The cougar's ears flattened. Its weight shifted to its haunches.
"Now would be good," she said.
Gideon threw the rock. It hit the ground just in front of the cougar's feet and exploded against a flat stone with a crack that echoed off the ravine walls.
The cat flinched. Just barely—a twitch of the head, a shift in weight. But it was enough.
Zadie moved. She pushed off the deadfall and covered the distance to Gideon in three strides. He grabbed her arm and pulled her behind him, putting his body between her and the animal.
"Get big," she said, stepping beside him. She wasn't hiding behind anyone. She raised her arms above her head. "Hey! Get out of here!"
Gideon did the same, spreading wide, and together they filled the gap between the trees like a wall. He grabbed a branch from the ground and cracked it against a trunk.
"Go!" he shouted. His voice was louder than she had expected. Raw. The volume came from somewhere deeper than his throat.
The cougar held for one more second. Its tail twitched, its eyes moving between them, recalculating.
Then it turned and disappeared into the ravine as if it had never been there.
Zadie's legs gave out. She didn't collapse, she just sat down, hard, on the forest floor, her hands shaking in a way they hadn't during the firefight, or the chase, or any of the last twelve hours.
Gideon dropped beside her. He was breathing hard, his face flushed, and his hands weren't much steadier than hers.
"City boy just saved me from a cougar," she said. Her voice cracked, and what came out next was a laugh—sharp, involuntary, and completely unhinged. "My teammates are never going to let me live this down."
"I threw a rock. That's literally all I did."
"You threw a rock, and then you stepped in front of me."
"Instinct."
"Bullshit." She looked at him. His hair was a disaster. His face was dirty. There was a scratch across his cheekbone she hadn't noticed until now, and his blue eyes were soft and warm.
"You know what you remind me of right now?" she said, still catching her breath. "MacGyver. Solving problems with whatever's lying around."
Gideon cocked his head. "What did you just say?"
"MacGyver. You know—duct tape, paperclips, saves the day with a?—"
"I know what MacGyver means." He stared at her now with an intensity that had nothing to do with the cougar. "Why that name?"
"Because you just threw a rock at a cougar and somehow it worked. It's very MacGyver." She frowned. "Why are you looking at me like that?"
He was quiet for a long moment. The forest filled the silence—wind, birds, the creak of timber settling.
"Hopper," he said.
One word. Barely above a whisper.
The ground shifted beneath her. Not literally, but it might as well have. Her breath caught. For three full seconds, she couldn't do anything but stare at him while her brain tried to reconcile the man sitting in the dirt in front of her with the voice on the other end of a gaming headset who'd made her laugh harder than anyone had in years.
"You're MacGyver."
"And you're Hopper."
She palmed both hands over her face and let out a sound that was half laugh, half something she didn't have a name for. "Oh my God." Her gaming partner, the man she'd been terrified to meet was also the same man she'd had a crush on for years. Talk about a mindfuck.
"Grace Hopper," he said. "Co-developed COBOL. I always thought that said a lot about you."
