A/N: FYI, the first section has been updated with timestamps to signal shifts in time, as I have also done in this section. If you feel as though these will help you understand the action, consider re-reading the first section. I think there will be one more section to follow. Thank you for reading. - WC
8:43am, November 30
He had been right. It was so cold. Even in her layered sweaters and wool socks, even under the long black rain slicker. It felt like she'd never be warm or dry ever again. It was incredible to her that either of them was still upright, not scrambling in the mud. He was bearing the heaviest weight, but she still struggled to control her pack and keep her feet under her. And the rain just kept pouring down.
As if her fears were being answered directly, she slipped and caught herself on the rough, damp bark of a tree with an involuntary yelp. She clasped a dirty hand to her mouth in immediate regret as Frank whirled around to spot her.
"It's okay," she spoke. "Sorry."
He nodded, silently scanned the trees, and pressed on. He didn't wait for her, but she understood. This was the sort of situation he had lived for, had trained for. She just had to keep up.
Because even if she had wanted to, there was no going back now.
4:13pm
When she was younger this sort of thing wouldn't have bothered her. This trudge through the muddy forest could have been just another drunken adventure a mere decade before. Vermont could be cold as balls even on the sunniest days, and she had grown up with a high frost tolerance. But it had been a long time since she'd spent a winter in Vermont, and that tolerance seemed to be gone.
She would make it, though. She could do this. She could keep it together and stick to the plan. If she could survive the walk from Inwood to Hell's Kitchen on the most miserable day in July, in heals, she could hike through some woods in the rain. She just might end up looking like a bog monster instead of another disgruntled New Yorker.
She kept her eyes on the trail that wasn't a trail, kept her ears piqued. But her mind wandered backward…
A motionless figure in her direct path interrupted her thoughts. She aligned herself with an adjacent tree and stopped. She strained to hear anything, but it wasn't until the pair of hunters crashed through the brush some ten yards to her left that she realized how close danger had come.
They were loud and garrulous, fighting over who had seen the buck first, though neither carried any trophies. They wanted to get to their camper and their beer, not pick a fight with a pair of "backpackers."
She hazarded a glance in Frank's direction, saw the coiled tension in his stance, and silently begged him not to do anything. They didn't even register the still figures in the trees.
When the rowdy pair were far enough removed, they continued their march. The sun was sinking more quickly than she had realized, and her mental math put them at two to three miles from their goal.
She walked right into his back the next time he stopped.
8:39pm
"Go over it again," his voice was gruff, agitation clearly bleeding through.
He was closer than she realized, and a blush rose under her already heat-flushed cheeks. She sank lower into the trough that served as bathtub.
She recited the addresses; the make, model, license plate, and color of the trucks; the names on their passports; the code phrases; and the border contacts.
"In case of emergency?" he asked, repeating like a recording.
"'Break glass,'" she murmured to herself, lips just barely above water.
"What?" he growled.
She gave him the name he was listening for, then sank completely under, submerging with a splash to punctuate the finality of the exchange.
She could hear the fire inside the water. The crackle and pop of carbon being consumed and transformed. The ping of heating metal.
The planks beneath her bare legs were smooth and waterlogged like driftwood, and her skin slid gently over them as she shifted to her back, pulling her knees in to her chest.
She lay at the bottom of the tub, listening to the fire, to the bubbles, to the demons in her chest. She lay like a drowned corpse, wondering up at the world of flickering light and distorted color overhead. She lay until her unhappy lungs threatened to draw the steaming water inside. Until the face she imagined she saw hovering over her underwater world disappeared.
But when she rose – with another splash over the side, in a hiss of water and fire becoming steam – she was alone.
9:00pm, November 28
Karen Page was determined, above all else. When a story, or a case, or a mystery, caught her attention she didn't let it go. That stubborn determination had gotten her into a fair number of scrapes – had nearly gotten her killed on several occasions, in fact – but had never left her. It had made her stronger, smarter, capable. And it was what had brought her to this moment. To the most important story of her life.
She stood amongst the shelves in the musty cellar, waiting for the informant she knew would double-cross her. Fear flickered in her stomach, but she drowned it in icy resolve. If nothing else, she had the failsafe in place. There was a plan prepared. She had set the pieces in motion, and she was going to come out of this with the information she sought. Whether or not she got to act on that information personally, though, remained to be seen.
The hand-off was made. The gun was drawn, as anticipated. She started to bargain, leaning on diplomacy. But then her mouth was splitting open, catching an unexpected punch, and she was flying into action even as she fell.
She wasn't sure whether she'd actually hit the informant once the light went out, but she'd unloaded the clip in that general direction. There were more people lurking about than she had thought there'd be, but she moved swiftly and sure-footed in the dark, missing bullets and disarming faceless goons. In the very back of her brain a tiny voice wondered what Matt would think of her blind "ballet."
Only one caught her with a knife, and it didn't go deep.
But once she'd gotten to the trigger, she'd had to fight her way to her exit – one last, determined foot-soldier – and got tossed by the blast. She caught a brick or some similar debris in the chest and gaped like a beached fish as she crawled up the stairs and onto the street.
11:46pm, November 30
She woke with a gasp, struggling for air. She hadn't been easy on her healing lungs in the last twenty-four hours. She rolled to the side, along with the mummy bag, and worked to steady her breath and focus her eyes. As they adjusted to the dark, she realized that he was watching her.
Draped in his own sleeping bag, with a jacket to pillow his head against the cabin's stone wall, he watched from his post beside the door.
She stared back, her breathing calmed, until her eyes grew heavy again, and her thoughts distracted. She wasn't sure whether she was looking at a man or imagining a ghost in the shadows by the time she rolled back to sleep.
1:18pm, December 1
The road was almost worse than the woods. She was warm and dry, but the silence between them, between the low roar of tires on asphalt and the barrage of rain around them, was deafening.
She could hear the soft steadiness of his breath that seemed to claim he was finally sleeping, and that made it marginally easier to handle the blackout that had developed overnight.
She focused on the pavement ahead, maintaining speeds neither suspiciously fast nor cautious. She pushed the truck and her body as far as she dared before stopping, but Frank never woke. Or if he did, he carefully maintained the air of someone either terribly exhausted or horribly hungover. So she just kept going, consulting the paper map as necessary.
It wasn't until well after dark, when she pulled down an unmarked logging road to find a place to sleep the night, that he finally roused himself.
"I'm too tired to keep driving," she said, but he only grunted in response. She got some food and more water from the packs, and crawled into the camper shell to stretch out for a while. But Frank was soon climbing into her vacated seat behind the wheel and grumbling something that sounded like "Coffee?"
She passed the thermos through the cab window to him, settled her spine into the grooved bed of the truck, and pretended the silence hadn't been eating at her all day. She lay as still as possible while he drove them onward.
-August-
She sought Micro out. He might not be keeping as close tabs as before, but she knew he was around.
"I need some help. Technical help. And I have a feeling you can put me in touch with the right people." She nearly blushed when he complimented her tracking skills, hurrying her out of his new entryway before his wife could get a good look at her.
She knew there was always the risk that he'd tip Frank off, but it was a risk that would always be there. Any time she got herself into deep water, there was a possibility – and in Matt's case, a probability – that one of the shadowy figures in her skeleton-closet would show up.
But if Micro had fed Castle information about Karen's comings and goings in the greater-New York area underworld, it seemed both men were wary enough of her stubborn determination to let things play out further before interfering.
Besides, it was "just a failsafe" she promised the hacker.
She had done her own research after the bombings and the incident with Lewis Wilson. She had learned everything she could about explosives without getting herself put on a watch list. She knew because Micro checked for her (although he didn't know why he was checking).
She flirted with a dangerous habit to get closer to the right characters. She exhausted every CI she caught wind of. She pestered Ellison and Mahoney just enough to keep them piqued without pushing them into their protective tendencies.
And every day she somehow carved out at least an extra hour to practice self-defense. Her martial art. Her meditation. She was determined to take care of herself, whether a gun was available or not. She would ask for help where she needed it, but in the end she would only put herself on the frontline.
Of course, that didn't mean others wouldn't try to step in.
11:00am, December 2
"Somethin's up," he murmured, so low she only felt the vibration of the words, rather than heard them. She took the offered binoculars and trained her eyes on the pier.
The security guard was stiff, his behavior far too alert. And everyone else, from the loaders by the trucks to the crane operators, moved as though choreographed.
"You see it," he asked. She nodded, passing the binoculars back.
"Plan B," she whispered, and he nodded back. She pushed herself carefully backward, slinking into the tree line.
9:09pm
"Detroit was always the riskier option," she mumbled, bundled into practically every piece of clothing she had.
A sound halfway between a grunt and "yeah" indicated that he was listening.
The lights of the pier were little more than pinpricks of light across the inky water. She shivered, but as cold as the night was, it was better than the lingering scent of who knew how many hundreds of others who'd huddled into the sparse shipping container before them and the sharp ammonia that failed to cut through it. She knew they'd have to go back before too long, but for the moment she was happy to shiver and ache in the fresh air.
"How far once we land?" she asked, already knowing the answer.
"Thousand kilometers," he huffed. "Give or take."
She nodded, turning away from the receding shoreline. The freighter lumbered on beneath them.
"Then we hoof it again," he continued. Eying her as she rubbed at her stiff legs and breathed into her cupped hands.
"Bring on the cold," she quipped, turning a wry smile his direction, though her eyes were dancing.
3:14am, December 3
Karen sat awake against the metal wall of the shipping container, cognizant of the slight sway of the freighter as it cut through the cold water and pulled them toward a foreign shore.
She wondered if Ellison had put it together yet. She wondered if Mahoney had broken down her apartment door and found the information she'd left for him. The carefully organized files, the photographs, her notes, all laid out on her kitchen table, waiting for him. Wondered if he'd found her registered gun in the nightstand drawer. Wondered if he'd contacted Foggy or Matt yet.
She wondered how long it would take the few people who had still been caught in loose orbit around her to realize that she was just gone. Not coming back. Would they call her father? Would they mourn her mysterious disappearance?
She shook her head, forcing such maudlin thoughts out. It didn't matter what was left in the crater of her old life. It just mattered that she'd found the missing pieces in her story and left them for the people who could do something with them. She hoped Mahoney was smart enough to know what to do next. Was sure he was.
And if nothing else, she knew Ellison would work it out. He'd find the locked file cabinet and get it open. He'd read her notes, her evidence, and put it all together. Whether or not he published it was up to him, but she thought someday he probably would.
Her body hummed with the tired energy of survival, and her fingers ghosted over the fading bruise on her lip as she contemplated. She was dry again, but still cold. Still felt the saturation of rain and fatigue in her sore muscles, her aching bones.
When Frank returned to the space beside her, she leaned into his shoulder. She could feel him shift, pictured his eyes on her, taking in her bent shoulders, her hand clasped loosely around the opposite wrist. She felt his hot breath against her neck and let it be enough.
For now it was enough.