Chapter Twelve
NASH
There is intimate, and then there is "sharing a two-person emergency shelter" intimate.
The tent is too small for what's happening inside it.
It's designed to keep two humans alive by trapping every BTU of body heat in a space the size of a coffin.
It works. It's warm. But it also means that when I wake up, Aris's head is resting on my chest, her leg is thrown over my thigh, and her hand is fisted in the fabric of my thermal shirt like she's trying to keep me from floating away.
I stare up at the orange fabric inches from my face and try to regulate my breathing.
Friends. That was the deal.
But lines in the snow have a way of disappearing when you almost drown in a frozen river and spend the night clinging to each other for survival.
And it's not just the proximity. It's yesterday.
I close my eyes, seeing it again—her on the ice, soaked and freezing, explaining leverage while I held up a snowmobile. Not panicking. Then her across the fire last night, wearing my shirt, soot on her cheek, not scared of the dark anymore.
I gently, carefully, lift her arm off me. She stirs but doesn't wake. I slide out of the sleeping bag, unzip the door with agonizing slowness, and roll out into the cold.
The morning air hits me like a bucket of ice water. Good. I need it.
I stand up, stretching the stiffness out of my back. The river is a ribbon of white silence below us. The hole where we lost the sled has frozen over, leaving just a dark, jagged scar on the ice to mark where our generator and satellite phone went down.
I walk over to the surviving sled. We have food. We have fuel for the machine. We have the solar panels. We're not going to die. But the margin for error just got razor-thin.
I set up the solar array, angling the panels to catch the weak winter sun. It's going to take all day to charge the collar batteries this way. Patience. That's the new game.
"Nash?"
I turn. Aris is crawling out of the tent. She looks wrecked, hair a tangled mess, eyes puffy, wearing my oversized wool shirt like a dress. She looks absolutely beautiful.
"Morning," I say, turning back to the stove to start coffee. "How did you sleep?"
"Like the dead," she says, standing up and wrapping her arms around herself. She looks at the river, then at the solar panels, and then her eyes widen.
"What day is it?"
The question comes out sharp, panicked.
"Friday," I say. "Why?"
She goes pale. "Friday. It's Friday."
She starts patting her pockets, then stops, remembering. Her hand goes to her mouth. "Oh god. The check-in. The weekly check-in."
"Aris, your phone went down with the sled," I say, as gently as I can. "And even if it hadn't, the cold would have killed the battery by now."
"I know, I know, but I didn't … I didn't process the day." She starts pacing, tramping a frantic circle in the snow. "Dean Reynolds calls every Friday at noon. Sharp. If I don't answer, he logs it. One missed check-in with no explanation, and he has everything he needs to trigger the clause."
"The clause?"
"The 'Non-Compliance/Safety Protocol' clause," she recites, like it's a scripture she's memorized. "It allows the university to freeze the grant funds immediately and recall the expedition if the lead researcher fails to maintain consistent communication."
She stops pacing and looks at me, her eyes wild. "They'll pull the money, Nash. It's over."
"Aris, stop." I walk over to her, putting my hands on her shoulders to halt her spinning. "Breathe. You're in the Arctic. Accidents happen. Equipment fails. When we get back, you explain it."
"You don't explain things to Reynolds. He's the dean!
" She pulls away from me, her voice rising.
"He controls everything, Nash! My tenure track, my lab space, my reputation.
If he pulls the plug, I go back to being a junior adjunct teaching Intro to Biology to hungover freshmen.
I lose Waldo. I lose Thaddeus's legacy."
I watch her crumble. This anxiety is deeper and more corrosive than the physical fear she showed on the first day, the sort born of a life spent pleasing people in offices who have never stepped foot outside a city.
I hate Dean Reynolds. I've never met the man, but I want to punch him.
I pour a cup of coffee and walk over to her. "Drink this."
She takes it automatically, her hands shaking.
"Aris, look at me."
She lifts her head. Her eyes are wet.
"You are not going to lose your career," I say firmly. "You know why?"
"Why?"
"Because you have the data. You have the photos. You have the GPS tracks. You have proof that Waldo is doing exactly what Thaddeus said he was doing."
I hold her gaze, steady and level. "Let Reynolds pull the plug. Let him freeze the account. When you walk into his office and drop a hard drive on his desk with the most significant caribou behavioral data of the decade, he's going to look like a moron for firing you."
"You think?" she asks, a tiny glimmer of hope sparking in the misery.
"I know. Universities like money, right? And prestige?"
"They love prestige."
"Well, you're bringing them a gold mine. 'The Thorne-Brine Discovery.' You think he's going to throw that away because you missed a phone call?"
She takes a sip of the coffee, considering. "Thorne-Brine. I like that order."
"See? You're already branding it."
She lets out a shaky breath, the tension in her shoulders dropping an inch. "I just … I hate the feeling of them waiting. Of him sitting in his office, checking his watch, marking a red X next to my name. It feels like I'm failing."
"That's the trap," I say quietly. "That's how they keep you on the leash. They make you think the paperwork is the work. It's not."
I gesture to the frozen river, the endless spruce forest, the mountains rising in the distance. "This is the work, Aris. Tracking the animal. Surviving the cold. Solving the problem with a shovel when the tech fails. That's the job. The rest is just noise."
She looks at the landscape, really seeing it. "Thaddeus used to say that. 'The map is not the territory.'"
"Smart man. He'd probably tell Reynolds to shove his check-in schedule up his—"
"Nash!" She laughs, startled.
"Just saying. Thaddeus sounds like my kind of guy."
Her face opens up, and the knot in my chest loosens. "He would have loved you. He would have hated your politics, probably, and he would have lectured you about lead ammunition, but he would have loved you."
"I use copper," I say. "Better for the scavengers."
"Of course you do." She shakes her head, looking at me with that expression that makes me want to do stupid, reckless things. "You always have the right answer, don't you?"
"I'm a guide," I say, standing up. "My job is to look like I know what I'm doing, even when I'm making it up."
She stands up too, finishing the coffee. "So what's the plan, Guide? We have no sat phone. We have limited power. And we have a wolf pack somewhere behind us.
"We can't do the full mission, can we?" she asks.
"Without the generator. Without the sat phone to call in the airlift.
Without the batteries we lost. Even with the darts, I can't safely immobilize a seven-hundred-pound caribou alone—not without a recovery team on standby.
We can't do the capture. We can't put a new collar on him. "
I don't answer right away. I let her work through it.
"So what can we do?"
"The plan just got smaller," I say. "We find Waldo. We trigger the release. You take home the year of stored data on the old unit. Waldo runs free. And you come back next season with a full team to finish what Thaddeus started."
"Without checking in?"
"Without asking for permission."
She nods slowly. "Okay. Without asking for permission."
"But first," I say, pointing to the solar array. "We need to wait for those batteries. We can't release his old collar if the trigger doesn't have full juice. If it fails, the collar stays on forever. We can't risk that."
"So we're stuck here today?"
"We're holding position. We can do some recon on foot, check for tracks, but we need to let the sun do its work."
The sound of an engine reaches us a few minutes before noon, rolling up the river corridor from the south, right around the hour Reynolds would be dialing a dead phone from his Fairbanks office.
Aris freezes with a tin mug halfway to her mouth. "Plane?"
"Beaver." I'd know that radial engine in my sleep. "That's Hank."
He comes in low over the river, maybe two hundred feet off the deck, skis flashing in the sun.
The wings waggle twice, hello, and then he banks wide and lines up on the gravel bar below camp.
The side window is open. A dark shape tumbles out, drops in a clean arc, and lands with a thump we feel through our boots.
Then he's gone, droning north like a man with other errands.
We walk out to the bar together. It's a canvas mail bag, army surplus, sand-weighted at the bottom and tied off with baling twine. May's block lettering is stenciled on the side: THORNE EXPEDITION. AIRMAIL.
Aris kneels on the frozen gravel and picks at the knot. Her gloved hands fumble it twice before it gives.
Inside, six cinnamon rolls sit wrapped in so many layers of foil they're still faintly warm at the center, packed in with two pairs of wool socks, a paperback western with a broken spine and a moose on the cover, and an envelope with her name on it in May's looping cursive.
Taped to the foil is an itemized invoice. Rhys has billed us for six rolls, two pairs of socks, one previously enjoyed novel, and "aerial delivery services," then crossed out every line and circled the zero balance at the bottom. Documented for the record, it says.
"My brother would invoice a sunset if he thought it'd annoy someone," I tell her.
She doesn't laugh. She's reading May's note, and her eyes have gone glassy.
She hands it over without a word.
Hank flies the river every few days now, whether you like it or not. We figured the silence wasn't your idea. Wave if you're alive. Eat the rolls before Nash does. May.