We broke camp without words. My body felt less like a vessel and more like a collection of punishments.
My hands shook so badly I couldn’t lace my own boots, but I got them on anyway, fingers rigid claws, a parody of willpower.
Around midmorning, we hit the river again.
There was no sign of a bridge. The water was fast and cold, and the noise of it was so loud it seemed to bounce inside my ribcage.
The sight of the water filled me with dread. The memory of the kayak crash whirled throughout my mind.
Caiden planted himself at the bank and stared across, scanning for some trick of geography, some hidden answer in the violence of the current.
The other side was maybe twenty yards, maybe a hundred. It might as well have been a mile of open sea, for all it mattered to me. I hovered at his shoulder, silent, pulling my arms around myself as if I could wring warmth out of my own bones.
“We’re crossing here,” he said. No question, no room for negotiation.
“Any particular reason?” My voice was a colorless monotone, scraped raw from cold and sleeplessness.
He spent a long momentchewing the inside of his cheek. “It’s the only way forward. If we try to backtrack, we’ll lose another day. Maybe more.”
I saw the logic, but logic doesn’t account for the way the river seemed to pulse, like it was hungry. The rocks that jutted from the water were wet and mossy, spaced just far enough apart to demand a leap of faith with every step.
It was a cartoon-trap: step, slip, crack your skull open, and wash downstream until your bones hooked on a logjam.
He set off, slow and deliberate, weight balanced forward. I watched him, hating the grace of his movement, the way his body seemed to anticipate the mutiny of the rocks.
He made it halfway before he turned, beckoned with one flick of the wrist.
My cue. My doom.
I should have told him no. I should have screamed above the river that if he wanted to lead, he could just keep going, vanish into the wild, leave me to rot.
But I was so very tired of arguing, so even my defiance curdled into compliance. The rocks were slicker than glass. I could feel the vibration of the water through the soles of my shoes.
The first two stones were manageable, if insultingly small: just enough space for both feet, but already laced with a skin of ice. The river roared up around me, the sound a low, primal threat.
I had a moment of vertigo, a flash of the kayak—air, water, air, water—then nothing, the cold bloom of losing myself.
My body remembered. My body did not forgive.
“Keep going,” Caiden called, his voice clipped, impatient, as if we were late for a train instead of inching across a deathtrap. “Don’t overthink it. Just move.”
I moved. My legs shook, the fatigue a mutiny of nerves and sinew. Two more steps and I was within reach; he held his arm out like a lifeline made of thorn.
I reached, but our timing was off and my shoe caught moss, then lost contact altogether.
For one weightless instant I hovered, cartoon-like, suspended over nothing, before the world snapped back and I careened into the water.
It was not cold; it was a murder. The river slammed my ribs,knifed the breath out of me, and spun my body under with a violence that was almost personal.
My lungs tried to gasp but filled with wet. I felt my skull strike something hard and for a second the world went black and red and black again.
My hands clawed upward toward what I thought was light, but my arms felt detached, as if they belonged to something already dead.
I kicked, or tried to. The current only sucked harder, greedy to keep me.
Then hands. A fist in the collar of my shirt, a bruising grip that wrenched me up and sideways, choking me on air and water and shame.
I caught a flash of Caiden’s face underwater, warped and monstrous, then we broke surface together, gasping and clutching at each other, both animals now.
