Chapter 9 #2
Her training kicked in hard. Memories of the Farm snapped into place.
She cut her harness, hit the deck hard, the cabin groaning above her like an animal that knew it was dying.
Heat licked through a torn panel. She felt the weight of her Glock before she saw it and holstered on instinct.
The carbine was wedged under a seat. She yanked it free, pain ripping her vision into gray for a second. She forced it clear.
Left shoulder pounding with the beat of her heart. Her right wrist burned, and her head spun a bit, in a way that made the edges of the world shorten and black. She tested the right hand on the weapon. She could close. She could press. She could shoot. Good. Sprained, probably. Useless, no.
Every shift of her body was agony, but she crawled to the pilots, touched each neck, and sighed softly.
“Pilots are gone.” She crawled out through a crack where the fuselage had peeled like a tin can.
The night hit her skin like a wet animal, hot and heavy, the smell of jet fuel knifing through the green.
One of her guys was beside the chopper. The other not far from him, both motionless.
Their faces and chests were still. She checked them anyway and swore.
Both of them had been with her for years. Good men.
“I’m the only survivor,” she said, dazed. For a second, grief clawed at her throat, but training took over. Feel later. Move now.
“Copy,” Joker responded, his voice heavy. “Move away from the wreckage. Team is inbound. ETA forty minutes.”
Her breath shook, just once. “Affirm. Moving.”
The jungle took a long breath.
Then came the voices.
Men.
Far away. Too many. Moving toward her.
She staggered into darkness, weapon up along the left wall of trunk and vine, using roots for cover, breath shallow to spare the rib and her injured shoulder.
She put twenty paces between herself and the fire before her body refused to keep pretending. The left arm was painful, and the right wrist sore and stiff. She dropped to a knee behind a buttressed ceiba, set the carbine in a fork of root, and took stock fast and cruel.
With her injuries, it wasn’t ideal to keep using them, but she had no choice.
The ache in her skull reminded her of what she’d taken to get here. Every heartbeat drummed behind her eyes, sharp and heavy, the kind of pain that made the edges of the world shimmer. She blinked hard, forcing the blur to clear. No time to go down now.
The air smelled of sage and burnt pine. For a moment, she saw firelight flicker in the undergrowth, and figures circling it, indistinct, their faces luminous with paint and shadow.
Her head had dropped, her vision blurring. She forced it up.
She looped her belt to sling it tight to her torso. The right wrist pulsed with pain, but she used it, fingers white around the carbine. Focus. She ordered.
Every step drove fire through her shoulders, but she kept moving, ducking low through vines and thorns until she reached a small clearing.
The heat grew unbearable. Her arms pulsed with swelling. She needed water, the colder, the better, to keep the damage down.
Following the sound of rushing water, she pushed through dense undergrowth until moonlight broke ahead. A waterfall spilled down a rock face into a clear pool, mist rising in the humid air.
She stripped off her vest and waded in, the cold hitting like a shock. Her breath caught. Pain flared, then dulled. The current wrapped around her, pulling heat and blood and fear out with it. She ducked under the pouring water, hidden, bracing her back, half-submerged, until her shaking eased.
The roar of the falls drowned out every other sound, a wall between her and whoever was still searching.
Her pulse slowed. Her breathing evened out. For the first time since the crash, she let herself feel the stillness.
A whisper slid through the back of her mind. You could die here without ever knowing what life is really like. Do you want that after you’ve tasted his lips, held his body, saw his gorgeous spirit, ached for him with every beat of your heart? Is it worth it? This isolation, this torment?
Dakota Locklear. Her Bear…
She missed him so much, it was like her body was nothing but pain. How they parted gnawed at her. She had been so harsh, so dismissive. Having him leave was far from her mind, but it was as if someone took her over, or had that just her fear?
Coward.
She closed her eyes as stars formed and fell to earth, turning to fabric in her mind.
It had kept her warm through winter, its pattern stitched into her bones like history.
Wi?á?pi Owí??a. Her star quilt, a handcrafted heirloom from her grandmother she no longer thought she deserved.
Her fingers curled into the fabric, soft and alive beneath her skin, and her chest tightened with the weight of everything she’d failed to become.
At thirteen, everyone said she’d begun her path.
When nothing came, it started to feel like failure.
Her grandmother’s eyes had been confident at the gifting ceremony, then as time wore on and she heard nothing, received nothing from the ancestors, those wizened eyes went to uncertainty, then doubt, then finally faded into a deep disappointment.
She’d said to wait, that the spirits would speak when they were ready, but even now Bailee was still waiting.
The chosen one who had never been chosen.
Bailee sobbed softly, the fabric clenched in her hand, then it slipped away like water as liquid replaced it. Her heart tightened, the memory of how she’d locked it into a trunk, like an unbearable promise unfulfilled.
Her radio clicked once in her ear, and she jerked against the stone at her back. “Eagle Two, Razor has your scent. Team is moving.” Joker again. Not a promise. A plan. She let the words pass through her like water.
It was time to move. She slipped out of the waterfall, looked around for any danger, then when she decided it was clear, she climbed the bank and disappeared into the shadows.
Bailee moved through the jungle like she’d been born to it.
Every rise and hollow registered without thought.
She stayed low, using the ground for cover, avoiding the ridges where moonlight could expose her.
Bark scraped her arms as she cut corners too tight, but she didn’t slow down.
The air shifted. She glanced back. Pursuit.
Seconds mattered now. Minutes could get her killed.
Between breaths, something else began to move in.
Not sound. Not word.
A drum that didn’t come from human hands, a far-off pulse in the marrow. Not a literal drum, not something any man could measure. The earth below her, beating. A reminder.
She blinked, seeing a rushing river, the sound of a girl’s laughter scattered over it like bright fish.
Her cousin stood on the far bank just the way she had in memory, half turned, hair caught in a wind that didn’t blow here, eyes carrying light the way a sky carries morning.
The women behind her didn’t show their faces.
Their presence ran around the circle like breath.
Bailee’s mouth moved, and a name came without the voice to hold it.
The girl didn’t accuse her. The girl only waited.
The waiting was worse than judgment. The waiting meant there was still something to hear.
Wolakota.
The old word rose the way smoke would rise if the night was very still. The balance she never granted herself. Right relationship. Not a concept, not a thesis. A way of walking. Of carrying where you came from and where you were going in the same body without letting either break the other.
Her grandmother’s breath in winter over hot stones. Sage smoke rising from braid and bowl. The way the wind, t?até, used to press its palm against the door before it came in.
You haven’t been forgotten, child, said nothing and everything at once. You haven’t been listening.
She came to at the sound of another voice, flesh and blood this time, not vision.
Men downrange, closing through the understory, too certain by half.
She lay in a small stream, felt the cold through her shirt, her head fuzzy, and her body throbbing from passing out.
But she took a breath and lined the sight.
Her wrist screamed. She made the pain very small and very distant and let the geometry do what it knew.
Two figures broke through the brush, offset in a staggered line.
The first carried his rifle too low—fatal rookie mistake.
The second swung wide, his elbow flaring with the motion.
Bailee didn’t hesitate. She took the first in the throat, then shifted half an inch and put the next round into the armpit of the second, right where his vest ended.
Both dropped fast, the jungle swallowing the sound.
Her vision went black around the edges. She lowered her forehead to the leaves and forced a breath, just one, steady and slow. The world stabilized with it. When the pounding in her ears eased, she pushed back to her knees.
“Keep moving,” Bailee whispered. She wasn’t sure if she meant it for her legs or for the small, frightened part of her that wanted to lie down in the stream and let it take her.
She pushed to her feet. The jungle seemed to grab at her, vines catching across her shoulders and arms. She tore through them with her left forearm and felt the sting of new cuts, pain she’d deal with later.
Behind her, branches cracked, more men closing in. She angled across the slope, used a narrow game trail to throw them off, then cut hard into the brush. The green closed around her, thick and smothering, the air heavy as a hand over her mouth.
Pain came in waves, sharp, then dull, then sharp again. The night pressed down, coaxing her to stop, to fall, to give in. She wanted to. She didn’t.