Page 7 of Flames and Blood

“Why this? Why you?”

I don’t answer.

She watches me not answer. She’s been doing that since we started, and she lets it go again. Behind her, the other three are loading gear into the second vehicle, quick and quiet. Most crews take months to get that good.

Kent is the broad one, a kid with a torn earlobe I haven’t asked about. Big through the shoulders, sandy hair that won’t lie down, and a face that hasn’t learned to hide anything yet.

He catches me looking, gives the tire iron in his hand a short spin, and goes back to work. Three weeks in. A lot of crews would be sloppy by now. These three aren’t. But Faine assigned them to me for a month, and our time’s running out.

I hand Odile my notes. She reads them walking, without slowing down.

“Two vans,” she says. “One of them carrying a passenger nobody wrote on the manifest.”

“That’s what it looks like.”

Halfway across the lot, my boot lands wrong.

Heat. Scale, gold catching light that isn’t there.

I pause, reaching for it.

Gone.

Half a second, maybe less. My hand’s already on the truck door. I’ve barely broken stride.

Nothing happened.

I don’t dwell on it. Whatever that was, it isn’t evidence, and I don’t work with anything else.

Odile’s watching me over the hood when I look up. She doesn’t say anything for longer than she usually manages. Odile de Rosemonde has something to say about everything.

I get in the truck.

“Mm,” she says, to nobody, and gets in after me.

I spread my notes across my knees and start filling in the route I’ve been building since the quarry.

The pattern’s wrong.

Every trade route out of that quarry runs toward a depot, a buyer corridor, someplace freight like that gets sold. This one bends wide around all of it, past every known crossing, every terminal on Odile’s list. Whoever’s driving has a list of places to avoid, not a place to reach.

Nobody builds a route like that unless they don’t want anyone to see it move.

Odile leans over the seat and traces the bend with one finger, same line I just drew.

“That’s not a route to any processing center on the maps we were given,” she says.

“No.”

“That’s a route away from everything we’ve tracked so far.”

I shrug. “Could be something we missed.”

“Don’t say that too loud. Bastien would have your testicles if you questioned his intel.”

“Really,” I deadpan.

“What?” Her eyes are wide, guileless. “You do have testicles, don’t you, Crowe? Fine man like you.” She bobs her brows. “Would be a shame if you didn’t.”