Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Eli
She sleeps like the hunted do. Surfacing every hour, eyes snapping open, finding me, deciding I'm not the thing that's going to kill her, going back under. I keep the fire fed and I keep my distance and I tell myself the watching is medical. Concussion protocol. Check the pupils. That's all it is.
It is not all it is, and I am too old to lie well to myself.
She's twenty-four. She told me, mumbling, half-asleep, when I asked what year it was to check her head, and then she said it again clear: twenty-four, grad student, geology, like the rocks were an apology.
Twenty-four. I was deployed before she was born.
There is a version of my life in which I have a daughter her age, and that thought is the wall I put up and intend to keep up, because whatever else is wrong with me, I am not a man who looks at a hurt girl half his age under his own roof and lets himself want.
But I'll name it to myself, here in the dark, where naming costs nothing.
There's a pull. It came on when she swung at my light before she even knew if I was friend, and it dug in when she said do you believe me or not with blood on her mouth and didn't look away.
I've spent nine years training myself not to need the warmth of another person in a room.
She's been in mine half a night and the room is already different, and I resent it, and I can't make it stop.
So. Rules.
I make them while she sleeps, the way I used to brief a team before a recovery, because rules are what stand between a man and the thing he shouldn't do.
She gets the bed. I take the floor by the door.
There's a line down the middle of this cabin she doesn't know about and I'll never tell her, and I'll keep my side of it.
I'll feed her, splint her, stand between her and whatever comes up the hill, and when the road opens I'll watch her go down it and back to her rocks and her life and the world that's the right size for a woman her age. That's the rule. That's the whole rule.
Toward dawn she wakes properly, clear-eyed, and catches me at the window with the rifle and the gray light, watching the tree line.
"What are you looking at," she asks.
"Habit." It's true and it's not. I am reading the mountain.
The snow's let up to flurries; the sky's gone that hard scoured blue that comes after the first big one, and that's the trouble.
While it's whiting out, nobody moves. The minute it clears, men can move, if they're determined and equipped and the kind of men who put a body in a mine.
I'm doing the math I spent a career doing.
Two roads up. One impassable from the slide I can see scarred across the south face.
One, the long grade, that a tracked machine or a determined fool on a sled could fight in another day or two of melt-and-freeze. I've got time. Not much.
"You were military." She says it like she's set a sample under a lens. "And then something after. The way you cut the belt. The way you tied the splint." She gestures vaguely at all of me. "The way you don't waste anything."
"Army. Then search and rescue, fifteen years. Then this." I don't elaborate on this. This is a word that holds a great deal.
"And you live up here alone because?—"
"Because I do." Sharper than I mean. She doesn't flinch; she just files it, and I can see her deciding not to push, and somehow her deciding not to push makes me want to give her the thing she didn't push for, which is exactly the kind of trap I built the rules to avoid.
I make breakfast instead. Oats, dried apple, the last of the good coffee. I bring it to her on the stool and step back to my side of the room to eat my own standing up, and she watches me do it.
"You can sit," she says. "I'm not going to bite. My ribs won't allow it."
"I'm fine."
"You're standing across the room from an injured woman so I don't get the wrong idea." Her mouth does something wry. "I clocked the line on the floor about an hour ago, Eli. You're very disciplined. It's a little insulting, honestly. I'm not in a state to be a threat to your virtue."
I should not laugh. I haven't laughed in this cabin in nine years; the dog would file a report. But something escapes me, a single rough sound, and her face lights with the surprise of having caused it, and the rule I just built takes its first crack.
"Eat," I tell her, to cover it. "You lost blood and you're at altitude. You'll get loopy."
"I'm already loopy. I'm having a lovely time being kidnapped by a mountain."
"Rescued."
"Same hospitality, better marketing." She eats. Her color's coming back, and with it the sharpness, the watchful wit, and God help me I like it, I like it the way you like the first warm day after a winter that nearly took you, before you've remembered to be suspicious of warmth.
When she's done she sleeps again, easier this time, and I go back to the window with my coffee gone cold. The mountain lies white and blue and beautiful and is lying to me, the way it always does, pretending nothing is coming.
But something is coming. I've read enough men to know that a man who calls it in instead of chasing is a man with people to call.
There's a number being passed around down in the valley right now, and the number is the girl in my bed, and somewhere a man is looking at a map and finding the long grade and deciding the snow is worth fighting because a witness is worth killing.
Let them come. I cleaned the rifle.
But under that, lower, where I keep the things I don't say, there's a second thought I haven't had in nine years, and it scares me worse than the men will. I'd burn this whole mountain down before I'd let them touch her.
I don't even know her. And it's already true.