Page 48 of Talk Story

We made our way up through the outer chamber toward the gray smudge of daylight at the cave mouth. The air warmed by degrees, and the green smell of the living valley floated in to meet us.

We were almost to the boulders at the entrance when I heard a woman’s voice coming from outside, where Souza held Madison. The tone was pitched low, unhurried and reasonable, the way you’d talk to an animal you didn’t want to bolt.

I stopped in my tracks. Keone bumped into my back.

That wasn’t a voice we’d left; it didn’t belong. I couldn’t make out the words, only the tone—and a cold finger traced down my spine, because there was no one up that slope who should have been talking to a handcuffed prisoner in that coaxing voice.

And Souza wasn’t answering. I couldn’t hear Souza at all.

Malia’s hand went to her weapon. “Who is that?” she breathed.

I didn’t have an answer, but I knew, with a cold certainty that came from beneath the thinking part of me, that something had gone very wrong in the bright world above while we’d been down in the dark.

17

Malia turned and made a single sharp gesture—edge of her hand across her throat: lights off. Silence.

Keone and I killed our lights.

The dark dropped over us like black cloth, total and instant, the no color of underground without a light source. I put my hand on the rough wall to my right and felt Keone’s palm settle between my shoulder blades, a point of warmth.

We stood a moment letting our eyes adjust, beginning to detect a faint gray bruise of daylight leaking from the entrance ahead—enough to feel our way toward the brightness.

Malia pulled her weapon and went first, heel-to-toe, soundless. I followed the way she moved, rolling my weight through each step, Keone a breathing presence behind me.

The voices—and now there were two—came and went as we moved, and that was the strange thing. They didn’t come from straight ahead, where the slope and the entrance were. They came around sideways, bent, bouncing off some fold in the rock so that two women talking up the slope outside seemed to murmur from the very stone beside my ear.

I’d heard Lei’s voice come up out of a pit the same way. Sound traveled crooked down here, carried on the cold air and wet walls, and it suddenly delivered those voices to us as clearly as if we crouched at their feet.

“He’s out cold, I think. But I don’t trust him—maybe we need to put the cuffs on him. Tie his feet.” A woman’s voice, low and even. “He could be faking.”

“He’s not faking.” That was Madison, sounding frayed and exhausted. “You hit him hard. There’s a lot of blood.”

“Scalp wounds bleed. It seems worse than it is.” A pause, the scuff of a shoe on stone. “Help me decide. Do we leave him, or do we put the cuffs on him before we go? If he wakes up and we’re only halfway up the trail⁠—”

“Take them off me and put them on him and let’s get out of here,” Madison hissed. “I don’t care. I want out of this valley.”

“Okay. Stay calm.”

I stopped breathing.

I knew that voice. The evenness of it, the measured cadence, the way she talked like she was conducting a seminar. I’d sat across a worktable from that voice in the K & K shack over Aunt Fae’s sandwiches, with Lei and Malia and Keone, and I’d believed every word it said. Dr. Emerson sent me. I have clearance. I produce assessments that hold up.

The woman who’d arrived out of nowhere with the right credentials and the right story, a woman whose documentation we’d been waiting on to lock down the federal case.

Dr. Susanna Patel.

And the woman was playing both sides.

I found Malia’s arm in the dark and put my mouth an inch from where I guessed her ear to be. “It’s Patel,” I hissed. “Dr. Susanna Patel. She’s working with them. She’s hurt Souza.”

Malia’s arm went rigid under my hand. I felt the exact moment the information landed and caught fire—her partner, the young officer she’d been responsible for, was bleeding on the ground at Patel’s hands.

“Police! Don’t move!” Malia’s flashlight blazed on, and her gun came up as she charged the last twenty feet toward the entrance, all the discipline of the morning burning off in a flash of pure fury—and three strides out, in the dark-to-light scramble over uneven ground, her boot caught the lip of a half-buried rock, and she went down hard. Her flashlight clattered and spun across the ground. Its beam strobed across the cave roof and her and she hit the ground with a grunt and a short, bitten-off cry of pain.

“I’m fine—go catch them before they get away!” Malia yelled.

“Keone—let’s go!” I was already moving past Malia.