Logs scattered across the snow. The stack collapsed, pieces spread in a radius that tells a clear story. I can read the sequencein the scatter pattern. Weight applied to the top. Structural failure. Everything coming down at once.
My eyes follow the scatter to its center.
She's on the ground.
Dark hair against snow. One arm extended, the fingers of her hand open and still. Face turned to the side, the line of her jaw and cheek visible, pale.
Small. She is so small against the ground and the wood and the snow.
And the snow beneath her head is not white.
Red. Going darker at the edges where it has had time to oxidize. The contrast precise and absolute. The size of the stain tells me how long she's been here.
Too long.
"Reid." I shout. My hands have gone still at my sides and there is pressure building behind my sternum. "Jace."
They're around the corner in seconds. Reid drops to one knee beside her and his hands go to her neck, two fingers on the pulse point below her jaw. His other hand moves to her skull, careful, fingers reading the wound with the precise, clinical touch of someone who has assessed this type of damage in the field before.
Jace is on her other side. His hands hover without landing. The hesitation is the most alarming thing I've registered in the last thirty seconds, because Jace does not hesitate with his body. He acts. The gap between impulse and motion in him is so short it's usually invisible.
"Head wound," Reid says. "Superficial cut but it's bleeding freely. She's breathing. Pulse is steady." His voice is even and organized, the report structure that lives in his nervous system from a decade of situations worse than this. "She's been out here a while."
She makes a sound. Not a word. Something below language, below consciousness. A body registering pain before the mind has returned to process it. Her face tightens, the muscles around her eyes contracting, and then goes slack again.
"We need to get her out of the cold," Reid says. "Now."
Jace doesn't wait for the rest of the sentence. He shifts his position, gets one arm under her shoulders and one under her knees, and lifts her in a single motion that is both clean and careful.
She makes the sound again. Involuntary. Undefended in the way that only unconsciousness produces, the total absence of the guarded, watchful control I saw in her face the first day we met.
Jace goes still. One second. Two.
"Hey." His voice is barely above a murmur. "It's okay. We've got you."
6
MAYA
Warm.
That's the first thing. The feeling of warmth against the full length of my body. More warmth than I've felt since California.
For a few seconds I let it be, the way you let yourself stay in a dream when you know you're waking up and the waking is worse. The air smells like woodsmoke, and the light behind my closed eyelids is amber, flickering, alive.
Then the throbbing starts. Low and steady above my left eye, building from background noise to something that demands attention, a pulse of its own keeping time against the inside of my skull. I try to move my hand toward it.
I can't.
Something is holding my arms down. The weight is too warm for a restraint, too specific, settled against me. Heavy across my middle. And my face is resting on something that isn't a pillow, something that has the give of muscle underneath skin, something that is breathing in a rhythm slower than mine.
I try to make sense of it before I open my eyes. My brain, still sluggish, gives me the information in pieces: weight across my ribs. A body curved against my back. The full contact of another person from shoulders to knees, my head on a bicep, and my nervous system registers the shape of it, the closeness of it, before my mind has finished assembling the picture.
Every muscle between my throat and my stomach locks at once. Exposure. Hands on me that I didn't agree to.
I pull a slow breath in through my nose trying to control the panic rising.
Pine. Leather. Something clean underneath, faintly cedar, and the familiarity of it stops the tightening before it crests. I know this smell. I can't place it to a face or a name, not yet, but some part of me knows it's not a threat. That part is louder right now than the part that wants to bolt, and I stay with it, breathing it in again. Slower.
