365 Days, Zero Missed Calls novel · Chapter 2 of 16

Chapter 2: Harrow Point

She loses the car that followed her, reaches the Vanguard, meets a cold training lead, and hears his thought that he's been ordered to watch her.

I didn't finish filling the tank.

I hung the nozzle back up and walked to the bike.

"Don't run yet," Echo said. "He's still talking."

The driver's voice came through the cracked window as clear.

"No, she's alone. A motorcycle. Yes, sir. I'll stay on her."

Fitzgerald.

I knew that name the way every Halston knows it.

Fitzgerald Shipping had been trying to eat Halston Maritime for a hundred years.

Dad used to say it at dinner.

I had no idea why a Fitzgerald would care where I bought gas.

I pulled my helmet on and rode out slow.

The sedan's headlights came on behind me.

I took the on-ramp north at sixty.

He took it at sixty.

I went to eighty-five, and so did he.

"Turn your head a little," Echo said. "Listen past the engine."

I did.

Under the wind, I could hear his tires.

I could hear his radio. I could hear him breathing through his mouth.

Half a mile ahead, I could hear running water.

I cut off at the next exit without signaling.

The road turned to dirt, then to a farm track along a creek.

I killed my headlight.

I rode by sound.

The creek on my left. A fence on my right, ticking in the cold.

Behind me, the sedan's tires hit the dirt and spun.

He shouted something at nobody.

I crossed a wooden bridge I couldn't see and came out on a county road on the other side.

I didn't turn the light back on for ten miles.

"You're good at this," Echo said.

"I had a year of practice being where nobody looked."

Harrow Point doesn't appear on maps.

The black envelope had a set of numbers inside the flap, and I'd put them in my phone.

At six in the morning they led me up a mountain road to a steel gate in a stone wall.

Two guards in grey stepped out.

"Name."

"Rory Halston."

The older guard looked at his tablet, then at me, then at the tablet again.

He made a call.

Twenty minutes later I was standing in an office with a woman behind a bare desk.

She was in her fifties, Black, grey at the temples, with reading glasses pushed up into her hair.

"Delphine Harker," she said. "I run this place."

"Yes, ma'am."

"We've never taken a Halston."

"I know."

"Halstons don't need us. They have their own army."

"I don't," I said.

She looked at me for a long time.

"Where's your family think you are?"

"I don't think they think about it."

She wrote something on a pad I couldn't read.

"You'll be in Barksdale's group. Get some sleep. You start at noon."

Barksdale turned out to be a tall young man in grey training kit, leaning on the wall outside.

He had a scar through one eyebrow and no smile at all.

"Tobias Barksdale," he said. "Second year."

"Rory."

"I know who you are."

He walked me across a yard of frozen gravel to a long stone barracks.

He didn't slow down for my bag.

"Rules," he said. "Phones go in the box. No calls out for the first year."

"You eat what they serve. You run when I say run."

"Fine."

"And nobody here cares what your father owns."

"Good," I said. "Neither do I."

He glanced at me for the first time.

Then he pushed the door open.

Forty-nine recruits looked up from their bunks.

A girl with a shaved head and a gold tooth sat up and grinned.

"Oh, look. Halston Maritime sent us a princess."

A few people laughed.

"Blythe," Tobias said.

"What? Her daddy's boats move half the oil on this coast. She's going to cry the first time she runs in the snow."

"She's on the bunk above you," Tobias said, and left.

I threw my bag up onto the top bunk.

Blythe watched me the whole time.

"Seriously," she said. "Why is a Halston here? You people buy anything you want."

"Not anything," I said.

I lay down with my boots on.

The room was loud, then quieter, then asleep.

I wasn't.

I could hear forty-nine hearts slowing down.

I could hear the wind on the roof slates, and a generator somewhere under the yard.

I could hear two sets of boots crossing the gravel outside.

One of them was Tobias.

"Anything?" said a woman's voice. Harker.

"Nothing. She barely talks."

"Keep it that way. Keep her close."

The boots moved away.

Then something else came through the wall.

It wasn't a sound.

It was the shape of words sitting inside someone else's head.

Tobias, thinking as he walked.

"Harker says watch the Halston girl. Every word she says about her family, I report."

I lay still in the dark.

I had driven two hundred and twelve miles to get away from people who watched me without seeing me.

And the first thing I'd walked into was somebody else's assignment.

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