The road slowly emptied as federal vehicles departed one by one, carrying with them the men who had arrived expecting an easy arrest and leaving instead in far different circumstances than they had planned for. Coulson stayed behind longer than the others, watching the taillights disappear over the low rise in the distance, turning over everything that had happened in the space of a single evening.
He thought about how close he had come to following an order that would have made him complicit in something he still did not fully understand, and how strange it was that the woman he had approached with his hand near his cuffs was the same woman who had, in the end, kept all four of them from making a mistake they could never have undone.
Quaid found Zariah preparing to leave a short while later, already back in the saddle, her horse restless beneath her after standing still for so long. "So, what happens now?" he asked, watching her gather the reins in her hands. "I keep going," she answered simply, her gaze already fixed on the long road stretching out ahead of her into the dimming evening light.
Quaid allowed himself a small, tired laugh. "Doesn't any of this scare you?" he asked. She considered the question honestly before answering. "It does," she admitted, then turned back to look at him directly. "But there's something I'm more afraid of than any of this." He asked what that could possibly be. Zariah's answer came without hesitation. "Staying silent when I already know the truth," she said.
With that, she turned the horse and rode on, leaving Quaid and the four officers standing in the road behind her. As the sound of hooves faded into the growing dark, the camera of memory, if such a thing existed for that night, would have pulled back slowly here, watching her figure grow smaller against the empty landscape until the road itself seemed to swallow her whole, quiet and undisturbed once more.
But the quiet did not last. Coulson's radio, still clipped to his shoulder though switched off only minutes earlier, suddenly crackled back to life on its own. Static bleeding into a voice none of them recognized. "Unit 4," it said, slow and deliberate, as though whoever spoke had all the time in the world. Coulson lifted the radio to his mouth, hesitating only a moment before answering. "Go ahead," he said.
The voice on the other end paused just long enough to make the silence unbearable before delivering its final line into the dark. "Do you really think Project Blackhorse is"