#kk4

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Sam narrows her eyes at the map, and sifts through evidence of Ninao folders to find the address of the abandoned property where Yuuki was kept.

She keeps this quiet until her and Kyle are passing by on the trip.

“Do you mind if we take a detour? I want to check something.”

She’s staring at a garden shed as she says it.

“How far are we from the next campsite?”

Sam frowns a little harder. “It’s…” She unzips her belt pocket and pulls out a plastic bag with a folded up map inside. Kyle steps a little closer to her, and peers over her shoulder. “About an hour and a half away, if we keep going at the pace we’ve been going.”

Kyle nods. “I guess we could take a break here, then.”

“Did you want to keep going?”

“I don’t mind stopping. I could use a break, to be honest.”

Sam looks at him directly then. She pauses. “Is your leg hurting?”

“… a little. But I’ll be fine, don’t worry.”

“You have a past head injury and broken leg to worry about. Among other injuries with flare ups.”

“Yeah," Kyle says drly, "I’m aware of that.”

“Yeah, and I’m aware that it still affects you. Kyle, please… promise me you’ll tell me honestly if you’re hurting somewhere, or if you want to stop and rest for a bit.”

“…I’ll try.”

The ‘promise’, as half-hearted as it sounds, must be good enough for Sam as she leaves the topic alone.

“Where’s the detour?”

Sam nods out at the view of the hill giving way to the open field below them.

There’s a house with a garden shed not far from the foothills. There’s no garden surrounding it, and no apparent signs anyone lives there. There’s no horses, or livestock, or hay bales. It looks uninhabited, abandoned almost.

And for whatever reason, Sam seems interested in it.

“That way.”

*

They shimmy off the track. They leave their bags beside the exposed roots of a fallen tree. It doesn’t look old, but it looks like it’s been there for a while. Vaguely, Kyle wonders if it fell in Cyclone Wilma. That was three years ago, and all a blur of inclement weather and stressful circumstances that none of them wish to reflect on too intensely.

Kyle grabs his knife from the belt pocket of his own tramping pack, and follows Sam down the hill.

They go down, and stumble across a field past a rickety fence.

The cloying smell of something chemical – like cleaning product, or paint – drifts over. Kyle wonders if Sam can smell it also, but if she does, she doesn’t make an obvious show of it.

Standing in front of the shed, after glancing around heaps, and Kyle getting nervous, Sam says, “This is the shed – where Yuuki was kept those three days.”

Kyle takes a moment to process it.

Sam looks around then opens the shed.

There’s supplies in it - typical outdoor / storage looking supplies. There’s a lack of actual gardening tools, but there’s also a lack of any proper garden anywhere.

“Oh, is it actually being used again.”

They look back at the property. There are no cars or any other vehicle around. Considering the house, though… the house looks like it’s in the process of being renovated. It has a fresh coat of paint on it. Kyle feels nervous, and Sam is getting affected too, so the two take a moment longer before leaving.

“Should we report this to someone when we get back?”

Sam frowns. “Hmm…I don’t know. What’s there to report?”

“Maybe we could take photos, at least…”

Sam snorts. “You’ve been around our family too long.”

The sound is light-hearted, but the mood between them is not. Sam’s father and older brother took pictures of this shed. This shed that had Yuuki in it. Sam and Kyle are not Timothy and Joshua; there is no Yuuki in this shed. There is no need to take photos. And besides…

“I don’t have my phone on me. Do you?”

“Yeah, it…” Sam fumbles with her pockets. She raises her face to the sky with an exasperated expression. “I left it back in my bag. I put it in there because it looked like it might rain an hour ago. Argh, stupid! I’m stupid.”

The realisation settles down on them: they’re both out here, trespassing on an abandoned land that is now somebody’s property – a once abandoned land that was once used in the kidnapping of someone they know – and they don’t have their phones on them.

If something were to go wrong…if something were to happen, or someone were to come home…

Sam glances at Kyle. The two lock eyes for a brief second. On an unspoken cue, they turn and start briskly walking back through the rugged field.

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