In her backpack was a small spiral notebook with a grease stain on the cover. She opened it to the last page she had written the previous evening and added three short lines: Northern Shields. Reese McKay. Dry room, door locks. Beneath that she wrote the time and, after a longer hesitation, a fourth line: They fed me before asking what I could give them.
She closed the notebook. For a moment she saw her father's shop as clearly as if she had been standing in it, the uneven concrete floor, the crooked clock above the sink, the smell of orange hand cleaner, and Grant Deacon bending over a motor with his glasses sliding down his nose. Her father had always made the work feel like an argument worth having. He would point at a machine and say, "Tell me what it is trying to say before you tell me what's wrong with it."
He had taught her that a damaged thing did not become worthless merely because another person was impatient with it. He had taught her to check a measurement twice when the first one told her what she wanted to hear. And during his last weeks, when the pain medication blurred the edges of his thoughts, he had tried to teach her one more thing, something about signatures and trust and a mistake that he believed he could still correct. He had died before she understood what he had been asking her to remember.
She lay down and pulled the blanket to her chin. The rain moved along the roof above her, and from the main garage came the final metallic clink of a tool being returned to its place. She had been sleeping in borrowed rooms and buses and spaces where she kept her shoes on for so long that the sound of someone locking up at night had begun to mean danger. Tonight it sounded, unexpectedly, like a promise that the building would still be here in the morning.
After the garage was quiet, Reese sat at the back table with Fig and Sark. He had poured a finger of rye into a glass and forgotten to drink it, which was unusual enough that Sark noticed. The three men had worked together long enough to let silence do part of the conversation for them. Fig was the first to speak.
"She's running," he said.
"Obviously," Sark answered. "Question is from what."
Reese studied the reflection of the work light in his untouched glass. "People running from something they've done usually pay close attention to exits. People running from something done to them pay close attention to people. She hasn't stopped studying us since she walked in."
"You don't know which one she is," Sark said.
"No. And we don't need to decide that tonight." Reese finally set the glass aside. "We know she saw a frame crack none of us caught. We know she's hungry, cold, and competent. Tomorrow, we see how she works, and we let the rest tell itself when she's ready."