Chapter 10 - The Sound of Churning Earth
Maya clamped her hands over her nose and mouth, trying to stifle the ragged, raspy sounds of her breathing. The mud below her was freezing, seeping through the cotton of her dress, chilling her to the bone, but she remained motionless, blending into the dark hollow of the creek bed.
Through the birch trees, she saw a beam of harsh, green light sweeping across the forest floor.
Vance was wearing night-vision goggles now. The green phosphor beam flickered across the trunks, illuminating every fallen leaf, every puddle, every shadow with unnatural clarity.
He was moving with terrifying speed, tracking her footprints in the damp mud.
"I know you can hear me, Maya," Vance said. His voice was calm again, conversational, drifting through the dark trees like a ghost. "You're tired. You've been running for three days. Your body is shutting down."
He stopped at the edge of the creek bed, just twenty feet from where she lay hidden behind a fallen oak trunk.
"The drive is encrypted anyway," Vance continued, his boots crunching on the gravel. "You can't open it without the hardware token. You're risking your life—and the lives of innocent people like that old cook—for a stack of corrupted data."
Maya squeezed her eyes shut. Tears leaked out, mixing with the mud on her cheeks.
Arthur, she thought, her heart breaking. Please tell me he didn't kill Arthur.
"Give me the drive," Vance said, taking a slow step down into the creek bed. His suppressed pistol was raised, the green laser sight attached to the barrel painting a bright, microscopic dot on the bark of the oak tree right above her head. "And I promise you... it will be quick. No more basement. No more trials. Just sleep."
Maya’s hand crept down to her waist. Her fingers closed around the small, cold metal rectangle of the USB drive.
She had a choice.
May you like
She could stay here, let him find her, and die in the mud like a stray dog. Or she could use the one thing she had left: the secret she had tried to tell the cook.
She pulled her hand away from her waist, her fingers finding a heavy, jagged rock half-buried in the mud of the creek bed.
