Bathsheba, now Katie, reaches for her tray, and this time the meal tastes good. She eats every bite, even the vegan brownie, licking her fingers when she finishes. In hindsight, she shouldn’t be surprised to find herself here. Just look at her mother, who rose before dawn, making breakfast, chopping wood, folding laundry until long after her kids had gone to bed. What was she if not a captive? Avon wouldn’t let the children go to school—government schools, he called them, where kids are programmed to be a cog in the machine—so their mother taught them how to spell, how to add and subtract. When she was tired, which was always, their mother sometimes lost the ability to watch her tone of voice. Her reward was the back of her husband’s hand or a blow from a rolled-up newspaper, the way one might discipline a dog.
Samson was the firstborn, named for the strongest man in the Bible, a favorite of God’s, betrayed by a woman. Bathsheba came second, named for a biblical object of lust, wife of David, mother of Solomon. A woman whose sole value was in her service to men. Bathsheba, now Katie, was a girl in a family that valued boys, that viewed the female sex as duplicitous. This presented her with a choice, either act like a boy or be owned by one. So she learned, first to wrestle, then to fight, then to shoot. She learned that there is power in a woman’s voice, but only if she is willing to take a beating to be heard.
At night she would lie in her bed reading old National Geographics with a flashlight, dreaming of faraway places. She would climb the Himalayas, sail the Mediterranean Sea. Her friends would be great apes and snow leopards.
During the day her father taught her to survive in the wilderness, how to build a lean-to and set an animal trap. He taught her how to hide and stay hidden. When she was twelve, she spent two weeks living in a ravine, drinking rainwater and eating squirrels she shot with an air rifle. Even then she was practicing, planning her escape. Except this time it wouldn’t be government men hunting her; it would be her own father, scouring the ground for footprints, sniffing the winter air. But she would beat him at his own game, vanishing like a snowflake in a storm.
Bathsheba cleans her plate, turning it upside down on the table. To fight off leg cramps, she walks around the empty basement, memorizing the terrain, looking for weak points.
She has been a fool, lured into a trap by the promise of a better life. But she has been trapped before. She escaped once. She will do it again. And then she will burn this place to the ground.
*
The storm comes in the middle hours of the night. A hot wind slams the shutters closed. The pressure drops. Lightning ignites the ridgeline. Bathsheba wakes to the sound of running feet upstairs. Her door opens, three men come down, bundle up her suitcase. Boaz Orci throws her clothes at her.
“The mountain’s on fire,” he says. “We’re moving again.”
They hustle her out to an SUV and blow through the open gates, spraying gravel. The air is heavy with smoke. Bathsheba sits in back between two guards. Did I do this? she wonders, still only half-awake, set fire to the world? Boaz is up front in the passenger seat, chewing Nicorette gum. He speaks into his wrist, listening to inaudible patter through an earpiece.
“Go around it,” he says. “We need to get to the highway.”
They’re in a convoy of three SUVs, piloted by men with tactical combat experience. Together, they race down winding mountain roads, the fire so close sometimes they can feel the heat.
In the center car, Astrid sits with Mobley. His mood is toxic, body emanating clouds of medieval wrath. Even he can’t spin this recent turn of events as positive. He has been chased from two homes in two weeks, once by infidels and now by weather. This is not the story of a god.
They are headed for Palm Springs, where it’s 104 in the shade, and then maybe out of the country, if this persecution continues. E. L. Mobley holds no allegiance to anything as petty as a nation. He is a citizen of the world, or rather a member of its ruling class. He has billions in banks all over the globe, real estate owned by trusts he controls, and a fleet of planes to take him wherever he wants to go. Customs and Immigration are barely a formality. There are concierge services he uses, fixers he employs on every continent. People don’t say no to him. Governments cater to him. The biggest law firms in the world bill him thousands of hours a year for civil, criminal, and tax work. They have protected him from police investigations in Germany, Bermuda, and France and negotiated a slap on the wrist from the American Justice Department for that incident with the Calloway girl.
What force on Earth could stop a man like this?
Astrid has learned to anticipate his fickle needs, which is how she knows before Mobley snaps his fingers that he wants to make a call and what number he wants her to dial. Gabe Lin answers on the first ring.
“How soon can you have a team in Palm Spring?” Mobley asks.
“I can have men on the ground in ninety minutes,” Gabe says.
“We’re being chased out of the mountains by these ridiculous fires,” says Mobley. “Insult to injury after the events in Marfa, which—thank you again for the warning. I assume you dealt with the men you caught.”
“Yes, sir. My client had instructions for all of them.”
“Good. Can you send a team of six?”
“I’d recommend two teams of eight, Mr. Mobley. We’re hearing chatter that the domestic situation could turn violent in the next few days. Politics and all that. I’d want to make sure you don’t get any on you, if you know what I mean.”
“Two teams of eight it is. Contact Ms. Prefontaine to set up the details.”