Chapter 27 The Present #2
“Don’t touch me,” I hissed. My voice sounded alien, like a recording of myself played back through a dying tape deck.
“Jesus, I was trying to help. You want to fall and crack your skull open?”
“At least then I wouldn’t have to listen to your voice ever again.”
He smiled, all teeth. “You’d miss it. Admit it.”
I almost laughed. Instead, I pressed two fingers to my temple, willing the headrush away. “The only thing I’d miss is oxygen that isn’t contaminated with your narcissism.”
We stood there a minute, locked in our old rhythm.
But the old venom had lost some of its bite. We were too tired for real violence, too depleted for anything but the ghost of our old hate.
“Keep moving,” he said, turning away. “We’ll make camp as soon as we find a dry patch.”
I limped after him, pausing to clutch a sapling and breathe through the latest crest of nausea.
We trudged on, the day dissolving into relentless gray. The trail degraded with every mile, until it was just another lie in the landscape, promising escape and delivering only more wilderness.
The only sign of civilization was the occasional beer can rusting in the weeds, or a shattered bottle glinting like a warning.
I thought of all the other lost souls who’d come through here before us. What was left of them, anyway, besides trash?
When we stopped that night, Caiden made camp in silence, his hands moving with rote precision. I watched him, hating his competence, envying it, too.
My own hands shook as I tried to assemble a lean-to from fallen branches. The first one snapped in my grip, the second slipped and landed on my foot. I swore, loud, and flung the stick into the trees.
Caiden looked up, eyes hollow. “You want to break your foot? Go ahead. Less work for me in the morning.”
“Fuck off,” I spat, but there was no heat left in my voice. “Just—fuck off.”
He didn’t reply, just hunkered down by the fire, stabbing at it with a forked stick. The light flickered off his face, carving out the bones. I sat across from him, knees drawn to my chest, and let the silence fill in the spaces between us.
I slept fitfully, haunted by the howling wind and the hollow ache in my belly.
My dreams were fevered.
Shane and Sabrina, safe and oblivious, laughing in a place made of warmth and food and light. Lillian appeared, her voice muffled and distant, panic in her eyes as she reached for me but dissolved to river water the moment I touched her.
When dawn bled into the world, gray and cold and merciless, I woke to the sound of Caiden urinating just beyond the fire’s ash ring.
That was intimacy, too, I supposed: to know the color and sound of a nemesis’s urine before you’d ever seen him truly weep.
We broke camp without words. My body felt less like a vessel and more like a collection of punishments.
My hands shook so badly I couldn’t lace my own boots, but I got them on anyway, fingers rigid claws, a parody of willpower.
Around midmorning, we hit the river again.
There was no sign of a bridge. The water was fast and cold, and the noise of it was so loud it seemed to bounce inside my ribcage.
The sight of the water filled me with dread. The memory of the kayak crash whirled throughout my mind.
Caiden planted himself at the bank and stared across, scanning for some trick of geography, some hidden answer in the violence of the current.
The other side was maybe twenty yards, maybe a hundred. It might as well have been a mile of open sea, for all it mattered to me. I hovered at his shoulder, silent, pulling my arms around myself as if I could wring warmth out of my own bones.
“We’re crossing here,” he said. No question, no room for negotiation.
“Any particular reason?” My voice was a colorless monotone, scraped raw from cold and sleeplessness.
He spent a long moment chewing the inside of his cheek. “It’s the only way forward. If we try to backtrack, we’ll lose another day. Maybe more.”
I saw the logic, but logic doesn’t account for the way the river seemed to pulse, like it was hungry. The rocks that jutted from the water were wet and mossy, spaced just far enough apart to demand a leap of faith with every step.
It was a cartoon-trap: step, slip, crack your skull open, and wash downstream until your bones hooked on a logjam.
He set off, slow and deliberate, weight balanced forward. I watched him, hating the grace of his movement, the way his body seemed to anticipate the mutiny of the rocks.
He made it halfway before he turned, beckoned with one flick of the wrist.
My cue. My doom.
I should have told him no. I should have screamed above the river that if he wanted to lead, he could just keep going, vanish into the wild, leave me to rot.
But I was so very tired of arguing, so even my defiance curdled into compliance. The rocks were slicker than glass. I could feel the vibration of the water through the soles of my shoes.
The first two stones were manageable, if insultingly small: just enough space for both feet, but already laced with a skin of ice. The river roared up around me, the sound a low, primal threat.
I had a moment of vertigo, a flash of the kayak—air, water, air, water—then nothing, the cold bloom of losing myself.
My body remembered. My body did not forgive.
“Keep going,” Caiden called, his voice clipped, impatient, as if we were late for a train instead of inching across a deathtrap. “Don’t overthink it. Just move.”
I moved. My legs shook, the fatigue a mutiny of nerves and sinew. Two more steps and I was within reach; he held his arm out like a lifeline made of thorn.
I reached, but our timing was off and my shoe caught moss, then lost contact altogether.
For one weightless instant I hovered, cartoon-like, suspended over nothing, before the world snapped back and I careened into the water.
It was not cold; it was a murder. The river slammed my ribs, knifed the breath out of me, and spun my body under with a violence that was almost personal.
My lungs tried to gasp but filled with wet. I felt my skull strike something hard and for a second the world went black and red and black again.
My hands clawed upward toward what I thought was light, but my arms felt detached, as if they belonged to something already dead.
I kicked, or tried to. The current only sucked harder, greedy to keep me.
Then hands. A fist in the collar of my shirt, a bruising grip that wrenched me up and sideways, choking me on air and water and shame.
I caught a flash of Caiden’s face underwater, warped and monstrous, then we broke surface together, gasping and clutching at each other, both animals now.
He dragged me onto a rock shelf, half-hauling, half-flinging my body onto the moss. I convulsed, retching river and black spit, my vision flecked with static. His mouth was near my ear, voice a snarl: “What the fuck is wrong with you? I told you not to overthink it!”
He slammed his palm into my back, forcing the water out of me in a series of wet, wracking coughs. Each convulsion sent shards of pain up my throat; I tasted iron and moss and the raw bile of humiliation.
“Jesus, Amelia, you want to die out here? Because you’re doing a hell of a job.” His face hovered inches from mine, a mask of fury and fear. I could see the pulse hammering in his neck, the quiver in his jaw.
“No! I don’t want to die. I’m weak and it all happened too fast. You could have just let me drown.”
For a second, I thought he might hit me, or kiss me, or kill me just to be done with it. Instead, he just stared, eyes so alive with contempt that I flinched away.
“I couldn’t do that.”
I didn’t meet his eyes. “How heroic of you. Well… thank you. For pulling me out.”
He huffed in response.
I tried to stand but my knees buckled, sending me slumping to the wet stone. I tucked my hands under my ribs, hugging the ache, refusing to let him see how close I was to breaking.
He climbed up the bank, mud streaking his calves, and turned to watch my struggle.
I tried to follow, hands clawing at grass, legs trembling, nails splitting, until I finally crested beside him, lungs on fire, river water oozing from my nose and ears and every raw seam in my head.
When I collapsed on the mud, he didn’t offer a hand. He just watched, silent, his face a sculpture of judgment and exhaustion.
Above us, the clouds had gone pale, drained of all color, a sky made of dead skin.
I lay there, cheek pressed to the muck, and tried to remember a time before this. Before the hunger, the endless walking, before the river and the pain and Caiden’s voice chiseling at the inside of my skull.
I couldn’t. There was only now, only the cold ache in my ribs and the taste of rot in my mouth and the crawling shame of his eyes on me.
“Get up,” he said, the words flat and empty.
I didn’t move.
He squatted beside me, knees popping in protest, and for a second I thought I saw something like pity in his face. Not true pity, not the soft, saintly stuff for orphans and dogs, but a rougher version, the kind that’s just a few molecules away from disgust.
“You break your head?” he asked. “Or are you just going to lie there until you drown in air?”
I rolled onto my back, blinking at the trees that swayed and smeared overhead, and let the silence hang between us. If I answered, I would cry, and I would rather die than let him see that.
I’d rather rot here in the moss and be eaten by foxes, let my bones melt into dust, let the blackness eat me from the inside out.
The only thing keeping me tethered was the hiss of his breath, the dull thump of his heart, or maybe it was just the echo of my own, too stubborn to quit.
He hovered at my shoulder, watching the microquakes in my chest, tracking the tremor in my jaw. I heard his breath, slow and almost thoughtful, as if he were letting the moment settle in before picking at it.
Then, almost gently, he wiped a smear of mud off my temple with his thumb. The motion was so alien it stunned me into stillness.
His touch lingered a fraction of a second too long, as if he didn’t trust his own hands to let go.
Then he stood, hauled me roughly by the elbow, and set me upright. I wobbled, but stayed vertical. “Don’t die. Not yet,” he said, his voice low, almost a growl. “It’s too much work to drag a corpse through the woods.”
He looked away, jaw tight, and strode off the bank, leaving me alone with the echo of his touch and the cold shudder rippling down my spine.
I hated him for it. More than words, more than silence, I hated him for reminding me I was still alive enough to feel.
That night, the cold chill was still in my bones. The clattering of my teeth and the shivers in my body was enough to keep him awake.
I curled around the last embers of the fire, but nothing in this world could coax the warmth back into my body. Not the feeble flames, not the smothering layers of damp clothing that clung to me like a second, sodden skin.
The cold was an infection, a curse in my marrow, and I hated it as much as I hated who I was sharing it with.
Caiden threw a stick into the blaze, then considered me from across the orange chasm. His face was unreadable, all hard planes in the uncertain light.
I wouldn’t meet his gaze, too busy cataloguing my own failures: the crawling ache in my ribs, the moss still glued to my thighs, the snot leaking from my nose, which I wiped on the back of my sleeve like a child.
My breathing was off, shallow and fast, as if each inhale cost me something I didn’t have to spend.
He leaned back on his elbows, tilting his head to the fractured sky. “You ever stop shaking, or is that a permanent feature now?” he asked, dry as a crypt.
I curled deeper, not dignifying it with an answer. My teeth clicked in reply, the only music the woods cared to provide.
I heard his footsteps crunching across the moss, but I didn’t flinch. I let my teeth chatter, let my body shake and rattle itself to pieces. The only sound was the rasp of my own ragged breathing, a death rattle on repeat.
I wished I could quiet myself, dissolve into the mulch and moss, but I was trapped in my own stupid, useless flesh. I wondered if this was what dying was like: a slow, joyless undoing, every cell mutinying against the next.
Then his shadow blotted out the moonlight. He crouched over me, and for a moment I thought he might smother me with his hands, finish what the river had started.
I almost welcomed it. Better to be murdered by a man than by the indifferent cold.
Instead, he reached down and, with a violence that was almost gentle, hooked his arms under my shoulders and dragged me toward the fire. I wanted to snarl, to sink my nails into his face and scream, but I was too tired, too small.
He settled beside me, his back against a boulder, and pulled me up against his chest, locking my arms under his arms, pinning me to him with the patience of a python.
His body was an oven, every inch coiled with heat that radiated straight to my marrow. It was humiliating, the intimacy of it, the way I molded to the shape of him.
I tried to thrash free, but my limbs wouldn’t obey. I was shivering so hard the world juddered in and out of focus.
“Stop fighting,” he muttered, voice flinty and low. “You’ll warm up faster this way.” I could hear the effort in his throat, the way he ground the tenderness into something cruel. “Don’t flatter yourself, it’s like hugging a stiff, rattling corpse.”
The heat unraveled me, cell by cell, the knots of cold unspooling into aches, then nothing. My breathing slowed. My teeth stuttered, then fell still. I felt the pulse of his heart in my back, a steady thud, and I tried to hate him for the way it steadied mine.
But I couldn’t. All I could do was drift in the space between him and the fire.