Or two halves of the same equation?
What was he trying to tell me?
I rolled the dice and moved my first counter to a free square, glancing at the radio as I waited for Aiden to play his turn. It wasn’t like I was desperately unhappy right now. Getting to play board games by a roaring fire with a hot man sounded fairly close to my idea of a good weekend. But this wasn’t just some casual outing – there was still danger all around us. I just wanted to know that help was definitely on the way.
More than anything, I wanted to know if Caleb and Aubrey were just hanging out and killing time like we were, or whether something more serious had happened to them.
“I’m sure the others are all fine,” Aiden said, as he pushed the dice to my side of the board, like he could hear what I was thinking. “They’re probably just passing the time like us. Or they might have been rescued already.”
“Yeah,” I said. The thought actually brightened me up a little. “Yeah, you’re right! I bet Olly and Keaton were the first to get dug out and they’re just working their way down to us.”
“That’s it,” Aiden said. “And I bet Keaton is making all the rescuers stop to have proper food breaks and make sure they stay fully hydrated, so it’s taking a bit longer.”
I laughed at the image, even though I hadn’t had the impression that Keaton would do something to willfully delay our rescue. It was a funny thought, though, so long as I didn’t let myself think about the implications of being trapped down here under the snow for longer. About what might happen when we ran out of food, or we used up all our water and had to try drinking the snow that would risk poisoning us, or our oxygen tunnel got blocked by more snow.
Okay, now I was thinking about it.
“Score!” Aiden crowed, moving his piece across the board to a space that moved him ahead of me by another five places. “You better get your head in the game, Red. I’m going to wipe the floor with you at this rate.”
I snorted. “It’s a game of chance.”
“Chance my ass,” Aiden exclaimed. “It’s all about how you use the luck you’re given. You can still use strategy in the order you move your pieces.”
“Alright,” I conceded, chuckling. He probably didn’t care as much about the game as he was pretending to – I knew that at least part of what he was doing was to keep me, and himself, cheered up. “Then don’t get too cocky yourself. I’m going to start paying attention now, so watch out.”
“That’s more like it,” Aiden grinned. “A fair fight.”
We played a few turns, only focused on the game itself, laughing as the dice sent us one way or another. I took the lead from Aiden and he took it right back – for all his talk of strategy, we seemed fairly evenly matched with our draws.
“I’ll make us some lunch when we finish this round,” Aiden spoke up, watching me roll the dice.
I counted out the spaces I could move before I answered. “Make is a bit of a strong word, isn’t it?”
Aiden chuckled. “You’re getting your spirit back, I see. Fine. I will get us some lunch items from our pile of rations and bring them over here.”
“That’s more like it,” I said. “I think I want to -”
And I stopped, cutting myself off sharply without telling Aiden what I wanted.
Because I had heard something that made me go totally silent – and Aiden did, too.
There was a voice coming from the radio.
Aiden
I dove for the radio, grabbing it and quickly pressing down the button to respond. “Hello?” I said, frantically, loudly. Not the smartest comment or the most information-packed message I could send, but I was in shock at hearing a voice.
“Hello? Can you hear us down there?”
“Yes!” I exclaimed, grinning at Cade in relief and laughing. “Yes, we can hear you!”
“Great,” the voice said. I heard it go a little distant as if they were talking to someone else in the same room as them. “We’ve got the radio working in chalet six.”
In chalet six – the way they said it made it sound like they were talking to, or trying to talk to, people in the other chalets as well.
“What’s going on up there?” I asked, then voiced the main question that had to be on Cade’s mind as well as mine. “Are you getting us out?”
“We’re working on it,” the voice responded. It sounded like a man, maybe in his forties or fifties. He was probably leading the rescue operation, or at least in charge of the radios. “How are you holding up down there?”
