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I watched the realization move across her face.

Mike was an athlete. He could sprint ten miles on his lunch break without even breaking a sweat.

“Mike, you have us out here in the middle of nowhere.”

“Just walk out. It’s not hard. You just… walk.” He sounded like he was falling asleep.

I put my back to Larissa and lowered my voice. “Hey, are you okay? You sound a little—”

“I’m fine. Hey, I gotta go,” he slurred. Then he hung up. I watched the phone screen go black in my hand.

“Is he okay?” she asked from behind me.

I turned and nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, he’s fine. I just think he’s a little out of it. From the migraine,” I added.

I didn’t think he was out of it from the migraine. I didn’t think he had a migraine at all. This was twice now. Something was up with him.

I wanted to ask Larissa how Mike had been doing. He had a history of anxiety and back in high school he drank to deal with it, but I couldn’t be sure whether he’d told her, and it wasn’t my place to let that slip if he hadn’t.

I’d have to talk to him about what the heck was going on, but for now I had to get us out of the woods.

“Okay,” I said. “We need to figure out where we’re at and how much farther we have to go.”

She nodded. “All right. Let’s sit and get our bearings.”

We found a shady spot just off the trail and sat on a log.

“We’re in the middle,” I said, looking at the map. “We’re almost as far in as we are out. A little less if we backtrack.”

“I don’t want to backtrack,” she said.

“We’ll get out faster.”

“Yeah, but we’ve already seen that. I don’t want to see it again. I want to see what I haven’t seen.”

“We have no water.”

“I have water. It’s gross, but it’s water. I have enough for both of us. Woofarine can drink from the next stream we pass. We’re not gonna die.”

I looked over at her. “You really want to keep going?”

She shrugged. “Yeah. Why not. What if what’s coming is better than what we’ve already done?”

I laughed a little.

The tenacity again.

The woman had a hundred jobs, she never took a day off. She quite literally didn’t slow down. She was like Woofarine, only without the urge to massacre.

I liked it.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll keep going.”

“Let’s take an inventory of what we have,” she said. “Take a little break, have a snack.”

“You have snacks?”

“I always have snacks.”