Page 5 of Fated, Allegedly

"Then help me," I say. "Actually help. Not the tow-truck version where you show up and hand me my broken things."

He picks up the casing again and puts it in the truck bed. "I'll pull the state loaner cameras out of storage tomorrow. Six of them. They're older, but they're mine to lend and nobody's got the spec sheet."

It isn't an answer. It's something, and I hate a little how much I want to.

The following Saturday night the reservoir does something it hasn't done in the eleven nights I've been here.

I'm on the porch at half past ten logging bat calls when the first light slides across the water — no navigation lights, just a low working lamp aimed down at the deck. Then another, four minutes behind, holding the same line. Then a third. They're running the deep channel beyond the drop-off in single file with matched spacing, no chatter, no fishing lamps, no drifting. Nobody fishes like that. Nobody recreates like that. That's a convoy.

I'm in the truck before I've finished the thought, down the fire road to the old boat turnout with my binoculars and a notebook and my headlamp off.

From the gravel bar I can make out four hulls now, coming toward the north shoreline where there's no dock, no ramp, no reason. Something big is riding under a tarp on the second boat. I get my binos up and start writing hull numbers by feel, and my heart is going like a bird trapped in a garage, and I'm thinking this is it, this is the thing, this is documentable…

A hand closes over my forearm and another comes across my mouth, and I nearly take a swing before I register the size of him and the smell of woodsmoke and pine pitch.

"Down," Nash breathes against my ear. "Now."

He doesn't wait for me to agree. He takes us both off the gravel bar and into the willow scrub, one arm still around me, and we go flat in cold sand behind a root wad with his forearm braced across my back. I can feel his heart. It's slower than mine by half, which seems medically improbable.

Sixty seconds later the shoreline lights up. Not floodlights, handhelds, four of them, sweeping in a disciplined pattern. Left, center, right, back. Men come up the bank in a spaced line, moving in a controlled sweep, and every one of them is carrying something slung across his chest that is definitely not a fishing rod. One stops, his light crawls over the spot where I was kneeling seconds ago and my boot prints are still sitting in the wet sand.

He says something into his collar, photographs the ground, and moves on. Nash's hand stays flat between my shoulder blades until the last light is gone from the bank. When he finally lets me sit up I realize I've been holding his sleeve in a fist.

"Those weren't poachers," I whisper.

"No."

"Nash, that was a perimeter." My voice cracks. "They're not hiding from the law. They're not worried about the law. Somebody is protecting this."

He looks out at the black water where the last hull is disappearing, and he doesn't tell me I'm wrong.

4

NASH

Caleb and Wyatt meet me at the culvert crossing at two a.m, already shifted, and we run the shoreline back from the gravel bar. The boats are gone. Whoever they were left behind a scent line along the willow flat that shouldn't exist, old marker, laid down by something that hasn't come this far inland in my lifetime. Deep water, cold and mineral and faintly electric, like the air before a strike. Wyatt drops his head and circles it twice, hackles up his whole spine, and I have to put a shoulder into him to get him moving again.

We find three more scents before dawn. All within a half mile of one of her campsites.

"They're being driven in," Caleb says when we're back on two legs and pulling clothes out of a dry bag. His hands aren't steady. "Something's pushing them out of the deep channel and up into the shallows. No animals want to be down there anymore."

"Or something's fishing them out." I sit to lace my boots. "You saw the tarp on the second hull."

"I saw a shape."

"I saw restraint hardware."

Wyatt hasn't learned to sit on a thought yet. "So we go get it back. Tonight. There's four of them and eleven of us and I've been waiting…"

"You've been waiting twelve days," I say. "Some of us have been at this since before you could hold a shift through a full moon. We don't move on four boats and a guess. We move when I know where they take them."

Caleb gives me the flat, unimpressed look he's been giving me since middle school. "And in the meantime?"

"In the meantime we sweep her sites."

The first camera is stuck to a cedar forty yards off her cabin's back deck. It's the size of a matchbook, cellular, magnetic mount, painted bark-brown by somebody that takes their job seriously. There's a second on the utility pole at the head of her driveway with a sightline down the whole gravel run. A third is inside the woodshed, aimed at her truck.

Wyatt wants to smash them. I make him stand there while I photograph each one in place, note the orientation, and check the SIM tray with a knife point.