There is movement in the pines above the road, and it is not deer.
The Smith family went south on the creek on a dead woman’s map because south was the only direction not already full of the men looking for them. It took less than a day for that to stop being true. Now there are scouts in the tree line on the ridge above the cut-through road the map runs along, moving the way men move who are not in a hurry, and the family is below them with a dog on a litter, thirty rounds, and nowhere to put its back.
Jake wants to hit them. Four men who can be seen are four men who can be shot, and the boy has been carrying that math since a woodpile under a stranger’s eyes. Mark will not let him, and the reason is not mercy. A family that wins an ambush is fixed in place by its own victory. Everybody who hears the shots knows exactly where the Smiths are, and the Smiths cannot move a litter fast enough to be anywhere else.
So the choice this week is not fight or run. It is how to be seen by men who are watching you, without letting them learn anything true.
What the scouts are collecting, and what the family finds out about it, is the whole of this episode.
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There is a price for crossing this river, and it turns out the price was never the water. The Wardens take the guns and the ammunition. Then they want more than that. They want the family to stand in front of their people and do as they are told, and they want everything about them written down. Who they are. What they can do. Whether anybody is looking for them.
