Patrick Lee - The Breach

"Travis," he said, suddenly lacking a better answer. She seemed to be waiting for more. "I'm just a guy. I found the plane, found Mrs. Garner."

"She lived?"

"Long enough to leave instructions."

Before she could ask about that, movement between them drew their attention sharply.

String Mustache was alive, trying to turn himself over in the dirt. Though a good chunk of the man's face had been cleaved away by one of the bullets, Travis now saw that the other two had glanced on the hard cheekbones and skull. He unslung the M16 and was an instant from finishing him when the woman spoke.

"No." The word came out rough, halfway between whisper and growl.

Then she surprised Travis by pivoting and putting her feet on the ground, and standing-shaky for a moment, but standing all the same.

With her undamaged left arm she took Travis's knife from where he'd set it on the table, and dropped hard with one knee onto String Mustache's back, pressing him flat to the ground. She put the blade, edge-up, under his armpit and pulled savagely. Travis heard a sound like heavy elastic parting, and the man screamed. The arm quivered, uncontrolled. She did the same to the other arm, then turned a hundred eighty degrees and slit both of his hamstrings behind the knees. His screams ebbed to a low moan, gurgling blood in his throat.

The woman stood, put the knife aside, then stooped and gathered a fistful of String Mustache's back collar.

Had Travis actually wanted to stop her, he wasn't sure he'd have had time. She lifted String Mustache's upper body, dragged him ten feet across the needles and loose soil, and dropped him facedown into the white-hot embers of the campfire. He screamed and thrashed, but could only command his limbs to jerk about; all control had literally been severed. He managed to contract his back muscles and raise his face for a few seconds, but then the young woman put her foot on the back of his head and pressed him deep into the coals again. She kept the foot there until his hair caught fire. By that time he'd stopped moving and screaming. She watched him for another ten seconds; then she picked up a rifle dropped by one of the hostiles, thumbed it to auto without even looking at it, and fired a burst into the back of String Mustache's head.

She dropped the gun and turned back to Travis, and for a moment he wasn't sure her eyes were even human. Then they fixed on her father, dead against the base of the tree, and all doubt about her humanity evaporated.

She crossed to the pine and sank beside his bound corpse, pulling herself against him, her face pressed to his despite the blood. She cried again, silently.

Travis went back to the edge of the camp and listened to the distant ATV engines. Thirty seconds later they stopped.

Travis expected to have to gently pry the young woman from her grieving. They needed to get out of the encampment and find positions from which to kill the other two hostiles when they returned.

But she sat with her father only a few minutes before standing, taking Travis's knife again and cutting the dead man free. She set him carefully flat on the ground, then looked around, troubled.

Travis understood. "Where do you want to take him?"

Her gaze settled on the dense stand of pines where he'd hidden earlier. "There."

Travis knelt and lifted the man, and carried him to the trees. He maneuvered the body among the boughs and laid it under the deepest cover, then waited silently as the woman stood looking down at it.

"We need to get out of here fast," she said after a moment. "As soon as we kill the two that left on the quads."

"There are more besides them?" Travis said.

"A lot more." She nodded toward the camp. "These guys were calling in on a satellite phone every hour. When their people don't hear from them, they'll know there was trouble. They'll send reinforcements with a helicopter."

The woman took a hard breath, gave her father a last look, then turned away, back toward the encampment. As she did, Travis got another look at her right arm. The set of clamps the torturer had used to pry apart her triceps were still in place, keeping the skin and muscle wedged open at least an inch. Heavy black clots filled the cavity, along with what could only be infected tissue.

Seeing him stare, Paige turned her arm and saw the opening herself. Travis knew by her reaction that she was looking at it for the first time. She took it well.

"I wouldn't pull those clamps out without a doctor close by," Travis said. "You don't want to trap those infections inside your arm, away from the air."

"I don't think I'll be in a doctor's care anytime soon," she said, but made no move to detach the clamps.

She stepped out of the pines and moved into the camp. Travis followed.

"Can you use their satellite phone to call for help?" he said. "Get the military in here, or whoever your people can send?"

She shook her head. "These guys had to use a code to make outgoing calls. If I were more of a tech, maybe I could get around it, but I'm not. How far from a town are we?"

"On foot, fifty miles." He looked at the remaining two quads parked nearby. "We could cover two thirds of it on one of those, taking the long way around a few ridges. Then there's a river, and no way across but log bridges and rocks. We'd have to ditch the quad and walk from there, maybe a full day to reach Coldfoot."

She considered that, looking more concerned than hopeful. Her eyes went past him to the open valley and the succession of mountain ridges beyond, as if the landscape were an executioner's scaffold. Travis imagined a full day's walk over the mostly exposed terrain, being hunted by armed pursuers in a helicopter. The young woman's expression suggested similar thoughts.

"This is going to get bad," she said. She stared a moment longer, then looked at Travis. "My name's Paige. Thank you for saving my life." The riders were coming back. The engines had started up a minute earlier, and now the two ATVs were just visible past the curve of the valley, maybe a mile away yet.

Travis kept his M16 steady against a pine trunk. Paige held her own rifle at the next tree over, left-handed-clearly not her natural choice-and braced across a branch. Her damaged arm hung at her side.

In the silence of the clearing, the distant hum of the engines was no more than an insect buzz. The wind through the boughs was louder. So was Paige's breathing, each intake more a gasp than a breath.

Travis wondered at the kind of resolve someone would need to even be standing after all she'd just gone through. Then he wondered at the stakes required to fuel that resolve.

"You're worried about a lot more than just your own survival," Travis said.

"Yes," Paige said, her eyes staying on the gun sights.

"I want to know what all this is," he said. "I saw the steel container on the plane. And there were details in the First Lady's note, but not enough. I'm going to help you get to Coldfoot, regardless, but if I'm going to risk getting killed over something, I want to know what it is. I don't think that's asking too much."

She looked up, met his gaze evenly.

"What's Tangent?" Travis said. "What the hell is a Breach entity?"

Her eyes stayed on his a moment longer, as the drone of the incoming engines rose. Then she lowered her face to the rifle stock again, eyes down the barrel. Travis looked down his own sights. The riders were still a thousand yards out, just now resolving into distinct shapes. There was no danger of them spotting Travis or Paige where they stood, against the darker backdrop of the camp and the tree cover.

"Tangent is an organization," Paige said. "Our entire purpose revolves around the Breach. Guarding it. Controlling it. And the Breach is… very hard to describe."