"It does if you die! Sit down."
My horror only grows when he listens immediately instead of arguing with me.
Afon Satyrin, who has never once in our acquaintance done a single thing I told him to, lowers himself onto the plank bench at the back of the lean-to and bows his head. Wolf crowds in after us and plants himself across the open side, head out, on watch, because at leastonemale in this party has sense.
"Jacket off," I order, kneeling in front of him.
There's a horrible déjà vu to it, except this time his fingers fumble the zipper. My dread deepens, more and more.
"Hey." I catch his hands. They're cold. He runs hot—I've slept against the furnace of him for three nights, I would know—but right now, he feels like a corpse-in-the-making. "Hey. I've got it. Let me."
"I can do it," he says. But he lets me do it anyway.
I get the zipper down. The sweater underneath is soaked through over his hip, the bloodstain the size of a bread plate, and when I peel the layers back, the gauze from the hut is hanging by one strip of tape, the graze beneath it raw and seeping.
"You absolutejackass," I breathe. "You knew! And yet you let me complain about my ankle for the last?—"
"I needed the distraction.
"I am going to kill you myself and save Reznik the gas money," I announce.
He chuckles, but it quickly turns into a wince. Then his eyes find mine, hazy, and they turn soft and sorry. "You don't have to worry about me," he insists.
"Too late, you mule. Where's the first aid kit?"
I'm digging through his stuff before he can even reply. His head is bowed again and he's breathing like the mule I just accused him of being. Shallow, pained snorts through his nose and open mouth.
I'm fishing through everything we have with us, tossing aside all the shit I don't need, when my fingers graze something familiar.
Something hard.
Something plastic.
Something rectangular, with a stub of antenna at one end.
I pull out the satellite phone.
This time, it's turned on. The screen glows. I pause for a second and glance backward, but Afon is still doing that labored breathing with his eyes closed.
So I tap the contacts.
There's one stored number. No name, simply a string of digits and a country code.
He had this. The whole time, he had this. A literal fucking lifeline.
When I was zip-tied to a folding chair in a bunkhouse that smelled like propane and bad intentions—he had this.
When his cabin, the one he built a new life inside, went up in a column of black smoke—he had this.
When a bullet drew a hot line across his hip and he drove a snowmobile up a mountain without mentioning it—he had this.
This morning, while calculating about beans and kerosene and how many days of kibble Wolf had left, as he was deciding to march a woman with a bad ankle fourteen miles through a blizzard—he had this, riding against his chest like a second heart, charged and working, one button away from making all of it stop.
One call could have saved us.
And he chose the blizzard instead.
I don't know what calling this number would require or cost. I only know that a man who jumps in front of bullets for medoesknow, and that price scares him more than dying does.
