The rain came without warning, sudden and hard enough to send them both scrambling for cover before they'd fully registered the first drops, and by the time they found the half-collapsed old barn at the edge of a fallow field, they were both thoroughly soaked, laughing breathlessly at the absurdity of it, mud splattered up to their knees from the desperate sprint across open ground.
"This is not what I imagined," Kane said, shaking water from his hair as they pushed through the barn's sagging door into the relative dryness within, "when I pictured leading a covert journey into enemy territory."
"What did you imagine? Something considerably more dignified?"
"Considerably less mud, at minimum."
The barn was old, mostly abandoned, its roof missing enough shingles that thin streams of rain
