever carried with flowers printed on the label. I’m sure.”

Kent’s eyes come to me across the room. I don’t give him anything back.

“What happens to me?” Reyes asks.

It’s the question he’s been sitting on since I arrived, and he asks it steadily, which I respect.

“You have family?”

“A sister in the south.”

“Go and see her. Tonight.” I stand up. “The people who paid you don’t know I exist. If that changes, the only thing you ever told me was the route, and you told it to me because I broke your door. Understood?”

“You didn’t break my door.”

“Break it after we leave,” Kent says. “Make it look honest.”

Reyes looks at him, and then at me, and then he laughs, one short surprised sound, and pours himself another drink with a steadier hand.

“One more thing, for free,” he says, as we’re moving. “The gate man’s list…it’s short. In over a year, I saw my truck go through, the medical truck, the food truck, and twice a black car with plates I didn’t know. That’s it. That’s everything that road carries. Four vehicles have business in that valley, mister, and you’re not any of them.”

“I know.”

“Then I hope you’ve got wings,” he says.

He’s making a joke. He has no idea what he’s just said. I keep my face still, tell him to lock up behind us, and walk out of his kitchen.

Outside, the cold is clean after the small warm kitchen. Meyer has the truck running. Kent gets in the back without being told and waits until the doors are shut.

“We know where she is,” he says.

“Yes.”

“But there’s more, right?”

“There’s one road in. You need to be on a list to access it, and the list is four vehicles long. Everything else that touches that ground dies at the gate. Engines. Phones. Us, probably. Or worse—it announces us.”

“So we can’t drive in.”

“No.”

“Can’t walk in.”

“A delivery truck got ten feet through that gate, and everything in it died on the spot. We wouldn’t get five steps. And if that wall does to us what it did to the engine, it tells them somebody tried.”

Kent flexes the fingers of his bad arm, slow, testing the bone that’s been closing all day.

“So how do we get in?”

“I don’t know.”