“If you headed straight ahead,” the driver said, pausing to take a swig of the bottle of water she’d wedged into her cup holder, making a face at how warm it was, “You’d put yourself into that lake down there. Or you’d end up in the ocean. You’d drown either way.”

Linc smirked.

“People would call you an idiot,” she said. “Why would you go straight ahead like that? Are you proving a point?”

“I don’t think that’s what Linc was getting at,” Moose said.

“Harper knows what I’m getting at,” Linc said, turning around in his seat to look at Moose as he said it.

Moose was a big guy, with tousled blond hair. He’d undone some of the straps of his mask and had the mask laying over one muscular shoulder. The mask was metal, crude, and Moose wore something cloth under it for padding, which he had on now. He wore a sleeveless undershirt, jeans, boots, and had two gauntlets sitting next to him on the car seat. Even with the truck being large and Moose lying down across the length of the seat, he barely fit. He didn’t seem to mind much.

Behind Moose and the truck was the gravel road that led up the hill, the gate checkpoint, and a ways below that, the simple settlement where most visitors would be made to feel unwelcome. One to two thousand people would be living there at most.

“They built this place and situated it on the very edge of civilization,” Linc said, to round off his earlier thought.

“You two always seemed like the kind of edge of civilization people to me,” Moose asked.

“We do okay,” Linc said. “Put us in the middle of a city, we do fine, eh babe?”

“Mm,” Harper made a vaguely affirmative sound. “This a trap, y’think?”

Linc turned his attention to the building at the top of the hill. “Nah. Why would you build a nice place like this and use it for a nefarious purpose.”

“Well, y’know, it’s gonna be nefarious. That’s why we’re here,” she said. “It’s a question of if it’s a murderous sort of nefarious.”

“That’s a good question, I admit,” Linc said.

“I knew a guy,” Moose said. “He had a mansion. Inherited or somethin’. Super nice.”

“The guy or the house?” Linc asked.

“Hm?”

“The guy was nice or the house was nice?”

“The house. That’s what I’m gettin’ at. The guy was as nefarious as they get. He renovated the insides. He wanted to make a whole business of holdin’ people that needed holdin’. For ransom. Said he’d deal with ’em and clean up the mess if ransoms weren’t paid. Wanted to be a contractor for disposin’ of people in horrible ways.”

“You’re supposed to just drop them off at the nice, conspicuous mansion, hand over cash?” Harper asked.