Chapter 33
Theda ran.
The trees were dense, and the ground was uneven, and she couldn't see more than a few feet ahead in the dark, but she ran anyway, her boots finding the ground and pushing off it, her breath coming in hard pulls that burned all the way down.
She'd been moving for an hour at least, maybe more. Long enough that her lungs had stopped asking her to slow down and started demanding it. She didn't slow down.
The forest floor was treacherous in the dark. Roots she couldn't see, rocks that shifted under her weight, patches of frozen ground that sent her sliding sideways before she caught herself on a branch. She went down hard once, her palms hitting the dirt, and was up before she'd finished falling.
Her arm screamed with pain.
The scrape from the wagon step during the fight ached with pain. A heat filled it, that felt like a fever coming on. She pressed her arm against her side and kept moving.
She thought about Jem. She thought about the way he'd looked at her in the dark between the trees, both hands on her face, memorizing her the way she'd been memorizing him.
She thought about his hands uncurling her fingers from his shirt and the particular gentleness of that, how careful he'd been even then.
She pressed her lips together and kept running.
The sky was changing at the edges, the black softening toward grey. Dawn was coming. She didn't let herself think about what was happening back in that camp. She couldn't afford to.
Her lungs burned. Her feet had gone past pain into a dull, spreading numbness from the cold and the ground, and she could feel every rock she'd landed on in the arches of her feet and the balls of her ankles.
She hit an incline without warning and scrambled up it on her hands and knees, her arm shrieking at her when she put weight on it. At the top, she stopped for thirty seconds, doubled double, hands on her knees, pulling in air.
She thought about Phineas.
He would come. He was already coming, most likely, riding hard toward the eastern outcrop with the dawn. She had to get to him before he rode into whatever Ransom had planned. She had to warn him.
She straightened and looked at the sky and tried to remember which direction she'd been running, whether it matched what Jem had told her.
Get to your brother. Don't stop.
She started moving again.
Slower now, her body making its complaints known whether she listened or not. The arm was the thing that worried her most.
That and Jem. He’d protected her. She thought about what it had cost him to do that.
She picked up her pace and ran harder.
Hoofbeats. Theda heard noises before she saw anything. She spun and ran the other way, back into the trees, her lungs already burning, her arm screaming. Ransom's men must have found her trail.
The hoofbeats got louder.
They were faster than her. She already knew that, and she kept running anyway because stopping wasn't something she would do. She cut left around a stand of pines, her boots slipping on the frozen ground, caught herself on a trunk, and pushed off.
“Theda!” Her name came through the trees. Someone was calling for her. They didn't sound angry, they sounded…worried.
She didn't stop. Her mind threw the voice away as wishful thinking, the kind of thing an exhausted person heard in the dark.
“Theda!”
Louder this time. Closer. She knew that voice. She had known that voice her entire life. She stopped.
She turned slowly, her hand still on the pine trunk, her chest heaving. The horses came through the trees, and the grey early light caught the first rider's face, and she stood there and stared.
Phineas.
His head was bandaged, white cloth wrapped from his temple to his crown, a dark stain at the side where the wound had bled through.
He was upright in the saddle, but she could see from twenty feet away what it was costing him. Behind him, riders spread between the trees. Some in the rough coats of the wagon train men, others in the blue uniform she recognized from the army fort.
She couldn't move.
Phineas swung down from his horse before it had fully stopped, and covered the distance between them, and she walked into him, and his arms came around her, and she pressed her face against his shoulder and held on.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
He pulled back and held her at arm's length, his eyes moving over her face, her arm, the state of her dress.
“You're hurt,” he said.
“I'm all right.” Her voice came out steadier than she expected. “Your head…
“It's fine.” He wasn't convincing about it.
“Hawkins made it to the army camp, and they were coming back to help us. They rode out with us at first light.” His jaw tightened.
“I had no idea where you'd be, or if you'd be at the exchange. No one showed up, so we started looking for their camp when Hawkins heard noises. It’s really you.” Phineas shook his head. “Can you ride?”
“Phineas.” She stepped back. “We can't leave.”
Shock and confusion mingled on his face.
“Jem is back there.” She watched his face. “He got me out. He went back himself; he created the chaos so I could run, and Ransom…” She stopped. “Ransom will kill him. You know he will. He has no reason not to.”
Phineas gripped her shoulders a little tighter.
“You can’t worry about that right now, Theda--”
“He sacrificed himself.” Her voice dropped. “He knew what he was walking back into, and he went anyway. We can't just ride for the fort and leave him there.”
“Theda--”
“I can guide you back.” She held her brother's gaze. “I know exactly where the camp is. I think I can retrace it.” She looked past him at the army riders, at Leland behind them, at the faces she recognized from the wagon train. “You have a lot of men with you, Phineas, please, we can’t leave him.”
Phineas looked at her for a long moment.
“He's one of us,” she said quietly. “Whatever he was before, he's one of us now. He's proven that.”
Phineas looked at the bandage on her arm. At her torn dress. At her face.
Then he looked back at the riders behind him.
“Commander Nathan,” Phineas looked up at the closest official. “We are going to have to help rescue Jem. He was a part of my wagon train.”
Commander Nathan showed no emotion; he simply nodded.
“Leland.” Phineas’ voice carried. “Form up.”
He turned back to Theda and held out his hand to help her onto the horse one of the men had brought over.
“Show me where,” he said. “But then you need to get back to camp.” Phineas kept his voice low. “We'll get him out. You've done enough.”
“You don't know where they are. You’ll need me. And what if he’s injured? He’ll need me right away.”
“We'll find them, we’ll help him. It will all work out. But right now, you need to focus on your recovery.’
“Phineas.” She looked at him, trying to show him just how important it was for her.
“I know every turn. I know where the camp sits in the pass, where the guards post, where the fires are.” She held his gaze.
“You could spend two hours searching and still come up on the wrong side. I can take you there so much faster.”
Phineas’ jaw worked. “You're hurt.”
“My arm hurts a little, but I can ride.”
“It's not just your arm, and you know it.” Phineas stepped closer, dropping his voice further. “You've been up all night, you're running on fear and no sleep, and you want to ride back into a camp full of armed men who just had you held prisoner.” He shook his head. “I can't let you do that.”
“He went back for me.” Theda's voice shook as she said it quietly, and she felt the full weight of it as she said it. “He knew what Ransom would do, and he went back anyway. He put himself between me and all of it so I could run.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I'm not leaving him there. I won't.”
“Theda--”
“I love him. I know what he was. I know what he did. And I know what he chose, and I know what it cost him.” She pressed her lips together for a moment. “I won't leave him behind when he was willing to risk everything for me. I won't do it.”
Phineas looked at her. His eyes were tired and pained.
“Miss Calloway.”
The commander's voice came from behind Phineas. He was a broad man with a weathered face. He looked at Theda with something that wasn't quite approval but was close to it.
“If you know the location, we're wasting time.” The commander looked at Phineas. “Let her ride. We'll keep her back from the front.”
Phineas held her gaze for one more second. Then he stepped aside.
As they rode, she talked the commander through what she knew: the camp layout, the position of the guards, the two fires, the tent at the center. Leland rode on her other side, quiet and listening, occasionally asking a question she answered as precisely as she could.
The commander nodded and conferred with two of his men, and by the time they'd covered half the distance, they'd settled on a plan.
Two waves, coming from opposite sides of the pass, the army riders taking the eastern approach, while Phineas and the wagon train men came in from the west. She would stay at the tree line until it was clear.
She accepted the condition without arguing. The sky was bright with the morning sun, the dawn settled in around them, the pass walls rising on either side.
She recognized the terrain. She recognized the particular shape of the ridge above them, the way the trees thinned toward the eastern edge.
They were close.
She closed her eyes for just a moment, the horse moving steadily beneath her.
I don't know how this ends. I don't know what we're riding into. But You do. So I'm asking You to go ahead of us. Go ahead of me, into that camp, and bring him out. Please.
She opened her eyes. An unsettled feeling made its way through her as she tried to imagine what had happened to Jem.
The fear was still there. She wasn't going to pretend it wasn't. But underneath it, something else had settled, quiet and immovable, like bedrock under moving water.
She hadn't been wrong about him. Whatever Ransom had made of Jem, whatever he'd done before the storm took his memory and Theda Calloway treated his injuries, the man who had kissed her forehead in the dark and walked back toward danger so she could run was the real one.
She was certain of it.
She lifted her chin and kept riding, more determined than ever to save the man she’d come to love.