Brat On My Mountain

1. Emilia

EMILIA

The heater died two hours ago.

I grip the steering wheel so hard my knuckles have gone white, then past white into something closer to blue.

The vinyl is cracked and frozen under my fingers, and every bump in the road sends a jolt up through my wrists into my shoulders where the tension has built a permanent home.

I paid fourteen hundred dollars cash for this car in a Texaco parking lot outside of Reno, handed the bills to a man who smelled like menthol cigarettes and didn't ask my name.

That was the whole point. No name. No paper trail. No breadcrumbs for anyone to follow.

The road ahead is a narrow tongue of asphalt licking its way up the mountain, bordered on one side by a guardrail so rusted it might as well be decorative and on the other by a sheer rock face wearing a beard of ice.

My headlights carve weak yellow cones into the darkness, catching the snow that falls in thick, lazy spirals.

It's beautiful. I know it's beautiful. But beauty is a luxury I can't afford right now, not when my teeth are chattering so hard I can hear them clicking over the engine's labored whine.

I curl my toes inside my ruined loafers.

The leather is still damp from when I stepped into a puddle of slush at the last gas station, the only stop for sixty miles in either direction according to the faded road sign.

My silk blouse, the one I was wearing when I walked out the front door of the penthouse like I was going to get coffee and never came back, is torn at the left shoulder seam.

I'd grabbed one of the sedan's moth-eaten blankets from the back seat and draped it over my lap, but it smells like motor oil and dog hair and does almost nothing against the cold that seeps through the floor panels.

The dashboard clock reads 11:47 PM. I haven't slept in thirty-one hours.

Maybe thirty-two. The math gets fuzzy after a certain point, the numbers sliding around in my head like beads on a broken abacus.

Every time my eyelids start to droop, I dig my nails into the meat of my palm and force them open again.

Falling asleep means drifting off the road.

Drifting off the road means dying in a ravine where no one would find me until spring thaw, if anyone bothered looking at all.

And someone is looking. I know that with the same certainty I know my own middle name.

Right now, back in the city, phones are ringing.

People are being woken up. Favors are being called in with the quiet, surgical precision that has always defined how things get done in that world.

He won't come himself. He never does the dirty work.

But the people he sends will be thorough, and they will be patient, and they will check every motel registry, every gas station camera, every car rental database within a five-hundred-mile radius.

Which is why I bought a beater with cash from a stranger and drove north into the mountains where there are no cameras and no motel registries and nothing but snow and silence and the ragged sound of my own breathing.

The engine coughs.

I sit up straighter, both hands locked on the wheel at ten and two.

The RPM needle twitches, drops, recovers.

Under the hood, something makes a sound I haven't heard before, a high, thin whine like a kettle reaching its boiling point.

I ease my foot off the gas and the whine gets worse, not better, climbing in pitch until it vibrates through the dashboard and into my fingertips.

"No. No, no, no. Come on."

The temperature gauge. I haven't been noticing the temperature gauge because the heater died and I assumed the engine was running cold along with everything else.

But the needle is buried deep in the red, pinned all the way to the right, and even as I register what that means the first tendrils of white smoke curl up from the edges of the hood.

They rise in thin streams at first, almost delicate, then thicken into a plume that hits the windshield and spreads across the glass like fog.

I flip the wipers on instinct and they just smear it, the blades scraping uselessly against the outside of the glass while the smoke billows from somewhere underneath, everywhere at once, and then there's a sound like a gunshot.

The hood bucks. A geyser of steam erupts from the front of the car, white and scalding, and the engine seizes with a grinding metallic shriek .

I slam the brakes and the sedan fishtails on the icy road, the back end swinging wide toward the guardrail.

I wrench the wheel the opposite direction, overcorrect, and the car lurches to a stop at a crooked angle across the center line.

The engine ticks once, twice, and goes silent.

Steam pours from under the crumpled hood into the frozen night air.

The headlights flicker and hold, casting their weak glow into the blizzard.

Beyond them, the road stretches upward into absolute nothing.

No lights. No houses. No sign of civilization in any direction, just the dark shapes of pine trees hunched under the weight of snow and the mountain rising above them, indifferent and enormous.

I sit in the dead car and listen to the wind howl through the gap where the passenger window doesn't quite seal. My breath comes out in white clouds. The cold is already creeping in faster now, without the engine.

I am completely alone.

I give myself thirty seconds to fall apart.

I lean my forehead to the steering wheel, squeeze my eyes shut, and let the panic wash through me in a hot, nauseating wave.

My hands shake. Not from the cold, though that's getting worse by the second.

This is the deep-body tremor that comes from running on adrenaline and gas station coffee for thirty-one hours straight, from knowing that every minute I sit still is a minute closer to being found.

The kind of shaking that starts in the marrow and works its way out.

Thirty seconds. That's all I get.

I count them down in my head, and when I hit zero I sit up, wipe my face with the back of my hand, and open the car door.

The cold hits me like a wall. Not a gentle wall, not a breeze or a chill.

This is something solid and mean, a physical force that shoves the air out of my lungs and replaces it with broken glass.

The wind cuts through my silk blouse like it isn't there, and my skin erupts in goosebumps so violent they hurt.

I step out onto the road and my right loafer slides on a patch of black ice.

I catch myself on the door frame, fingers burning against the frozen metal, and stand there for a moment getting my balance.

The steam is still pouring from under the hood but it's thinning now, the plume going from angry white to a grudging gray.

I walk around to the front of the car, the snow already soaking through my loafers and numbing my toes past the point of pain into something worse.

Something quiet and final. I know what frostbite is.

I know what it does. I grew up in temperature-controlled environments, heated marble floors and cashmere throws draped over every surface, and I know absolutely nothing about surviving real cold, the kind that kills people.

The hood latch is hot enough to sting when I pop it.

The hood itself won't open all the way because the steam warped something in the hinge mechanism, so I have to jam my fingers underneath and force it up.

It groans and sticks at a crooked angle, propped open by a rod I have to find and fit into a slot by feel because the steam is still curling up into my face, smelling like burnt rubber and hot metal and something chemical I can't name.

I stare at the engine.

It stares back at me, a blackened and incomprehensible tangle of hoses and metal blocks and wires going everywhere and nowhere.

A thick green fluid has sprayed across the entire engine bay, coating everything in a slick, alien sheen.

Coolant. Even I know that much. The coolant is supposed to stay inside wherever coolant lives, and it is very much outside, dripping off the underside of the hood and pooling on the asphalt below the bumper in a spreading neon puddle.

I reach for a hose. I don't know which one.

It's the closest one, fat and black and split along its length like an overripe fruit, and when I touch it a fresh gush of green liquid pours over my fingers.

Hot enough to make me jerk my hand back with a hiss, shaking off the fluid that's already cooling on my skin in the mountain air.

"Okay. Okay, so the hose is broken."

I say it out loud because the silence up here is the kind of silence that has weight.

It presses against my eardrums. The wind has died down to a low moan through the trees, and without the engine running there is nothing else.

No traffic. No distant highway noise. No aircraft overhead.

Just me and the drip of coolant and the soft, relentless whisper of snow falling on snow.

I look down the road the way I came. Nothing but darkness and the faint impression of tire tracks already filling in with fresh powder.

Somewhere down there, maybe two hundred miles back, maybe less, a phone rang in a quiet office and a man in an expensive suit answered it.

And another man, my father, spoke four or five words into the receiver.

That's all it ever takes. Four or five words, spoken in that flat, pleasant tone he uses when he's already decided how something will end.

She left. Find her.

Or maybe just the last two. Find her. Because the context wouldn't need explaining.

Because everyone in his orbit understands the rules.

Virgie assets don't walk away. Virgie assets don't make their own decisions.

And his daughter, his only daughter, his quiet and compliant and perfectly groomed daughter, is the most valuable asset of all.