For a moment, we just stood there, staring at the emptiness as if the earth had finally given up and caved in on itself.
“We’ll camp here,” Caiden muttered, not even bothering to ask for my input.
I watched him work, the way his arms flexed, and shoulders hunched, the deliberate menace in every movement. I wondered if he would ever tire of playing the martyr, the soldier.
The silence was absolute save for the crackling of twigs and Caiden’s occasional muttered curses.
At some point, he managed to get a small fire going.
Still, it drew my eyes like a beacon.
He sat opposite me, knees drawn up, the fire a tiny no-man’s-land keeping us from tearing each other apart.
The fire spat a cinder into my lap, and I brushed it away, hissing. “Nice campground, Rambo.”
He barked a harsh laugh. “You want to sleep in a mud pit, or you want to freeze to death? Not a lot of options, unless you want to try your luck with the wolves.”
I stared into the flames for a while, not trusting myself to speak. I could feel the old bitterness pooling in my chest, threatening to spill out if I wasn’t careful. All the unresolved shit between us rose up with the smoke, making me dizzy.
I watched Caiden’s face through the haze of heat, the way his lips pressed thin with concentration, eyes darting every so often to my hands, my knees, my face.
“Well?” he finally said, voice low and unsteady. “You gonna stare at me all night, or should I build a fucking shelter, so you don’t whine about the dew?”
I didn’t answer. Iwas busy trying not to think about my body, or the way my mind kept circling back to the same thought: we’d been out here for a few days, and no one was coming for us.
I wondered if Caiden had figured it out, too. He looked as ragged as I felt. He was a dying campfire, smoldering with just enough rage to keep himself moving forward.
He started stacking branches around the fire, forming a crude shelter. Each stick he jammed into the ground was a little more violent than it needed to be, as if he could punish the world into giving us better odds.
I watched him work, unable to help myself: the way he’d sweat through the armpits of his t-shirt, the way mud streaked his jaw, the way his hands shook a little when he thought I wasn’t looking.
A clump of wet ash collapsed, sending sparks spiraling up. For a while, neither of us spoke. The sky was ink, punctured by the faintest scattering of stars. Every so often an animal shrieked in the distance. A fox, a night bird, something dying.
At last, I broke. “You hate me, don’t you?” I asked, and the firelight made my face feel raw, exposed.
He didn’t answer right away. He poked at the fire with a stick, sending up a shower of sparks. “Does it matter?”
“It does to me.” The air between us seemed to contract, heavy with everything we’d never said. “You could have just left me back there. Why didn’t you?”
Caiden stared into the fire so long I thought he hadn’t heard. “Because I don’t want to be like him,” he said, barely louder than the wind. “I don’t ever want to be like him.”
The “him” hung between us, a specter that made me shiver more than the cold.
The words landed like a stone in a pond, sending out silent ripples. I opened my mouth to argue, but it was useless. We’d spent so much energy fighting the people who made us that we’d forgotten who we were.
Maybe there was nothing left.
THE PRESENT
CAIDEN
I wish I never went on this fucking trip.
The bleeding monster within me fought to escape, to unleash years worth of rage. Being around Amelia brought that shit out of me.
I forced the beast down, suffocating it. No good came from bleeding out in front of her. She was watching me. Always fucking watching. Probably waiting for meto snap, to give her a reason to bolt and leave me here to rot.
Every branch in this hellish forest had it out for me. We were both soaked through, tripping and gasping in the undergrowth, but Amelia managed to do it with more whining than any human had a right to.
