Chapter 14

The tip came from Mai, the way most of the useful ones eventually did, carried back from a hamlet two days’ walk from An Hoa where a woman selling rice had mentioned, almost in passing, a stranger who’d bought supplies for one rather than a household, twice in the past month, always paying in a way that suggested money wasn’t the concern it should have been for someone claiming to be a farmer’s widow.

“It’s thin,” Mai admitted, laying it out on the table alongside Linh’s map. “Could be nothing. Could be a hundred women in this province buying rice for one.”

“It’s not nothing.” Lan tapped the location on the map, a hamlet sitting at the base of a ridge complex Linh had marked in black ink months earlier and never upgraded to red. “This is close to the triangle Cortez traced. Closer than anything else we’ve had in weeks.”

The squad gathered that evening the way they’d gathered a dozen times before over the same map, and for the first twenty minutes the conversation circled the usual ground without finding new purchase — distances, water sources, the timing since the last confirmed kill, all of it familiar enough that Marisol found herself only half listening, her attention drifting instead to the shape of the terrain itself rather than the arguments being made about it.

“She never uses the same water source twice in a row,” she said, mostly to herself, tracing the black-ink cluster with one finger. “But she always uses a source within a day’s walk of wherever she’s holding position. That’s true in every account we’ve collected.”