The mountain didn't warn us. Yara did.
"Ten minutes," she said over the in-house line, voice level as a carpenter's bubble. "Same operator, smarter altitude. He wants us to blink."
No one blinked.
Elara was already on the roof ladder by the time the sentence ended, Santi on her heels with a coil of cable over his shoulder and a grin that meant he had absolutely no idea what fear was for. Marcus took the service stairs at a pace that turned concrete to apology. I cut through the back corridor, the one whose walls kept their own counsel, and passed the viewing slot where the jaguar watched the world with half-lidded scorn. In the forest biome, the wolves raised their heads, ears pricking to a frequency that hadn't been invented for them and yet their bones remembered.
"Mask on," Elara said, shouldering the hatch into cold air.
"Mask hungry," Navarro would have said. She was not here to say it. She was half a world away with Haruto and a rumor the earth had chosen not to let die. For a heartbeat, I felt the world tug like a wishbone—one hand on Tasmania, the other here on our false façade. Two rooms. One truth. Both could fail if we let them.
Santi popped the lid on the HVAC box-that-wasn't and slid a panel back to reveal the innards Yara had named after orchestral sections. The "strings" hummed with the dull boredom of office hardware. The "brass" siphoned heat into a loop that would go nowhere interesting. The "woodwinds" breathed on command.
"Thermal bleed holds," Elara said, checking a gauge and trusting it and herself in equal measure. "We look like payroll software and fights about printer queues."
"RF?" Marcus asked. He had eyes on the parapet, one hand under his jacket, two exits mapped behind him without turning.
"Vanilla," Yara said in our ears. "I've tuned us to hum like every boring building between here and the river. He'll need a taste for beige to catch us."
"Sadly common," Marcus muttered.
"Dragon ready," Santi said, rolling the net launcher to the lip of the roof. This one was larger than the beetle-snare we'd used the night before. The rig sat on a swivel, anchored to the parapet, trigger cable snaking to a little handgrip that looked like it belonged on a video game and could ruin your day if you flew too close.
I took the binoculars from Marcus and panned the sky. Cloud. Two hawks riding a thermal like a secret. A dot that was not bird and not weather, edging in on a diagonal like a solicitor trying to be polite.
"I've got him," I said.
"ETA eight," Yara said. "He's doing the slow creep of a man who thinks he's smarter than his last mistake."
"I'm thirty seconds from telling him God disagrees," Santi said, practically vibrating.
"Let him see the intake," Elara said. "Let him have the shot he came for. Then—"
"—we close the door," I finished.
The drone slid lower, nose tilting. It came not from the lay-by but from a different angle, the south ridge where the scrub gave way to rock and the wind threw its weight around. Smarter. Cautious. He had learned us. He had come to learn more.
"Range?" Marcus asked.
"Forty-five," I said. "Then forty."
"Net goes clean to twenty-five in this wind," Santi said. "At thirty we scare; at twenty-five we sacraments."
"Patience," Elara said, which from her was like asking lightning to consider its tone.
Down below, the lobby's temporary reception desk answered a phone call from a fake delivery about a real water cooler. A temp with a good sigh asked for a purchase order. The mask breathed. The mask smiled. The mask held.
"Thirty-three," I said. "Thirty."
The drone paused to preen—little adjustments as it hovered, reading the world, its operator sending micro-corrections like prayer beads. Its eye turned toward our false intake, then back to its own shadow, then forward again with a twitch that meant intent.
"Twenty-eight," I said. "Now, Santi."
Santi squeezed. The Dragon coughed net like a magic trick, a rectangle of night that knew what it needed to be. The mesh ballooned, caught the wind, missed the drone by a breath, and kept going.
"Again," Elara said, calm as a scalpel.
"Reeling," Santi said, cranking the line. The Dragon took a second breath. The drone, spooked, rose three meters and slid left.
"Operator's got hands," Marcus said. "Respect to the thief."
"Twenty-six," I said. "He's trying to get above the column."
"Don't let him," Elara said.
Santi put his weight into the crank and reset. The second shot left with less drama and more purpose. The mesh opened like a door. The drone chose badly and flew through it. Propellers whined; a motor coughed; the net smiled and cinched.
"Got you," Santi said softly, the way a fisherman murmurs to a line he intends to honor. He let the wind do most of the work, paid out twice, and brought the small machine to the roof with a courtesy it hadn't earned.
"Elara," I said, turning the drone over. "Make and model?"
She didn't look. "All of them. Yara?"
"Serials shaved," came the answer, already halfway to the box on the parapet. "Don't bother; we'll learn more from the transmitter. He didn't send a toy to do a soldier's job. Find his ear."
Marcus found it—an aftermarket antenna taped to the belly, a transmitter the size of a cigarette lighter that might as well have had the word inevitability stamped on it. He passed it to me. I passed it to Elara. She passed it to Santi. Santi passed it to the Faraday sleeve and snapped it shut with a sound like a parent turning out the light.
"Operator location?" Marcus asked.
"Gimme ten," Yara said. "He tried to play quiet. He forgot the sky owes me favors."
I went to the parapet and glassed the ridge. Nothing moved. No van. No man with a salted-peanut packet. No one but us.
"They're learning," I said.
"So are we," Elara answered.
Tasmania decided to learn us too.
Navarro and Haruto moved through the tea-tree like rumor, low and careful, breathing with the rain. The print was in Haruto's pocket, on his phone and under his eyelid—a snapshot and a burn-in. The hair rode in a sealed vial like a relic.
"Yara says two vehicles," Navarro whispered, reading the land as if it were a mouth. "Surveyors. Maybe their maps have teeth."
"Where?" Haruto asked, because scientists ask and then ask again to make sure the universe hasn't changed while they were watching.
"West track," she said. "We'll skirt. Creek for cover. No light."
He followed, and in following, remembered how to be a student. Navarro taught the lesson with her heels.
They crossed at a narrow where the water whispered and left only the kind of footprint a creek would keep for itself. On the far bank, the scrub gave way to a line of trees that had stood for three governments. Navarro slid between trunks and out into shadow again, the shed a smudge behind them, the road ahead a rumor she preferred not to name.
Headlights cut the rain a hundred meters away—two bouncing cones. Engines murmured the confidence of rental cars. The vehicles slowed at the lay-by and idled, doors opening, men speaking a language that sounded like government and wore whatever uniform money could buy.
Haruto and Navarro lay on bellies in grass that smelled like a pharmacy, and let the night do its job.
"Scans up," a voice said, too cheerful. "Thermal returns low. Audio anomalous at creek line two nights running."
"Dogs?" another voice asked.
"None recorded," the first said. "That's why we're here."
The word dogs hung in the air and received no permission to attach itself to anything.
"Do they know?" Haruto breathed into his sleeve.
"They know to hope," Navarro breathed back. "Hope gets men killed when they don't know what they're hoping for."
They watched as an operator lifted a drone from a case, unfolded legs, powered up a console. The rotor's whine cut through the rain. The drone rose like a tool being told what it was for.
"Yara?" Navarro murmured into the mic clipped under her collarbone. "We could teach their bird to land if you were feeling religious."
Back in the mountain, Yara laughed softly, in a way that meant she was two steps ahead of anyone who thought they were in front. "Already praying," she said. "I can see their handshake. Send me a photo of the controller if you can. Different vendors, different sins."
Navarro slid her phone out, lifted it, and took a photo without lifting her face. The drone moved left, then right, then toward the shed.
"Fifteen-minute window," Yara whispered. "I can offer the drone a home it prefers."
"Do it," Navarro said.
The drone slowed as if suddenly remembering a chore it had left undone. It pivoted, squared off, and began to back away, controllers stuttering as the operator fought not a person but a suggestion.
"What the—" the cheerful voice said. "Return to home?"
"Cancel it," the other snapped.
"Try—" Cheerful again, then less so. "It's—huh."
The drone turned its nose and headed for the track draw where nobody was standing. Thirty seconds later, it landed in bracken with a whine that sounded like surrender. The operator swore. The other man swore too, with more education and less art.
Navarro smiled to herself. "Thank you, sky-witch," she whispered.
"Always," Yara said, and the ocean hummed agreement between them.
"Now we leave," Navarro said, touching Haruto's sleeve. "Before the men who call themselves surveyors decide to measure us."
He nodded. The hair in his pocket felt suddenly heavier. He imagined a lab. A microscope. A certainty so clean it would make strangers weep.
They ghosted the creek line back to the bush plane in a loop long enough to teach patience lessons it didn't ask for. They did not look back. They did not run. Running turns you into prey. They walked, and the land decided it preferred them alive.
"Van," Yara said in our ears. "Blue, dent in the driver's side. Signal hopping on a band I don't like. East service road, past the lay-by, two bends out. He's not leaving. He's waiting to learn something. Let's teach him the wrong lesson."
"Copy," Marcus said, which is how he says I'm already moving. He took the stairs, then the catwalk over the empty warehouse floor of our false office, then the back stair that knew the shape of his feet. He slipped through the fence gate we had never admitted existed and into scrub that knew what to do with men like him.
"Visual?" I asked.
"Soon," he said, which is how he says yes.
Elara tightened the last clamp on the decoy heat loop and checked the gauge a final time. Santi packed the net gun and patted the drone as if it were a dog that had remembered a trick. I looked east and thought about all the men who had ever stood where they shouldn't and called it work.
Marcus slid along the service road at a crouch that made no noise and saw the van exactly where Yara had promised it would be. The door was open. The operator sat in the captain's chair, headset on, a portable monitor in his lap. He had peanuts. He had a gut he'd earned. He had a face that said he'd once been good at something else and had come to believe this would be easier.
Marcus took a photo and sent it up the line. Yara ate the pixels and let them teach her. "Stolen plates," she said a heartbeat later. "Rentals on the name 'R. Cole.' Card paid with cash, which means not paid. Van's Wi-Fi SSID is 'printer_room.' How adorable."
Marcus moved around to the back. The bumper wore scratches where a generator had been loaded hard by a man who didn't know how. A second transmitter sat on the roof, cabled clumsy to a repeater box.
"I could kill it," Marcus said, which might have meant the repeater and might not.
"Better," Yara said. "Feed it."
Marcus obliged. He pulled a small device from his pocket—a humble thing Elara had named the Breadcrumb because engineers can't resist a joke—and fitted it under the repeater's housing with two magnets and a prayer. The Breadcrumb would dine on packets, split them like pomegranates, and tell Yara what fruit fell out.
"Done," Marcus said. He backed away. He did not touch the operator. He did not say hello. He did not advertise the nature of his mercy.
"Let's send him mail," Yara said, fingers already building the fiction. "A ping from a nearby 'data center' with a thermal profile worth chasing. One that isn't a mountain. One that belongs to a company that belongs to a man who owes a favor."
"Make our friend busy," Marcus said. "Make him think he's clever."
"Done," Yara said. "He'll spend the next six hours getting lost in a warehouse that makes chicken nuggets."
Santi laughed, delighted. Elara allowed herself a small, clean smile.
I looked back over the parapet at the false intake and then up at the ridge where the hawks were drawing circles like signatures. The wind smelled like weather and victory and something else I didn't have a word for.
"You got him?" I asked.
"We fed him," Marcus said. "We'll catch him later when he comes back hungry."
"Two minutes," the pilot in Tasmania said, voice in the headsets like gravel that had chosen kindness. Navarro and Haruto strapped in with the care of people who knew better than to trust a smooth takeoff. The strip was a suggestion. The plane was a prayer.
Haruto gripped the armrest and did not think about microscopes. Navarro glanced out the window, saw the shed, and met it with a look that said: We both know what we saw. That can be enough for now.
Her phone buzzed with a message from Yara: SURVEYORS DELAYED BY THEIR OWN DRONE. GET TO AIRSTRIP. WEATHER WINDOW CLOSES IN 20. Then a second: STRIPES: WORKING ON CHAIN OF CUSTODY. WHEN YOU LAND, DO NOT HAND ANYTHING TO ANYONE WHO SAYS 'CONSERVATION' IN A VOICE YOU DON'T LIKE.
Navarro texted back a photo taken from the door of the shed just before they left: a second print, cleaner, angled perfectly by accident. He came closer, she wrote.
I know, Yara replied, and sometimes three words are enough to hold a cathedral up.
The plane leapt, became air. Below them, the creek wrote its sentence. The shed held its breath. Two white SUVs found the lay-by and looked around as if they had arrived at a story and the storyteller had forgotten to show.
We ate soup that night in the backroom and pretended salt was a strategy. The drone sat on the table like a beetle that had learned regret. The pen that Laughton had given me lay beside it, its microphone small and disappointed.
Elara popped the pen open and let its guts uncoil on a mat that had been manufactured for exactly this task. "Passive recorder plus burst transmitter," she said. "On handshake with any of three cellular carriers. He thought he'd hear us talk about the basement."
"We don't talk," Marcus said. "We do."
"I talk to cats," I said, and took a sip of soup, and my throat hummed with laughter that wasn't entirely human.
Yara threw the drone's transmitter schematic up on the screen. A map of our valley traced in dotted red lines appeared alongside it. Five nodes blinked. "Operator's mesh," she said. "He's not alone. Two more along the ridge, one near the river cut, one at the old logging spur. He's been hopping signal like a con man with too many hands."
"Breadcrumb?" Marcus asked.
"Eating like a king," Yara said. "We'll have names. Or at least initials and bad passwords. We can give them other work."
"Meaning?" Elara asked.
"Meaning we'll bury them in noise," Yara said. "Vacant warehouses with interesting exhalations. Abandoned hospitals with HVAC that 'shouldn't be so warm.' They'll have a buffet. We'll control their appetite."
Haruto's face appeared on the big screen, grainy from a connection stolen out of rural sky. He looked like a man who had sold his last excuse. "We're down," he said. "Chain of custody secure. Hair and scat sealed. We'll hand off to the lab under the protocol we wrote last winter and didn't tell anyone about." He swallowed. "If I'm wrong, I'll be wrong publicly and we'll take our beating. If I'm right—"
"You are," Navarro said, leaning into frame, eyes bright with joy that had nothing to do with revenge. "You are, viejo. The stripes don't apologize."
"I know," Haruto said, and smiled like a boy who had been given back a toy he'd convinced himself he'd never see again. "I think I know."
We did not cheer. The world hadn't asked for that, and anyway cheering is for endings. We had only arrived at a beginning that was older than us.
"Don't fly home tonight," Marcus said, practical as weather. "Rest. Be boring. Change planes twice. Switch hotels. Yara will dirty your path. Make the lab think you're arriving from Cleveland."
"Done," Yara said. "I'll throw in a rental car with glitter on the floor. No one follows glitter."
Navarro rolled her eyes. "Everyone follows glitter," she said, delighted.
Elara closed the pen with a click and pushed it across to me. "Give Laughton his toy back at your convenience," she said. "Tell him we prefer fountain pens. Watch his face."
"I'll bring you his next one too," I said.
"Bring me his signature," she said. "I want to know how he writes destiny when he means control."
Marcus tapped the drone with a knuckle. "We keep this," he said. "Souvenir."
Yara snorted. "We keep its brain," she said. "Its body we return to the operator's doorstep with a thank-you note."
"What should the note say?" Santi asked.
Elara thought for a moment, then wrote with a grease pencil on the drone's plastic skin: YOU WERE RIGHT. IT'S BORING HERE.
Santi laughed until he had to wipe his face.
Past midnight, the mountain remembered the moon and made a copy of it with our lights. The wolves sang—short phrases, not the long rope of before. A patrol song. A language of we are awake; you are seen. The jaguar turned three times on his platform and curled in a way that moved only air.
I walked the corridor alone to the little glass where I could see the waterfall's silver thread in the dark. It always looked like handwriting. Tonight it looked like the kind that has learned to be read in two languages.
My hand found the stone. My voice found the low note that lives below words. It said what it always said and more: Door. Stay open. For them. For the ones we found. For the ones we've only just learned how to look for. For the ones who will make us wrong in a way that saves us.
A soft footfall behind. Marcus, unsurprised to find me praying to geology.
"We bit back today," he said.
"We did," I said.
"We'll have to again."
"I know."
He stood with me in the hush for a time that could have been two minutes or an hour. Then he spoke in the voice he uses when he brings the future to heel.
"The letter," he said. "The coalition. You never opened the file."
"Yara opened it in a box," I said. "It tried to call home."
"It will call again," he said. "Tomorrow they'll invite you to a smaller room. They'll offer security like a sacrament. They'll ask what exactly we keep in the cold."
"What will I say?" I asked, though I already knew.
He smiled, not kindly and not unkindly. "Tell them the truth," he said. "That we keep teeth and thread and a door that stays open. They won't understand. That's why it's safe."
A beat. Then his phone buzzed—a small sound the night made to remind us it had other business. He checked it and raised an eyebrow I had learned meant both trouble and dessert.
"Breadcrumb just gave us a present," he said. "Operator's van. Same man. Same dent. Parked behind a building owned by a company owned by Laughton's sister. They're not poachers. They're procurement. Same animal. Different hunt."
I nodded. We had named a new predator. The sanctuary would have to learn its shape.
"Tomorrow," Marcus said, "you'll go back to their mirrors and bring Elara more pens."
"And you?"
"I'll go find where our van sleeps and teach it what dreams are for."
We left the water and the glass and the stone to go on being themselves.
In the forest, the alpha lifted his head, listened to a sound we could not hear, and laid it down again. In the jaguar room, a muscle flickered under fur and went quiet. In a lab far away, a hair in a vial waited to be told what century it belonged to.
Two rooms. One truth.
The world exhaled.