My tent.
I blink slowly, each movement of my eyes scraping sandpaper against the inside of my skull. The fabric ceiling hovers a foot above my nose, pale green in the daylight. My sleeping bag is zipped up around me. Someone has thrown an extra blanket over the top.
I don’t remember getting here.
My tongue feels thick in my mouth. I roll my head to the side and immediately regret it when a spike of pain lances through my temple.
“Okay,” I whisper. “Nope. We stay still. Still is good. Still is our friend.”
There’s a water bottle next to my sleeping bag, cap off but resting loosely in place. My hand shakes a little as I reach for it. I manage a few sips before my stomach protests and I have to stop.
Outside the tent, the world is quiet. Not silent—there are always sounds in a forest—but muffled. Like someone stuffed cotton into my ears. Birdsong is distant, slippery. The stream nearby gurgles, but I can’t seem to locate it precisely in space.
Concussion, my brain says calmly.
No, I tell it.We do not have a concussion. We have… a dramatic bruise. A very, very glamorous headache. We are fine.
I try to remember.
Bear.
Running (bad idea).
Root.
Impact.
Floating.
Naked man complaining about humans.
That last part is almost definitely not real.
I shift my legs under the sleeping bag and realize my boots are off. My socks are still on, but my laces have been undone and neatly tucked into the shoes. They sit just inside the tent flap, side by side, like someone lined them up on purpose.
A slow prickle crawls up my spine.
I turn my head—carefully this time—and peer around.
My pack is in the far corner of the tent. My jacket’s been folded—folded, not crumpled—and used as extra cushioning under my head. My field notebook lies beside me, closed, a pencil tucked into the spiral binding.
What’s missing is the satellite phone.
A cold knot forms in my stomach.
That’s bad. That’s very bad. That’s top-of-the-list-of-things-you-don’t-lose-in-the-backcountry bad.
“Shit,” I croak.
I pat around my body, then the sleeping bag, then the immediate ground around me. Nothing. No hard rectangle. No coiled antenna.
“Shit,” I repeat, a little louder. “You absolute idiot, Elias. Where the hell is the phone?”
I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to think past the pulsing pain. I must have dropped it when I fell. Or when I was running. Or when I was… being carried?
No. No, we’re not revisiting that particular hallucination right now.
The idea of dragging myself out of the tent to look for the phone makes my stomach flip in protest. My limbs feel like they’ve been filled with wet sand. Every time my heart beats, the world pulses in and out of focus.
