Jake nods, but he’s still scowling. “Yeah. Just feels like somebody built more into this thing than they told the mechanics about.”
Damian snorts without looking up. “Are you suggesting the O.D. doesn’t keep clean books?”
Jake waves him off, saying the timestamps are corrupted.
Outside, the sound of an axe hitting wood cracks. Ryder’s splitting logs.
The cabin is small. There’s nowhere to go that isn’t someone else’s orbit. I don’t mind it, I just don’t know if this is life now—five people breathing the same air, suspended in limbo. I don’t know what the plan is, whether we’re going back to Redwater, what any of this means for me…I’m just going with the flow. I trust these men implicitly, and I know that whatever we’re waiting for, whatever they think the threat is, they have a plan.
I settle back into my book, trying to lose myself in an unfamiliar world of smoke and jungle against the backdrop of small human sounds. Metal clicking as Damian reassembles his weapon and then lays out another, Jake cursing softly, Wyatt clearing his throat. Wood cracking outside and falling to the ground with a soft thud. All the background sounds layered together. The rustling as I turn a page, and the low humming of the generator…until the humming breaks.
The generator coughs, a deep mechanical stutter that makes every head lift, and then the lights blink—once, twice—and die.
“Oh shit.” Damian pushes back from the table and stands.
“Fuck,” curses Jake, putting the tablet down.
Damian crosses through the living room, footsteps heavy, and swings the front door open, leaning out. “Ryder!” he calls. “What’s up? You doing something with the genny?”
“Nope,” comes the reply. “She just choked.”
“Fuck,” Damian says under his breath, and slips his shoes on and heads outside.
A minute later, the two of them come back in, cold air and the smell of wet earth wafting in with them. Ryder flushed and in a t-shirt despite the cold, Damian frowning.
“Fucking generator’s dead,” he calls toward the kitchen.
“I need the power steady,” Jake whines. “The battery on this thing is half gone.”
“We’re out of gas,” says Ryder. “Generator’s done.”
“I can go,” Wyatt offers, but the words dissolve into a cough.
“No, you can’t,” I say sharply. He tries to wave me off, but I can see the pain behind his eyes.
“I’ll go,” Ryder says, already reaching for the truck keys hanging by the door. He crosses to a cedar chest under the window, where Damian stacked the Walmart haul, lifting a gray sweatshirt from the pile of cotton clothes.
“I’ll come,” I volunteer, tucking a bookmark into my book and sitting up.
“Fine,” says Ryder, grabbing another hoodie from the pile and tossing it to me. “Put that on. It’s cold out.”
It hits my chest with a soft thud, smelling of new cotton. I pull it over my head, the sleeves swallowing my hands, then slip into the slightly too big runners Damian bought for me.
“Let’s go,” says Ryder, opening the door.
Outside, the drizzle is fine and relentless, turning the clearing to mud. I jog after him through the damp, hood up, breath fogging in the chill. The cabin vanishes behind a wash of mist as I pull the door shut.
Ryder starts the engine and reverses, tires squelching in the muck before finding the ruts of the gravel road. The truck noses onto the narrow track that winds through the pines. Even in daylight, everything looks dim and washed-out. Ryder drives with one hand on the wheel and one on the gearshift, eyes fixed ahead. The wipers dragging across the windshield smear the mist into wet ribbons.
Wyatt’s cabin is a good distance from the main road, so it takes us about five minutes before the trees clear and we hit pavement, and then we drive for another five minutes before I begin to wonder if Ryder is ever going to say anything.
I look at the side of his face—the hard line of his profile against the delicate and absurdly long fringe of eyelashes that frame his dark brown eyes—and feel the familiar aching pull in my center that I always feel when I look at him. He’s so beautiful it hurts. A god carved from granite. Strong hands gripping the wheel, trim beard covering a chiseled jaw.
“You’re quiet,” I finally say.
He shifts gears, the engine growling, and says nothing.
I face forward and sigh. Ryder is always quiet, but he broods, too. When something’s bothering him, he has to process it before he can talk about it. And then, eventually, he does. He’s not someone to avoid conflict, but he needs self-control to be ready.
