THIS IS PART TWO FOR EPISODE 18.
The copy below is the same that was published with Part ONE yesterday.
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The count came up wrong at seven in the morning. Camp Ridge runs its scarcity in the open, three weeks from empty and everybody knows it, which means the count gets run every day, and this morning the count caught a wound no rifle on that wire ever had a chance to stop. Critical supplies are gone. Taken in the night, out through a seam in the camp’s routine that no stranger could have known existed. Whoever carried that food into the dark was already inside. He was trusted. And every gun at Camp Ridge was pointed faithfully the other way, because walls do not watch inward.
Suspicion runs downhill toward the newest face, and JJ Morris stands under the weight of it in the middle of the yard, six days inside the wire and a kill order on his name, while the one judge whose verdict outranks every opinion in camp renders it. The dog’s word is law at Camp Ridge. And when the dog is done, the real question is standing in the yard where nobody can look away from it: if it was not the stranger, it was one of us.
Then the second count comes up wrong, and this one has a name on it. Jake Smith found the trail before anyone thought to look, and he did what seventeen does after two weeks of becoming a man on a wall. He went. Alone, without approval, into a dark that belongs to things far worse than a thief. Now the tracker and the listener take the field together for the first time, JJ Morris reading the ground and John Moon reading the enemy’s own radio band, on the trail of a boy who is on the trail of a betrayal, through timber where some of the sign was not made by either of them, and was not made by anything that gets cold.
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