He slowed. “Stop dragging your feet,” he said, not turning around. “If we lose daylight, we’re done.”
I couldn’t help it. “You’re the one who wanted to go north. I told you we should have doubled back to the river.”
He wheeled on me. “The river’s a trap. It loops back on itself for miles. You want to end up right where we started?”
I laughed, a single note. “Might as well. Maybe we’d find a rescue team. Or a body to eat.”
His lip curled. “That’s not even funny, Amelia.”
“I’m not joking,” I said, and I wasn’t.
Before he could reply, I slipped on a patch of mud, the world teetering left, and he was there, hand clamped around my elbow to steady me.
The contact was jarring, almost electric, a wild jolt that reminded me I still had a heartbeat. I shook him off so hard my shoulder cracked.
“Don’t touch me,” I hissed. My voice sounded alien, like a recording of myself played back through a dying tape deck.
“Jesus, I was trying to help. You want to fall and crack your skull open?”
“At least then I wouldn’t have to listen to your voice ever again.”
He smiled, all teeth. “You’d miss it. Admit it.”
I almost laughed. Instead, I pressed two fingers to my temple,willing the headrush away. “The only thing I’d miss is oxygen that isn’t contaminated with your narcissism.”
We stood there a minute, locked in our old rhythm.
But the old venom had lost some of its bite. We were too tired for real violence, too depleted for anything but the ghost of our old hate.
“Keep moving,” he said, turning away. “We’ll make camp as soon as we find a dry patch.”
I limped after him, pausing to clutch a sapling and breathe through the latest crest of nausea.
We trudged on, the day dissolving into relentless gray. The trail degraded with every mile, until it was just another lie in the landscape, promising escape and delivering only more wilderness.
The only sign of civilization was the occasional beer can rusting in the weeds, or a shattered bottle glinting like a warning.
I thought of all the other lost souls who’d come through here before us. What was left of them, anyway, besides trash?
When we stopped that night, Caiden made camp in silence, his hands moving with rote precision. I watched him, hating his competence, envying it, too.
My own hands shook as I tried to assemble a lean-to from fallen branches. The first one snapped in my grip, the second slipped and landed on my foot. I swore, loud, and flung the stick into the trees.
Caiden looked up, eyes hollow. “You want to break your foot? Go ahead. Less work for me in the morning.”
“Fuck off,” I spat, but there was no heat left in my voice. “Just—fuck off.”
He didn’t reply, just hunkered down by the fire, stabbing at it with a forked stick. The light flickered off his face, carving out the bones. I sat across from him, knees drawn to my chest, and let the silence fill in the spaces between us.
I slept fitfully, haunted by the howling wind and the hollow ache in my belly.
My dreams were fevered.
Shane and Sabrina, safe and oblivious, laughingin a place made of warmth and food and light. Lillian appeared, her voice muffled and distant, panic in her eyes as she reached for me but dissolved to river water the moment I touched her.
When dawn bled into the world, gray and cold and merciless, I woke to the sound of Caiden urinating just beyond the fire’s ash ring.
That was intimacy, too, I supposed: to know the color and sound of a nemesis’s urine before you’d ever seen him truly weep.
