Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Eli
Ihear it before she does, and I'm on my feet before I've finished hearing it, which is how it should be. Nine years of quiet and the old wiring still fires clean.
A sled. Snowmobile. Far off, down low, the sound bent and thrown by the cold air so you can't fix it exactly.
But it's on the south side, which means the long grade, which means somebody is fighting the only road that can still be fought, two days after the storm, in conditions a sane man stays home for.
Nobody up here is sane. That's the whole point of up here. But that's also how I know this isn't a sane man's errand.
"That's them," Wren says from the bed. Not a question. She's sitting up, splinted leg and all, and her voice is steady in the way that costs people something. "Isn't it."
"It's somebody." I'm already at the window, then the gun rack, doing the thing I do, the thing I told myself I'd never do again, sliding back into it like a stream into its old bed.
"Could be a scout. Could be nothing. Sound carries wrong out here; he might be six miles off and turning back.
We don't know yet. So we don't panic yet. "
"I'm not panicking. I'm cataloging exits."
"Good girl." It's out before I can stop it, and I see it land on her, see her file it somewhere warm, and I make myself keep moving so I don't have to deal with the fact that I called her that and meant it as praise and that it means something to both of us.
"There's only one road a machine can fight, and it tops out a half-mile below us at the saddle, then it's foot travel.
Steep. Open. No cover for the last quarter mile.
A man comes up that, I see him for ten full minutes before he sees me. "
"That sounds like you've thought about it."
"I think about everything. It's why I'm not dead.
" I crack the window an inch, just to listen clean.
The whine rises, falls, rises, and then, after a long minute, fades.
Fades and doesn't come back. He's turned around.
Conditions beat him, or he's a scout who came up to see how far a machine can get and went back down to report it can get close.
Either answer is bad. Both mean someone's looking, and looking with intent, and willing to come back.
I close the window. The cabin's quiet is different now. We both hear it. The amber we've been frozen in cracked tonight, and there's no pretending we didn't.
"He's gone," I say. "For now. He'll be back.
Probably with the road scouted and friends and better gear.
Two days. Three, if the next system comes in like the radio says.
" I keep my voice flat, a briefing, because a briefing is a thing you can hold.
"I'm telling you the truth so you can plan with me, not so you'll be scared.
You hear me? I don't manage people by lying to them.
Bad leaders lie. I had bad leaders. You'll always get the real number from me. "
She's quiet a moment, and then: "Okay. Give me the real number."
"The real number is that two, maybe three men are going to come up this mountain to kill the only witness to a murder, and the only thing between them and her is a forty-two-year-old hermit and a rifle.
" I say it because she asked for it straight.
"And the real number is that I like those odds.
Because they think they're hunting a hurt girl alone in the woods.
They have no idea I'm up here. And the last thing a man like that ever finds out, in the last quarter mile of an open slope with no cover, is that the girl was never alone. "
She looks at me for a long time. The fire moves on her face.
She's not crying, which I half expected; she's doing something harder, which is deciding to trust me with her actual life.
The weight of it settles onto me, and I find, to my own surprise, that I want it.
Nine years I've carried nothing but my own quiet, and here's a hundred and twenty pounds of stubborn grad student handing me her survival, and instead of the old dread I feel something turn over in my chest that I last felt useful with a litter and a rope in my hands and somebody's child going home alive.
"Eli," she says. "When was the last time you stood between someone and the thing that was going to kill them?"
The question goes in deep. Too deep. It finds the thing I came up here to bury.
"Nine years ago," I say.
"And it went wrong."
"It went wrong."
She doesn't ask how. She's learned the beat I take, the cost I count, and she lets it be.
Instead she does something that undoes me more than any question could: she reaches out, across the line on the floor she's not supposed to know about, and puts her hand flat on the back of mine where it rests on the bench, and she leaves it there.
Her hand is small and cold and certain.
I should pull away. The rule says pull away. Too young, hurt, under my roof, depending on me. Every reason I built is sound and good and I know them all by heart.
I don't pull away.
I turn my hand over, under hers, and let her palm settle into mine, and for the length of one slow breath in a cabin at the top of the world, with killers two days down the mountain and the fire burning low, I let myself have it.
The warmth. The weight. The terrifying, forbidden fact of another person choosing to hold on.
Then I take my hand back, slow enough that it costs me, and bank the fire, and lie down on my side of the line.
But I don't sleep. I lie in the dark and listen to her breathing even out, and I make a different math than the one about roads and rounds.
It's the math of a man who just understood that protecting her isn't the job anymore. It's the reason.