14. Chapter 14
Sable
The mountain doesn’t care that I’ve just thrown my career away.
It has its own problems. Loose scree on the north-facing slopes, deadfall across the game trails, meltwater cutting channels through the soil that turn solid ground into something that slides.
I lead because I’m not the one who just spent years locked in a research facility.
But he keeps up easily.
That should be the first thing I worry about: his bare feet on rock, the cut along his side, the years of sedation and starvation that should have left him weaker than this.
Instead, my thoughts keep sliding backward.
Brenna will have heard by now. The transport team will have radioed in.
I duck under a low branch and hold it for Rafael.
He takes it from me, his hand closing over the wood above mine, and follows without speaking.
He’s barefoot on rock and rough earth, and he hasn’t complained once.
His feet must be torn raw—I caught a glimpse of blood on the stone behind him an hour ago—but his stride is steady, and he’s reading the ground ahead of us with a focus that surprises me.
Twice already, he’s put his hand on my arm to stop me before I stepped onto a surface that wasn’t what it looked like.
Loose rock disguised by pine needles. A root bridge over a gap that wouldn’t have held my weight.
He sees the terrain like someone who knows it.
“Water,” he says. He’s stopped, his head tilted. Listening. “That way.” He points left, down a gully I would’ve walked past.
“You can hear it?”
“Yeah.” He glances at me. “You can’t?”
I can’t. My wolf perks up whenever I move close to him, but aside from that, I’m running on human hardware in wolf country, and it’s costing me.
“Lead the way,” I say.
He does. The gully drops steeply, and he picks a line through it that avoids the loose shale, angling toward the sound of running water I still can’t hear.
I follow his feet, stepping where he steps.
It’s a strange reversal; I’ve been guiding him for weeks.
Now he’s guiding me, and he does it with the quiet competence of someone who once knew how to navigate.
We find the stream at the bottom. Narrow, cold, running fast over smooth rocks. We drink. The water is so cold it makes my teeth ache, but it’s clean, and my body takes it in like medicine.
He crouches on the bank beside me, cupping water in his hands. The morning light catches his face: the shape of his cheekbones, the stubble darkening along his jaw, his eyes clear and blue and tracking the tree line above us.
“How far do we need to go?” he asks.
“As far as we can before dark. The more distance we put between us and their last sweep point, the wider they have to cast.” I wipe my mouth.
“They’ll use thermal imaging once they bring in the right equipment.
We need to be underground or under enough rock to mask our signatures before that happens. ”
He nods. Not the blank compliance of a patient following instructions. The nod of someone absorbing useful information and storing it.
“There are caves,” he says. “Higher up. I can feel the air…moving differently. Where rock opens into space.”
I look at him. “You can feel that?”
“The air has…” He pauses. Searches. “Pressure. Temperature. Where it moves through openings, it changes. Like sound through a room.”
I look back at the gully we just climbed down, then up toward the rocks. Water I couldn’t hear. A line through shale I wouldn’t have trusted. Now air moving through stone.
The Syndicate numbered him, drugged him, cut him open, and somehow missed the man who could stand barefoot on a mountain and read it better than I can.
“Then we head up,” I say. “Show me.”
We climb. The terrain steepens. The trees thin as we gain elevation, replaced by scrub pine and exposed rock. The wind picks up, and the temperature drops steadily. I can feel it in my fingers, in my ears, in the tightness of my lungs as the air gets sharper.
The helicopter comes back at midday.
I hear it before I see it, the rhythmic thump of rotors, distant but unmistakable. Rafael hears it first. His hand is on my arm before the sound reaches me, pulling me into the shadow of a rock overhang. We press flat against the stone and wait.
The helicopter sweeps east to west along the ridge below us. Slower than the morning pass. More methodical. They’re tightening the grid.
“They’ve narrowed the search area,” I say. “They know we went north.”
Rafael watches the helicopter through narrowed eyes. His jaw is set, but the shift isn’t threatening. He’s tracking it the way an operative assesses movement—distance, speed, pattern.
“How long before they come back?” he asks.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” I admit. “I guess it depends on their fuel cycle. Maybe two hours. Maybe less.”
“Then we keep moving.”
We keep moving.
The afternoon is hard. The slope is relentless, the rock face increasingly exposed.
My boots slip on wet stone. Rafael’s bare feet somehow find grip where mine can’t, the wolf abilities coming to the fore, but not as something dangerous.
He’s moving better than I am now, and twice he turns back to offer his hand at a difficult traverse, his grip warm and sure as he pulls me up.
He’s talking more. Not fluently; sentences come in clusters, then silence, then another cluster.
But the gaps are shorter, and the words are more precise.
He tells me the rock composition is changing as we climb; more granite, less shale, which means caves are more likely.
He tells me the temperature is going to drop hard before sunset.
Each time he speaks, I hear more of the man he was. The halting fragments are giving way to someone who observes, analyzes, communicates. Someone who was competent before the facility, and whose competence is surfacing now that the wolf is letting the man through.
“You were someone before,” I say. I don’t mean to say it out loud.
He glances at me. “Everyone was someone before.”
“I mean…you think like someone who was trained. Not combat training. Something else.”
He’s quiet for a few steps. The wind pushes at us. A hawk circles high above the ridge, riding a thermal.
“I don’t remember enough,” he says. “Pieces. Music. A room with sunlight.” He looks at his hands. “I think I used to…lead people. Teach them. I remember standing in front of a group, and they were watching my hands.”
The image settles in my chest. A man standing in front of a group of people who watch and listen without fear.
“Rafael the teacher,” I say.
His eyes soften. “Maybe.”
He turns back to the path.
I step up behind him.
Then the ground drops out from under me.
There’s no warning. One second, my boot is on solid rock, the next the shale beneath it slides, and the whole shelf gives way, a section of trail no wider than my shoulders just peeling off the mountain. My foot goes through. My knee hits stone. My hands grab for anything and find nothing.
I scream as I go down.
“Sable!”
The drop isn’t vertical; it’s a steep angled chute between two rock faces, loose stone, scrub roots, and nothing to hold.
I slide maybe ten feet before my hip catches a ledge and stops my fall.
The impact drives the air out of my lungs.
Below me, the chute drops another thirty feet into a narrow crevice choked with rock and shadow.
“Rafael!” I’m gasping. “Oh, God! I’m stuck!”
“Don’t move. The ledge you’re on… Can you see the edges?” His voice. Above me. Clear. Not the halting, word-by-word speech from before. The voice of a man in crisis, and crisis has stripped everything else away.
I look. The ledge is maybe two feet wide. The rock is fractured. My left leg is hanging over the drop, and the stone under my right hip is making sounds I don’t like.
“It’s cracking,” I say, fighting down panic.
“I know. Listen to me.” His face appears at the top of the chute.
He’s on his stomach, one arm braced against the rock face, the other reaching down.
His eyes are locked on mine, and they’re clear.
Completely clear. The wolf is there—I can see it in the way his muscles bunch, the way his free hand grips the stone hard enough to leave marks—but the man is in front. Driving.
“I need you to reach up with your right hand. Slowly. Don’t shift your weight to the left.”
“I can’t reach you. You’re too far.”
“I’m coming down.”
His arm extends. His shoulder drops over the edge of the chute. The bones of his hand thicken…not a full shift, just his fingers lengthening, the grip widening. Controlled. Precise.
His hand closes around my wrist. The grip is iron.
“I’ve got you. Push up with your right leg. Now.”
I push. The ledge cracks under me—a sharp pop that sends a shower of stone into the dark below—and for one second I’m hanging by his hand over nothing.
I scream again. “Oh, my God! Rafael!” I glance down into the abyss below me and fight back another scream.
“It’s all right,” he says. “Just keep your eyes on me.”
I force my head up, locking my gaze on him. His eyes are calm and focused.
“I’ve got you,” he says. “I won’t let you go.”
And somehow, I believe him.
His arm takes my full weight without buckling. The tendons stand out in his forearm like cable, and I hear him exhale through his teeth, but he doesn’t let go.
He pulls. I climb. My boots scrape stone, my free hand finds a root, and between his arm and my scrambling, I clear the chute and hit solid ground.
I’m on my hands and knees on the trail. Breathing hard. My palms are torn. My hip is screaming where it hit the ledge. Below us, the rock shelf I was standing on breaks free and tumbles into the crevice with a sound like something heavy being swallowed.
He’s beside me. On his knees. His hand is still on my wrist.
“You’re okay,” he says. Breathing hard, too, but his voice is steady. “You’re okay. You’re on solid ground.”