Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(70)

He hits her openhanded. She doesn’t see it coming—the slap hard—a sting followed by a swelling flush. She imagines, on her cheek, the white shape of a hand blooming bright red.

His eyes, at first black slits, soften. He hangs his head and turns away and continues to climb upward. “Come on,” he says, and, after a moment, she follows, her hand holding the place his had been.

The air brightens. The incline flattens and they come to a door made of cross-stitched nylon rope—messy with browned vines—that parts like a curtain. This is one of four entrances, he says, and the netting provides camouflage and blocks the worst of the wind but also keeps the cave system breathing. “Essential, considering the smell the raggedy lot of us gives off.” His voice full of humor, as if what happened a moment before did not.

Outside the sun is red and the trees are black. Dawn. She has lost all sense of time underground. She tries to take in as much of her surroundings as she can. A tangle of manzanita, stacks of lichen-encrusted rocks, a valley shoulder busy with scree. They are high up, near a lava cone frosted with snow, the Cascades rising jaggedly behind them. She imagines, at night, she would be able to distinguish—in the distance—some town, the faraway grid of streetlights. But now, squinting against the rising sun, she can distinguish nothing but hundreds of miles of woods that eventually give way to a wash of desert.

“Where are we?”

He looks at her with eyes the same color as the winter sky above them. “Your new home.”



*



Max picks up Patrick’s rifle and tests its weight in his hands as if it were a baseball bat. Then he swings into a tree, once, twice, three times, the bark chipping away, revealing the pulpy yellow wood beneath—and the rifle shatters, the stock splinters.

Patrick does not so much as lift his head in protest, his cheek to the forest floor, one of his eyes swollen to a slit. His mouth is full of blood and his tongue feels like an eel twisting around in it. Everything hurts, his entire body a pulsing wound. A headache tightens like a hot belt around his skull.

Max kicks at the remains of the rifle and shakes off the pain in his hands, and then, after one final withering glance at Patrick, he heads back the way they came with the other boys trailing him. One of them asks, “What about the deer?” and Max says, “Let it rot.”

Patrick lays there a long time, feeling sorry for himself, caught up equally in the pain and humiliation of the moment. The woods seem suddenly leached of color, a nearby pine gray and gaunt and pocked with woodpecker burrows.

They have abandoned him here. A ten-mile hike from the nearest asphalt road, and from there, forty miles or more to Old Mountain. But he is alive. He rolls onto his side, bringing his knees to his chest, and imagines the bruises darkening his skin. He breathes through the pain in his ribs and listens to the trickle of the stream and the far cry of an owl.

Then he hears what he at first mistakes for the blood-pounding pulse in his ears—footsteps. Moving toward him. The Americans returning to finish him off. He lifts his head and blinks away the blood that films his vision and still he cannot make sense of what he sees. Walking along the edge of the coulee, a woman in full-body camouflage, Miriam.

“You’re not dead anyway.” She holds out a hand. “Come on. Get up.”





Chapter 27



SOMETHING IS HAPPENING. When Jeremy escorts her back to her cell—she isn’t sure what else to call it, the dark sandy recess she is consigned to—men rush through the underground passages, many of them speaking into walkie-talkies, one of them carrying a tangle of cords and video equipment, another huffing along with an oil-stained cardboard box that rattles in his arms. Jeremy says things to them—like “Go time” and “Let’s do this”—and in their passing he pats them on the back or grips their shoulders.

Then, when the two of them descend the staircase, the corridor curls around a corner and she sees him, Puck. Unlike the others, he is not moving. He is leaning against the wall, hands in his pockets, with no other task except to wait for them. “I was told I won’t be joining you in the field,” he says, his voice as high-pitched as a bat’s screech. “I was told I would be staying behind.”

That stops Jeremy, who—head down, lost in his thoughts—hadn’t yet noticed Puck. “Your work is here.”

“You’re punishing me? For the hot springs? Because I didn’t ask for your approval?” This last word said with more than a little venom.

Jeremy looks at Claire, looks at Puck, and says, “We’ll talk about this later.” He starts down the staircase again, and Claire reluctantly follows, crossing her arms, walking directly behind Jeremy as if he were a blind. She feels electricity in the air, the crackling possibility of violence.

The corridor is thin and Puck does not move to accommodate them, so that Jeremy and then Claire have to brush against him, and when she does, she feels as she might when brushing up against a lightning-scarred tree, the char rubbing off on her, staining her with its shadow. She tries to keep her head down but can’t help glancing his way, and when she does, he slides his tongue between his teeth and bites down.



*



Patrick isn’t sure what it is, maybe the sight of the knives on the counter or the pistol holstered around her shoulder, but he can’t help asking, “You’re not bad, are you?” The most childish question in the world, he knows.