Don't make it obvious. Just be near him. If anyone approaches who isn't Covenant, you know what to do. Mara nodded once and moved without another word.
"Hatch, I need you to clone this thing if you can. If you can't clone it, we strip the battery and attach it to one of the trailer wheels. Let it report movement without taking it off site." Hatch took the device with the delicate focus of a man who understood that small objects sometimes contained catastrophic implications.
"Give me 10 minutes." "You've got six." Cal went back to Noah. The boy was leaning against the fence with his arms crossed, watching the mountain ridge line like he was trying to read something in the tree line.
The sun had dropped another degree and the air coming off the ridge had sharpened into the kind of cold that arrived suddenly in these elevations, dropping 20° in 90 minutes without ceremony. Noah didn't seem to notice. Either he was used to it or he was too busy thinking to feel it. Cal positioned himself beside the fence rail parallel to the boy, both of them facing the same direction.
Not confrontational, just present. "You want to tell me," Cal said, "why you were checking over your shoulder all afternoon?" Noah was quiet for a moment. "I wasn't."
"You were," Cal said, not unkindly. "I watched you do it 11 times in 40 minutes. You weren't looking for your grandmother." The boy's jaw worked.
Then, "Someone keeps showing up." "Showing up where?" "Everywhere." The word came out with a weight that didn't belong in a 12-year-old's voice.
"Near school, near my grandma's house, at the county fair last month. Always the same two cars, dark SUVs, no plates I could see. I thought I was" He stopped. "My grandma said I was making it up. She said I was still processing losing my dad."
Cal watched the field. Watched the two parked SUVs at the far edge without looking like he was watching them. "When did you lose your dad?" "Eight months ago."
Flat, practiced. The flatness of someone who'd said the sentence enough times that the raw edges had smoothed down. "He was sick. It wasn't sudden. We had time to know it was coming."
"I'm sorry." "People say that." "I mean it." Noah looked at him sideways, performing that same evaluation Cal had noticed earlier.
Then the boy looked away. "He was a surveyor. Did geological work, mostly private contract stuff. He kept his records in a storage unit outside town because our house is small and grandma didn't want boxes everywhere."
"Past tense on the storage unit?" "It got broken into 4 months ago, right after he died." Noah's voice stayed even, but his hands had moved inside his jacket pockets. The fabric pulling tight where his fists had clenched.
"Police said it was probably kids, petty theft. Nothing was taken that they could see, but my dad didn't have anything worth stealing, at least nothing obvious, so I don't know." "What did your dad keep in that unit?" The boy hesitated.
And in that hesitation, Cal heard a door that the kid wasn't sure he wanted to open. "Survey equipment, old notebooks, maps." Then quieter. "He told me once, when he was still okay, when he was still himself and not just sick, he told me that if strangers ever started asking questions about his work, I shouldn't tell them about the old map."
Cal kept his voice entirely neutral. "Did he say what old map?" "No." Noah pulled his bottom lip in, thinking.
"He said it like it was a joke. Like it was one of those things parents say because they think their kid might need to hear it someday, but they don't want to scare you." His voice dropped. "I don't think it was a joke."
Hatch materialized at Cal's elbow at exactly the 6-minute mark, which was either impressive or a sign that he'd been working fast enough to cut corners. And with Hatch, there was no way to tell which without asking. "Couldn't clone it," Hatch murmured. "Proprietary encryption, but I stripped the battery and did the next best thing."
He held up the device, now with a thin wire trailing from the battery housing to a small additional unit. "Wired it into the trailer's auxiliary power with a GPS relay. Far as whoever's tracking it is concerned, it's moving, heading north on Route 9. I set the relay to broadcast at road speed."
Cal studied the modification. "How long before they figure out the signal's wrong?" "Depends on how good their analysts are. Somewhere between 2 hours and never."
"We'll assume 2 hours." "Smart." Cal watched the two dark SUVs at the field's edge. Even as he watched, the vehicles shifted.
Not dramatically, not obviously, but he saw brake lights flicker. The distant suggestion of reorientation. They were responding to the signal. They were already moving.
"Get everyone mounted," Cal said quietly. "We're not leaving. We're repositioning. I want bikes between the boy and that road access."
Hatch was already moving. Cal turned back to Noah. The boy was watching him with those steady eyes, and Cal could see the exact moment when Noah Mercer stopped pretending he didn't understand what was happening around him. The pretending collapsed quietly, like a structure losing its last load-bearing wall.
And underneath it was something that looked like exhaustion. The specific exhaustion of a person who'd been scared for a long time without anyone confirming they had reason to be scared. "They were following me," Noah said. Not a question.
"We don't know that yet." "Don't," the boy said. The single syllable landed flat and hard. "Don't manage me. I'm not a little kid."
Cal looked at him for a long moment, then, "Yeah, they were following you." Noah closed his eyes for 3 seconds. When he opened them, something had solidified. "What do I do?"
"Right now? You stay inside the perimeter we're setting up, and you tell me everything you remember about your father's work, everything. Even the parts that seem boring or unimportant." "Why?"
"Because someone put military-grade surveillance equipment on a 12-year-old's dirt bike," Cal said. "Which means whatever your father knew, they think you know it, too. Or they're afraid you might." The mountain air sharpened another degree.
Somewhere in the tree line, a bird startled out of the canopy and went hard against the sky, wheeling east. Both of them watched it. "My grandmother," Noah said suddenly. "She's coming at 5:00."
"I know," Cal said. "Dex is already calling her. She's going to get redirected to a different pickup location. She won't know why and it's going to worry her, but she'll be fine."
"She doesn't even know I came to you." "She will." "She's going to think I" The boy stopped. "She already thinks I'm paranoid. She's going to" "Noah."