I keep my mouth shut. I don’t want to be the weak link.
We need to get to the Reds’ castle and out of this jungle and as a matter of extreme urgency.
I drop back a few steps without meaning to, then catch myself and try to pick up the pace. I manage it for a while, and then I fall behind again.
“Are you okay?” Magma asks in a low whisper.
“Yes.” I keep my voice down too. “I’m good.”
He doesn’t answer; he just narrows his eyes on me for a second, and what he sees must appease him because he nods once, and then we keep walking.
The ground is fairly soft in this section of the jungle, but it still hurts. Despite my best efforts, I fall behind again.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asks, a few minutes later, in that same low tone.
“I’m fine.” And I am, sort of. I’m upright, I’m moving, I’m not bleeding all over the jungle floor. That counts for something. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll keep up.”
“Why don’t I believe you?”
I shrug.
He moves away a few steps, and I walk toward him, doing my best to look A-okay.
I fail.
“You’re limping.” He lifts his brows.
“I’m not—” I start, and then I hear myself and stop, because I absolutely am.
He tips his head toward a flat-faced rock jutting out of the ground a few feet off the path, half-buried in the earth and roughly the height of a low bench. “Sit over there.”
“It isn’t neces?—”
“Humor me,” he whispers.
I sigh and then roll my eyes, but I do as he asks and sit. The relief of getting the weight off my feet is immediate and embarrassingly obvious. I press my lips together to hold back a sigh.
He crouches in front of me, takes my right foot in both hands and looks at it, and I’m unprepared for the experience of watching those enormous hands clasping my feet. I have average-sized feet. They’re not small by any measure, but right now they look tiny. I quite like it, actually.
He turns my foot slightly, tilting it toward the pale light that filters through the canopy above us.
He doesn’t say anything for a moment.
There are a few cuts. I knew about most of them. The one along the outer edge of my left heel is the one I’d been trying to ignore since this morning. There’s some bruising across the ball of my right foot.
He presses his thumb gently around the cut on my heel, and I make a sound before I can stop it – something embarrassingly involuntary – and wince.
He looks up at me.
“Sorry,” I say.
“Don’t apologize.” He looks back down at my foot. He presses very lightly around the cut, checking the edges of it. His touch is so careful it barely registers as pressure. His hands are twice the size of mine, broad across the palm, with thick, blunt fingers; the kind of hands that could crack a trunk in half and probably have. Right now, they’re holding my foot like it’s made of something delicate.
“It’s not that bad,” I say. Which is what I’ve been telling myself.
“Itisthat bad,” he says in a way that holds no room for debate. He puts my foot down and looks up at me. “We are a team, Carla. If something is wrong with you, I need to know about it. Don’t hide things like this from me again. I need to know what’s going on with you. What if we have to run and you can’t?”
“I thought running was bad.”
