Not as he slips the inhaler back into his pocket when my breaths have eased and my lungs have softened, and the tears have stopped rushing down my cheeks.
Blood-stained hair brushing over his furrowed brow, Samick murmurs faintly, “Tesni.”
TEN
Samick’s hands spread out the parchment, flattening the map over the boot of the car.
His fingers are slick with mostly dried blood. Smears of it stain the thick, beige paper crinkling under his hands.
Samick hasn’t told me to switch off the torch yet. Not once since leaving the pharmacy. So I push my luck and aim it directly at the map.
My chin lifts, and I try to get a better look over his moving forearm.
Samick murmurs in his language, his fingertips grazing from landmark to landmark, leaving traces of dark blood.
A compass—dated, and with symbols in place of letters—is clipped to a folded edge of the map. But I have no doubt about what it is, and what it does.
The car suddenly creaks.
Leaning his hip on the boot, Arwyn folds his bulky arms over his chest. He gives a faint nod and a grunt to whatever Samick said.
I don’t know what he agrees to. But I do know that the longer I stare at the map, the more I realise something is utterly wrong with it.
It’s not that it isn’t fully spread out and parts of the parchment are still folded, and so I’m staring at only a section of Canada, but that it’s basically unintelligible.
Any letterings—like with the compass—look more like scribbles and symbols. And the whole map is criss-crossed with red and black lines.
The frown furrows on my brow for the longest moment before it makes a little sense.
The red lines could be the route Samick’s unit follows. So the black lines would belong to other units.
The towns aren’t named, the cities and the roads are untitled, but the coast lines the edge of the folded parchment. That means we’re closer to the east coast than I thought.
As for the actual province we’re in, the red line cuts around rocky mountains, which I think we’ve passed already in the winter, then it comes down to the border.
That’s where I guess we are now, because there are no hills or mountains. The terrain here is mostly flat.
But from the border, the red line shoots off in a winding route to the coast.
Samick seems to know exactly where we are.
He and Arwyn consider the map without any hint of confusion, and they talk in their foreign tongue.
Mika is quiet.
She doesn’t even participate in their planning.
Maybe it’s the loss of Shark that silences her.
I look over at her.
Sagged on the bonnet of the same car, with the swell of the rusty roof between us, she slumps in the wisps of my torchlight.
Her hand presses to her gut, lashes low over her glassy eyes, like she’s on the verge of passing out or throwing up.
Whatever energy she had after waking up in the prison was spent in the fight. Then the mental, emotional fatigue of losing Shark.
They were friends.
