Chapter 27 The Present
THE PRESENT
AMELIA
Being stuck out here in the Colorado wilderness was a nightmare. An actual nightmare. It had been a few days since the kayak accident, and I feel as if we were wandering the woodlands in circles, never actually coming any closer to civilization.
The tension was insane. We couldn’t go a few minutes without bickering and arguing. There were maybe a few civil moments, but not enough.
The two of us could be bridged by friction alone, by the heat generated from scraping two ruined things together until they caught.
But I knew better: no matter how hard I tried to lose myself to anger, to hatred, to memory, the needle always dropped back in the same groove. His name, my name, our names twinned like wounds.
The fire was dying. The world around us was black and bottomless, the trees a silent jury of skeletons.
I caught myself staring at him, the way his hands hovered over the fire, the raw pink of his knuckles, the scars tracing the backs of his fingers.
He was always marked by violence, even when he wasn’t using it.
He noticed me looking, of course. He always noticed. He smirked, lips twisting upward in a way that made me want to claw them off his face.
“You going to keep staring, or are you going to say something?” he asked, low and almost curious. I could see the spark in his eyes: the challenge, the hunger for a fight.
“I was just wondering if you’d consider throwing yourself into the fire,” I said, voice flat. “I hear it’s a quick way to get warm.”
He scowled. “Ladies first.”
A branch snapped somewhere in the woods. I flinched. Caiden didn’t, but I could see his muscles tense, every line in his body preparing for disaster.
For a second, I wondered if there was anything he couldn’t turn into a contest of endurance, a test to see who would break first.
We sat in silence. The fire gnawed slowly at the wood.
At some point, darkness claimed the both of us.
Caiden didn’t bother to wake me when their light came back.
I awoke and he was already breaking down the pathetic camp, his back hunched and his hands moving like the hands of a clock wound too tight.
I watched him from the ground, hating him, wanting him to keel over dead just to prove I could survive without him.
But I knew I couldn’t, not really, not with every muscle in my body melted to a useless slush.
Sometimes I watched the shadows between the trees just to see if my mind would paint in a monster, a bear or a wolf or even Lillian, arms outstretched and mouth leaking black water.
But there was only ever Caiden.
He was the only thing truly alive out here, and he was proof that even after all the entropy and rot, there was something left to hate.
The path—all paths, really—ended in mud and darkness.
Sometimes I let myself hope that he would slip, that his foot would misjudge the mulch-masked mud and his body would tumble into the undertow of roots and fallen logs and vanish, leaving me to the cold and the silence and the long, patient hunger.
But he never did. Caiden moved through the world with a kind of primal glide, all instinct and muscle, and even when he faltered I knew he would never not get back up. I hated that about him the most.
By the third night, I’d started to lose my grip on the difference between waking and dreaming. The world blurred at the edges; tree trunks swayed and bled into each other, the sky was a gray bruise, the wind a howl that never stopped.
I started talking to myself just ground myself to reality.
At dusk, we found a dead deer. Half-rotted, ribs ripped open, fur sloughing off like wet moss. I caught the sweet, metallic rot on the wind before I saw it, and gagged, but Caiden only paused, staring with a cold calculation.
He crouched and inspected the corpse as if it might hold a secret, fingers hovering over the snapped spine, then looked at me, his gaze unreadable.
He said, “Something bigger than us did this,” and I knew it wasn’t a threat but a fact, a warning from one animal to another.
I wanted to blame him for it anyway.
I stared at the carcass, the thicket of yellowed bone clawing at the night air, and thought of Lillian sprawled lifeless on her bedsheets, her body already leached of color.
I could feel the accusation in his words: we were not the apex predators here. We were nothing. We were meat.
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Maybe it’ll come back and finish the job,” I said, my mouth tasting of copper. “Put us both out of our misery.”
He just shrugged, lips twisting in a way that made me want to claw the expression off his face. “Wouldn’t be the worst way to go.”
We left the carcass behind. The smell followed me for miles, sinking into my sinuses like a disease.
That night, I dreamt of Lillian. She was in the kitchen, dappled in sunlight, her hair curling into a halo, her eyes wide and brown and not yet empty.
She was slicing apples and humming some song I’d never learned the name of.
I circled her, slow as a vulture, waiting for the moment she’d look up and see me.
But she never did. I watched her for what felt like hours, paralyzed by longing and dread, wanting to warn her that she was already dead, that the kitchen, the house, the whole world was just a grave she hadn’t yet lain down in.
I woke up screaming. Caiden didn’t say anything, just stared at the flames until I shut up and curled into myself.
I hated him for his silence, but I hated my own noise more.
The next morning, I sat up and sucked in the freezing air, my teeth picking up where the night left off, chattering like a machine gun.
I watched Caiden kick dirt over the embers, his hands and forearms streaked with soot.
His back looked bent, tired, as if something had finally managed to gnaw a piece out of him.
I wondered what he saw in the dying glow, what hallucination or memory was haunting him.
Maybe he was reliving some bullet-ridden wasteland, or maybe he was just contemplating the infinite new ways I’d inconvenienced him.
When we started walking again, I could barely keep up.
I let Caiden lead, watched the set of his shoulders, the hard swing of his arms. Sometimes he looked back, just to make sure I hadn’t dissolved into the green-black murk.
The path, if you could call it that, was little more than a vein of mud slicing through the trees.
My shoes slipped, my socks congealed with cold water. Every step was a fresh, exquisite misery. I rolled each ache around in my mouth like a stone, savoring it. It was the only taste left to me.
I thought, for the hundredth time, about how easy it would be to just stop. Sit down, lean against a moss-eaten stump, and wait for the earth to reclaim me.
But the memory of Lillian’s corpse—rigid, alone, face gone slack and pale—kept me lurching forward. I would not die her death, not if I could help it.
We crested a ridge around midday. My vision wavered at the edges, a feverish haze brightening every leaf, every shadow. I saw the world in halos, like I was already half-ghost.
My knees locked, and I swayed, woozy with hunger and dehydration. I could hear the throb of blood behind my eyes, the world pulsing in and out of focus like a failing satellite feed.
The trees pinwheeled above me, stars blurring into daylight, and for an instant I was nowhere. Just floating, bodiless, in that gap between misery and oblivion.
Then Caiden’s voice cut through, too loud: “Careful, princess. Wouldn’t want you passing out and making my life any harder.
” He was a few steps ahead, standing on a flat outcrop of stone, arms folded, lips pulled into a knife-edged smirk.
“Unless you want me to drag your corpse the rest of the way.”
I closed my eyes and clenched my fists, nails digging into palm. “I’m not dead yet,” I rasped, the words no more than a strip of sandpaper in my throat.
He didn’t move. Just watched, pupil narrowing as if to see how much further I could be pushed before the breaking point. “If you want to die here, just say so. Might save us both some trouble.”
I staggered after him, every step an act of violence against my own body. Each muscle screamed rebellion, but I kept moving, unwilling to show him that he was right, that I was weaker than he was, that I was still the victim.
The sun glared down from directly above, a white-hot interrogation lamp. Sweat pooled in the hollows of my neck and spine, but my skin felt cold, as though I was already being digested by the world beneath me, inch by inch.
We kept going. Each hour was a fresh torment. The only food we’d seen was a squirrel, flattened and leaking, in the middle of a game trail. It looked like a prophecy. I watched it for too long, its ruined face, its dark, poppy-seed eyes.
I’d never felt more kinship with a dead thing.
The ground leveled out, and the trees thinned, opening onto what passed for a trail. A weedy tire rut, pocked with puddles, barely navigable.
I followed Caiden in silence, though the throb in my head was a chorus of curses. I wanted to hate him, but my hatred was brittle, all flaking edges and hollow bravado. Mostly, I just wanted to collapse.
He slowed. “Stop dragging your feet,” he said, not turning around. “If we lose daylight, we’re done.”
I couldn’t help it. “You’re the one who wanted to go north. I told you we should have doubled back to the river.”
He wheeled on me. “The river’s a trap. It loops back on itself for miles. You want to end up right where we started?”
I laughed, a single note. “Might as well. Maybe we’d find a rescue team. Or a body to eat.”
His lip curled. “That’s not even funny, Amelia.”
“I’m not joking,” I said, and I wasn’t.
Before he could reply, I slipped on a patch of mud, the world teetering left, and he was there, hand clamped around my elbow to steady me.
The contact was jarring, almost electric, a wild jolt that reminded me I still had a heartbeat. I shook him off so hard my shoulder cracked.