They cut back through the pines, keeping the co-op's blank windows behind them like eyes they didn't trust to stay shut. The morning had begun its slow betrayal—the gray deepened, edges sharpened, the world returned to detail and demanded to be looked at. Margo walked point with her palm still inked with the ear, Gavin a half step off her shoulder, Riley with the brick bag, Madison watching their backtrail with the patience of a man who'd learned not to blink when blinking cost blood.
County Road 19 presented itself as a strip of cracked asphalt framed by ditch grass and the occasional arm-thick snake of old tire tread. A pair of buzzards stood in the distance like undertakers late to a service; when the group drew near, the birds lifted without hurry and drifted to a billboard that promised PROPANE • KEROSENE • SAFETY TRAINING in cheerful block letters. Time had turned the sign into a chalkboard; wind wrote on it with dust.
"Eyes," Margo breathed, and touched her ear. They stopped as one and listened to what the road had to say. Nothing obvious. No rhythmic strike of feet. No breath louder than their own. Only a button or two of sound pinned to the morning: the dry rattle of a sycamore's last leaves, a single frog's opinion from a ditch.
They moved.
The depot appeared by degrees—a low cinderblock office squatting behind a run of chain-link, two long above-ground tanks on welded saddles, a third half buried for show, a scatter of smaller cylinders banded in red. A speaker horn perched on the office roof, the kind that used to throw out reminders about hours and safety goggles. The front gate stood open and empty, chain looped through the links but not dressed with a lock, as if the last person out had meant to close it and then someone had asked a question that took his mind away.
"Choice is a door," Riley whispered, and then shut her mouth like she'd heard herself teaching.
Margo pointed past the office to where the tanks rose. "We don't use the pumps," she murmured. "Card readers teach patience. We take the manual line on the northeast tank. Gravity and a liar's valve."
"Liar's?" Madison asked.
"Shut-off that swears it's closed when it isn't," Margo said. "Like men in bad marriages."
They steered wide of the open gate and slid through a gap where a storm had folded the fence and left it sulking. Inside the yard the ground was a patchwork of pea gravel and oil stains. The oil spoke old sentences in the earth's throat; Gavin smelled years, not just days. He did not like what the years had learned to say.
He touched Riley's elbow and pointed to the office window. A paper sign hung crooked inside the glass: DON'T SPEAK TO THE SPEAKER. Beneath it, someone had taped a list: I HEAR / TAP-TAP / PLEASE / OPEN / WAIT. The last word had three lines under it.
Riley nodded once, face set, and slid a brick radio from the bag. Margo laid her hand over Riley's and shook her head. "Not yet," she mouthed. "Hiss eats thought. We'll need thought in a minute."
They kept to the tank shadows. At the second saddle, Margo crouched and ran a finger along a line of copper. "Here," she mouthed, and pointed to a knurled wheel nearly swallowed in a nest of pipe. The wheel had been painted shut twice and then freed once by hands that knew what they were doing; the paint around the nut was scraped clean in a circle, bright as a halo.
"Torque," Madison whispered, and his engineer's brain—buried under years of smash and carry—woke. He found a length of angle iron leaning against a pallet, slid it over the wheel like a cheater bar, and tested. The metal gave a fraction and then sulked.
"Even," Gavin breathed. "Not brave. Correct."
Madison exhaled and put slow on it. The wheel turned, sighed, turned again. Somewhere inside the tank a pressure line made a small throat-clearing noise, a concession. The smell of gasoline, real and thick, wavered up like a ghost getting nostalgic.
Riley produced a stack of metal jerrycans from beneath a tarp that had become more memory than cloth. She lined them up under the spigot Margo loosened with two clicks and a prayer. The liquid came slow, steady, amber in the slant of light like tea no one sane would drink. Riley watched the first can climb to weight, then shut the spigot with a careful quarter turn. No glugs. No slap of full. Sound here was a story with an audience; she would not be a loud narrator.
Madison tilted his head. "Hear that?"
At first Gavin heard nothing but the little song of gasoline drumming the can's interior. Then the other tone resolved like a second instrument joining in—not a footstep, not breath, but a thin hiss from the speaker horn on the office roof. A breath taken through teeth, held, then let go. It repeated itself exactly, as if someone had found a tape loop. The hair on his arms lifted anyway.
Margo's mouth pinched. She tapped the ear on her palm, then pointed to the speaker and drew her thumb across her throat. Dead it, the gesture said. Gavin looked for a power cut, a breaker, any simple mercy. None offered itself. The horn continued its patient little inhale-exhale, a novice swimmer practicing not to drown.
"Static?" Riley mouthed.
Margo nodded. Riley thumbed a brick on low and set it under the tank's ladder. Hiss crawled into the air and took its seat like an old aunt at a funeral. The speaker hiss faltered, uncertain of its role, then tried again. The brick kept talking. The horn listened to the horn.
They filled a second can, then a third. Gavin's hands shook and calmed, shook and calmed—his body trying to learn a rule he kept giving it with poor handwriting. He thought of the keypad line at the fence and the boy with his recorder and the man in a lab coat tapping on glass to teach rhythm to something that would never need rhythm to hunt. He thought of Margo's mouth when the voice had said please in the church's own tone. He turned the spigot carefully and watched the meniscus climb.
The horn gave up on hissing and found words.
"Authorized personnel only," it said.
The sentence was wrong—not in content, but in the place where it had learned to break. The word authorized came out as if typed with two different fingers by two people who couldn't agree about emphasis. Au-THOR-ized per-SON-nel on-LY. The voice was nobody's; it was duct tape and speaker wire and breath practiced against plastic.
Margo's eyes closed for the half second you reserve for disappointment. She opened them again and signaled: faster.
Madison slid the last can into place. Riley kneeling, hand on valve, counted under breath and kept the count inside her lips. Gavin watched the yard. The office door stood open by the width of a book; the darkness beyond looked like a mouth that had considered a word and decided to clench on it instead. The pump islands out front were dead machines, hoses looped like reptiles asleep in the sun that hadn't arrived yet. A breeze worried the corner of a laminated safety poster and made it flutter. Motion. Flicker. He kept his eyes off it.
"Perimeter," Madison whispered, chin lifting.
Shapes. Two, then three, gliding along the fence line adjacent to the road. They moved like men who had forgotten errands but remembered posture. One stopped under the billboard and tilted its head at the buzzards, who could not be bothered to be offended. Another reached the torn place in the chain-link and placed its palm against the floppy diamond like a man testing the worth of a handshake.
"Don't give them our study," Margo breathed, and it was the closest to poetry she allowed herself.
Riley capped the last can. The gasoline smell had become heavy enough to feel like a hand on the back of the tongue. Margo wiped the spout with a rag, stowed it, tightened the liar's valve with two clicks. The cheater bar did not squeal. The tank accepted the return to silence as if silence had been its idea.
They hefted the cans—two apiece. The weight surprised Gavin; it promised distance and it promised fire and it promised arguments with inertia. He set his breath to the task. Margo pointed for the fence gap and they started, even, even, even—
The speaker tried again. "Please… wait… for at… ten… dant."
The last word landed like a dropped dish. At the fence, the palm pressed into the chain flinched back sharply as if the sound had scolded it. The shape turned its face to the horn and stood very still, head cocked at the exact angle you'd use to hear good news. The second shape joined the first. A third arrived and placed its hand where the first hand had been, then removed it, then placed it again—memorizing a pressure it didn't understand.
"Eyes down," Margo mouthed, and they crossed the gravel in that slow walk that isn't a walk but a photograph of a walk. One pebble rolled; Gavin felt it skitter, and his body begged to flinch and he did not give it the flinch.
They ducked the fence at the tear. Madison had to go sideways and exhale to make the jerrycans and his shoulders agree. Riley slipped through like an idea through a legal loophole. Margo came last, her palm brushing the rust with a soft, affectionate apology for the trespass.
On the road side of the fence, the shapes stood under the billboard, looking up at the happy promise of SAFETY TRAINING as if it were a sky. The speaker said please again, and this time the first shape lifted its hand and traced a circle in the air. It became obvious then what the circles in the grass had been—practice. Not devotion, not magic, just the worthless geometry of trying to be included.
"North," Margo breathed.
They took six steps.
Behind them, from the office doorway, came a new sound: the cough and catch of a small engine that had never learned what discretion was. The generator. Either the horn had been on a timer or something inside the office had finally spoken a language it understood. The engine took a breath and whirred and then found itself. Lights flickered on above the pumps—a weak neon, a neon taught by a dying man. The signs woke and tried to sell.
The shapes at the fence pivoted together toward the light like flowers. Their hands came up not to plead but to test—palms held out the way a person holds out a hand to rain to prove it's falling.
"Run?" Madison whispered.
"Even," Margo said. "Even and behind."
They moved along the ditch, using the shallow as a road. The jerrycans tugged at shoulders and forearms, trying to make rhythm into ragged. Gavin fought the tug and kept his steps the same size—the quietest lie he could tell the ground.
At the lot's corner, the chain-link ended in a post and a billboard support set in concrete. Something crouched there like a man tying his shoe, except no laces existed and the hands were wrong. It lifted its head when they passed and breathed in. Not a sniff. A study. Its lips shaped the start of a word that wasn't its. It let the word go. Margo didn't look at it. Riley didn't. Madison didn't. Gavin didn't, but he saw the motion at the corner of his eye: the thing lifting its hand and making a little circle, proud of getting a curve right on the first try.
They reached the ditch bend where trees threw a screen of shadow over the road. Margo raised her hand and counted with her fingers: three, two, one—down. They slid into knee-high weeds, sank the jerrycans a few inches into soft mud so metal wouldn't knock metal, and breathed through their noses like swimmers who'd been told the pool wasn't water.
Back at the pumps, the generator stuttered. The horn tried one more sentence and broke it in the middle: "Au-thor—" Then it died. The lights blinked once, twice, and went away, not with drama, just like someone whose heart had decided to stop working overtime.
The shapes did not run. They stood and waited for the lesson to resume.
Margo touched Gavin's arm and pointed ahead along the ditch, to where a county truck sat with its nose in brush and a ROADS—EMERGENCY stencil on the door. The hood was up. The rear gate was down. In the bed, half under a blue tarp, jerrycans waited like cows in a pen. A siphon hose coiled beside them and a crank pump bolted to a plywood square.
"Mercy," Madison breathed.
"Or bait," Riley said.
"Same difference," Margo replied, and the line delivered itself without bitterness. "We earn it or we don't."
They crawled to the truck. Gavin peered through the window. No keys. No blood on the seats. A map lay open across the passenger side, a coffee ring blotting the county's south end. He fished the crank handle from under the tarp and snapped it into the pump. Margo nodded at the siphon. Riley fed the hose down into the truck's tank, took the jerrycan Madison held, and seated the nozzle with the care of a nurse securing a line.
The first crank squealed and then settled. The pump did the old work and sighed the old sigh, and the can filled with the thick, beneficial glug of solved problems. Gavin watched the ditch, the road, the billboard, the fence. The shapes at the depot stood as if at service, motionless in a world made of too much motion.
Madison swapped cans without a clink. They filled a second, a third. Gasoline dripped from Riley's knuckles and traced a dark line along her wrist like a string she had tied there to remember something she'd rather forget.
When the fourth can was half full, the pump handle jerked under Gavin's palm. Not a stall. A tug from the other end.
He froze. Madison did too; you could feel a man that size stop. Riley kept her hands where they were and didn't make the telltale error of looking at them. Margo's eyes moved without her head: down the hose, along the truck's flank, under the bumper.
A hand held the siphon from below.
It wasn't grabbing. It was pinching the hose lightly between finger and thumb the way a child pinches a straw to watch the bubble rise and decide if what bubbles do is a rule.
The hand released. The pump breathed again. The can rose toward full.
"Don't," Margo breathed. "We don't teach."
The hand pinched again, firmer. The pump hiccupped, then recovered. A second hand joined the first and slid along the hose toward the can, feeling the vibration, learning the song inside the rubber.
Gavin tightened his grip on the crank until the tendons stood out like chords. He turned evenly, not faster, not slower, and the hose did its service while being studied. The can filled to neck and Riley eased the nozzle up and away without clank, without drip. Madison slid the next can into place.
The hand on the hose held a moment longer, then let go. It made a circle in the air below the bumper—small, neat, satisfied—and then withdrew into shadow as if it had signed its name and remembered that names cost.
"Last one," Margo whispered.
They filled it. The ditch grass leaned with their breath. The shapes at the depot still faced the dead lights, practicing waiting. The speaker horn had gone back to being a mouth with no job.
They stood with cans in hand and looked north. The road curved toward trees that would hide them for a while and betray them when the day grew legs. Behind them, under the truck, a shape slid forward on quiet elbows and brought its face up into the open air between bumper and brush. It tilted its head and listened to the sound gasoline made inside steel. It opened its mouth and gave them a word it had found somewhere, the edges dented but the center pure.
"Ready," it whispered.
No one answered. Gavin lifted his can. Margo raised her palm. Madison flexed his fingers once to remind them what weight was. Riley nodded, as if she had agreed to a bargain only she had read the fine print on.
They took their first step north, jerrycans heavy, ditch water sucking at boot leather. Behind them, the mouth under the truck tasted the air where their ankles had been and watched their balance as if balance were a spell it could learn by watching. It put its hand out, palm up, and waited to be blessed with something it did not yet have a word for.