“Lead the way.”
I stopped where I was. “What do you have?”
“Shovel.”
“Why?”
“You never know when you may need a shovel.”
“Right,” I said, abandoning the thought. “We need to be quiet from here, though.” I headed down the track, careful to keep my distance from the fence, stumbling over my rolled trouser legs and nearly falling.
Gray grabbed my elbow and said, keeping his voice low, “I’ll hold onto you. Just in case.”
I nodded. All my distractions were gone now, and there was so much that could go wrong.
As long as I’m on this side of the fence, I reminded myself, they can’t touch me. The trouble was, I wasn’t going to stay on this side of the fence.
A cautious hundred meters, and then another one, my feet squelching in the wet canvas trainers, the legs of the track pants dragging along, the sleeves of the jacket falling over my hands despite my attempts to push them up. The sound of wind rustling the leaves in a stand of poplars, a faint, far-off hum of generators. A nearly full moon low on the horizon that was much too bright, but we’d had no choice. And, finally, a darker rectangle that was the outbuilding I was looking for. The most far-flung of the storage sheds on this side of the property.
Please, let them still be there. I was nearly two hours late. Let them still be there.
No talking now. I touched Gray’s arm, solid under his flannel jacket, and nodded at the fence. Then I handed the torch to him, and when he had the red light trained on the mesh, I moved closer, breathless once more.
The electric fence was made of white mesh, the sort where the electrified strands are woven through horizontally. I was very familiar with this fence.
I faced the mesh, waited until the red light steadied, took a breath, held it, and plucked two non-electrified vertical strands of white fiber delicately between finger and thumb. Using both hands at once, the way I’d learned to do as a kid, the way that would keep your fingers away from the electrified wires and wouldn’t get you shocked. The way that had earned me my harshest belting, two weeks before I’d run.
That one, I didn’t want to think about.
The blood was pumping hard into my brain, and my hands were trying to shake. The body’s arousal system in full activation mode. Blood. Hormones. Brain. Everything.
I was a low-arousal person. I’d worked at it. Tonight, I couldn’t be.
I didn’t have time for panic, so I pulled the fence down toward the ground as carefully as if I were handling nitroglycerin. I had small fingers, a flexible body, and steady nerves, and I lowered myself and took the fence along with me, slowly, steadily, until I was crouched as low as I could go and the strands were on the ground, then whispered, “Stake them down.”
Gray didn’t say anything. He just did it. The stake in his right hand, the light in the left, he crouched down on the damp grass beside me and pushed the two prongs down gently and carefully, avoiding the thin blue-and-white lines of electric cables. The U-shaped stakes were metal, and they were long. Capable of carrying a charge, which was exactly wrong, and why I always used plastic ones instead. I kept my eyes glued to that stake, and every muscle in my body tensed to breaking point.
The fence wouldn’t kill you if you touched it. It would just hurt. Heaps. I couldn’t get the girls out without crossing it, but Gray wouldn’t keep helping me if he got shocked, and the girls couldn’t. Your muscles didn’t want to do it a second time.
Well, mine would. Theirs probably wouldn’t.
The first stake was in. Gray took the second one from his back pocket and fastened it down with the same care.
A half-meter section of fence was pinned down near the ground now, twenty centimeters of it fastened flat, so you could step straight over. More of a jump, it would have to be, as the fabric stretched nearly a meter wide along the ground, but everybody could jump.
Gray had his hand cupped over the red light, blocking most of it. Now, he whispered into the silence, “Ready?”
I nodded, then realized he couldn’t see me and muttered, through a throat that had gone dry, “Ready.”
He picked up his shovel, pointed to himself, and held up a hand. Wait. I’ll go first. He jumped lithely across, and he was on Mount