10
CAP
The creek took our noise and made it into something the woods understood. Cold bit through my boots up to the bone, and I let it. Pain is a boundary; it keeps your head where your feet are.
Ariel’s hand brushed my back and settled on the strap of my cut. Juno kept two fingers hooked in Ariel’s sleeve. The hoarse man breathed like a busted accordion, but he kept moving, which is all the world asks most days.
We followed the creek until it shouldered into a bend and dove under roots. I took us out there, wet ankles to wet grass, and cut north along a deer track that knew how not to be obvious. The rain eased to a steady tap. In the far-off world beyond trees, engines prowled and then drifted, like men arguing with a map they didn’t love.
A half-collapsed shed shouldered out of the brush not fifty yards from the creek. Not the one we’d used, this one had caved on its back, leaving a shallow overhang like a cupped hand. Pine needles made a mat under it. Dry. Sheltered enough you could close your eyes for ten minutes and not pay for it.
“This is a layup,” I told them, soft. “Not a hotel.”
Blank looks. That was on me.
“You get ten minutes now,” I said. “Then we move you again. We do that until the search lines give up or get stupid. When the engines drift east, you follow the ridge there,” I pointed with two fingers, not my muzzle, “until you hear water big enough to have a name. Keep it on your left. No fires. No talking unless you have to. If someone yells freeze, you drop. You only run on a word from her,” I tipped my head at Ariel, “or from me.”
Juno licked rain from her lip and nodded too fast. Ariel squeezed her hand until the speed bled out of the nod and turned into understanding.
I shrugged out of my cut and shook the water off. “Pockets,” I said. “Let’s see what we can make into a kit.”
Ariel already had the look, one hand braced in the needles, chin down, inventory running behind her eyes. She stripped a bobby pin from her sleeve and tucked it in Juno’s cuff. “For later,” she said. “Not now.”
Juno came up with a crushed granola bar. The hoarse man had a packet of salt and two peppermint candies. From my lining I pried loose what I had no right to still have: a space blanket folded to cigarette size and a rectangle of water tabs sealed and snotty with old glue. I didn’t look at Ariel when I said it. She didn’t look at me when she smiled.
We built small comfort and pretended it was a plan. I tied the space blanket as a windbreak across two ribs of the shed, low enough that a man would have to crawl to know you were there. Ariel tore the granola bar into three bites, gave Juno the biggest without making a show of it, slid a small piece to the man, and palmed me the last. She put the peppermints in Juno’s hand like medicine. The man tore the salt and let it sit on his tongue. No one needed to tell him he was right to do it.
I scraped a shallow trench with a stick, one boot-length wide, two deep, then scattered needles over it. “If you’re sick, use this,” I said. “Cover it. Smell matters tonight.”
Ariel watched me build the small, ugly things that make survival look like housekeeping. She didn’t say anything about Sunshine. I didn’t either. The fact of her sat between us like a stove we couldn’t turn off.
“Hands,” I said, and showed them how to make their bodies small. “Quiet isn’t magic. It’s a posture. Chin in, shoulders soft, elbows in, no extra. When you get scared, your arms want to fly. Don’t let them. Put them here.” I pressed my palms to my ribs. They did the same, and the woods took some of our outline and ate it.
Juno’s breath started to race. Ariel slid in close and turned the racing into counting. “Four in,” she said, low. “Hold. Four out.” She cut her eyes at me: okay?
“Okay,” I said. Juno found the beat like she’d been waiting for permission.
A pickup growled somewhere on the service road and then backed off. Closer, a dog fussed at the water’s edge, snout full of our minutes-old mistakes. The handler praised in that quiet way men do when they learned the wrong lessons from the right teachers. Ariel’s fingers tightened on my strap. I felt each word she didn’t say under her nails.
“New plan,” I said, decision running ahead of the part of me that wanted to turn back and make the bay pay for itself. “We split.”
Ariel didn’t flinch. She only asked, “Where do you want them when I bring you back to them?”
“Ridge spur,” I said. “There’s an old marker, orange, half-peeled, on a pine that got hit by lightning and didn’t have the decency to die. Twenty minutes north of here if you don’t get curious. If the engines punch west, you cut south instead and take them to water again.”
“Got it,” she said, like it was already done.
I pulled off my tee and wrung it once. The rain made new water the second I let go. I tore a strip from the hem and tied it around a low branch, then snapped the branch back so you’d only see the rag if you were as petty as me. Ariel raised an eyebrow.
“For me,” I said. “When the night tries to convince me, I’ve never been here before.”
“Mm.” She looked like she wanted to kiss my jaw and instead checked Juno’s arm. Nothing needed bandaging. She made a wrist wrap anyway from her own sleeve and the space blanket edge and pure stubborn tenderness.
I dragged my boot heel through a patch of mud on purpose and then brushed it out with a pine bough until the ground looked bored. The dog’s voice lifted, a high, certain thread, and the handler’s praise got closer.
“All right,” I told the two under the lean-to. “You’re invisible unless you decide not to be. You’ll want to decide. Don’t.”
Juno looked at Ariel, not me. “You’re coming back, right?”
