Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(14)

She shook her head. “They just dropped it on the floor.”

“Did anything from that bag go into this backpack?”

“A few things,” she said. “My wallet, interview notes for three stories, my notebook, chargers, my phone.”

Her phone.

She’d said she got great reception up there.

She saw it in his face. “What?” she asked.

He watched as realization dawned. It only took a second. She was plenty smart.

She shucked her pack and dug into the top pouch. The phone was in a Ziploc bag.

“It’s turned off,” she said. “Can they still—”

“Someone can,” he said. “Unless you take out the battery. They had some kind of locator down there. Your phone’s the most likely source of the signal.”

She turned the phone in her hands. “I can’t take the back off this thing.” She raised her arm to hurl it into the air.

“Wait,” he said. “Don’t throw it.”

“Why not?” Her voice was a little louder than it needed to be. “I just want to get it as far away as possible. And get the fuck out of here in the complete opposite direction.”

“We could do that,” Peter said calmly. “But they would know that we know. And it would be harder for us to predict their actions.”

“I don’t want to predict their actions,” she said, as if talking to a profoundly stupid person. “I want to get away from them.”

“We will,” said Peter. “But right now we’re on the defensive. This knowledge gives us a tactical advantage. Do you want to run forever?”

She gave him a look, and he felt it again, the heat of her focused attention. “You better know what the fuck you’re doing, mister.”

“This is my first time on the lam in a redwood,” he said, “but I’m pretty sure you should leave your phone here.”

She made a face, and tucked the smooth aluminum rectangle into a crevice in the bark. “Good-bye, phone. You served me well until you got hacked.” Then she went back to coiling rope.

“Is there a way to move laterally?” asked Peter. “From one tree to the next?”

“Way ahead of you,” she said, stuffing the rope and pulleys into her pack. “My ex-boyfriend studied the biology of tall tree crowns. This was his lab.”

“Ex-boyfriend?” asked Peter.

“Don’t even think about it,” she said. “Anyway, we used to have lines out to neighboring trees, for a larger sampling area. You and I are going to find out if any of those are still in place.”

“Your ex sounds like a cool guy.”

She strapped the bow along her pack again, put her arms through the shoulder straps, then looked up into the branches, searching for something. “His other girlfriend thought so, too. But I helped set this place up, so I gave myself visitation rights.” She pointed. “There. You see it?”

Peter looked. “The yellow rope?”

“Yep. We marked our paths with colored rope. My idea, by the way. You came up the red path.”

The red ropes, thought Peter. “So the yellow path takes us to the next tree?”

“That’s the idea. If it’s still there.” She set off along a wide horizontal branch.

“The tree or the rope?”

“The tree’s been there since the Roman Empire,” she said over her shoulder. “But these ropes can rot pretty quickly in this damp environment. I used to replace them every year. They’re not cheap. But then, I used to write his grant proposals, too.” She flashed a grin. “I’m not sure how much funding he’s got these days.”

Peter wondered if the ex-boyfriend knew what he’d lost. Peter was pretty sure the guy had no clue. If he did, he wouldn’t have lost her to begin with.

Riot Grrrl led, Peter followed.

It was more technical than the scramble up along the red path. They had to use the ascenders again and again. The path was not direct. Down to go over, then up again, ropes strung where the climbing was difficult, always following the trail marked by bright yellow ropes. It was hard work, but they were cooled by the damp breeze filled with the astringent tang of evergreen needles and the pungency of bark, while the infinitely blue California sky peeked through the fog.

This time, Peter clipped the safety lines to his harness, and spent most of his attention watching Riot Grrrl. Climbing with anyone was an exercise in trust. Any fall, even on a ten-foot rock face, might mean a significant injury or death. Three hundred feet up in a giant redwood, she could have killed him a dozen times. But she hadn’t.

Every climber had their own style, and it didn’t take long for Peter to get a pretty good idea who he was climbing with. Riot Grrrl wasn’t flashy, she didn’t take unnecessary risks. She knew her gear and how to use it. But she didn’t rope off for every step, either, and seemed perfectly comfortable free-climbing through the branches as if it were a fifteen-foot apple tree in her backyard.

She stayed ahead of him without any trouble. Peter knew how she’d gotten those serious arms.

After less than half an hour, they stood on a wide limb looking out at the wrinkled tree-covered mountains spread out ahead of them. Thick nylon webbing around the limb held a beefy locking carabiner attached to a gleaming cable, impossibly thin, stretched high above their little pocket valley, barely clearing an impossibly steep rocky ridge and slanting down to the next drainage, where it disappeared into the canopy of another redwood.