Chapter 18
Carla
My feet are killing me, but I keep moving anyway.
Magma is several feet ahead of me, and he moves like he is one with the jungle.
There’s no stumbling or staggering, or limping.
He just flows through it all. Quiet as anything.
Every few seconds, his head turns, a slow, scanning sweep from left to right and back again, checking the canopy, the tree line, and between the trunks. He doesn’t miss a thing.
I’m trying hard to match his pace, but I’m struggling. I wasn’t built for this. I find myself wishing I’d gone to the gym after getting that membership early last year. Maybe I’d be stronger and fitter than I am.
The truth is that the break we took an hour ago didn’t do my feet any favors.
We found a patch of shade near a thick stand of ferns, and Magma had gone a little way off and come back with more coconuts.
He’d also found dragon fruit, which I knew existed but had never tried before today.
The flesh was white and sweet, and I ate too fast, leaving me with a bit of a sore tummy when we set out.
Once we got moving again, I forgot all about my stomachache because my feet felt like they seized up.
The muscles had gone stiff, the cuts that I’d been walking on long enough to go a little numb had apparently taken the break as an invitation to remind me they existed, and now every step I take on the hard-packed earth and knotted roots hurts like mad.
I keep my mouth shut. I don’t want to be the weak link.
We need to get to the Reds’ castle and out of this jungle and as a matter of extreme urgency.
I drop back a few steps without meaning to, then catch myself and try to pick up the pace. I manage it for a while, and then I fall behind again.
“Are you okay?” Magma asks in a low whisper.
“Yes.” I keep my voice down too. “I’m good.”
He doesn’t answer; he just narrows his eyes on me for a second, and what he sees must appease him because he nods once, and then we keep walking.
The ground is fairly soft in this section of the jungle, but it still hurts. Despite my best efforts, I fall behind again.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asks, a few minutes later, in that same low tone.
“I’m fine.” And I am, sort of. I’m upright, I’m moving, I’m not bleeding all over the jungle floor. That counts for something. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll keep up.”
“Why don’t I believe you?”
I shrug.
He moves away a few steps, and I walk toward him, doing my best to look A-okay.
I fail.
“You’re limping.” He lifts his brows.
“I’m not—” I start, and then I hear myself and stop, because I absolutely am.
He tips his head toward a flat-faced rock jutting out of the ground a few feet off the path, half-buried in the earth and roughly the height of a low bench. “Sit over there.”
“It isn’t neces—”
“Humor me,” he whispers.
I sigh and then roll my eyes, but I do as he asks and sit. The relief of getting the weight off my feet is immediate and embarrassingly obvious. I press my lips together to hold back a sigh.
He crouches in front of me, takes my right foot in both hands and looks at it, and I’m unprepared for the experience of watching those enormous hands clasping my feet. I have average-sized feet. They’re not small by any measure, but right now they look tiny. I quite like it, actually.
He turns my foot slightly, tilting it toward the pale light that filters through the canopy above us.
He doesn’t say anything for a moment.
There are a few cuts. I knew about most of them. The one along the outer edge of my left heel is the one I’d been trying to ignore since this morning. There’s some bruising across the ball of my right foot.
He presses his thumb gently around the cut on my heel, and I make a sound before I can stop it – something embarrassingly involuntary – and wince.
He looks up at me.
“Sorry,” I say.
“Don’t apologize.” He looks back down at my foot.
He presses very lightly around the cut, checking the edges of it.
His touch is so careful it barely registers as pressure.
His hands are twice the size of mine, broad across the palm, with thick, blunt fingers; the kind of hands that could crack a trunk in half and probably have.
Right now, they’re holding my foot like it’s made of something delicate.
“It’s not that bad,” I say. Which is what I’ve been telling myself.
“It is that bad,” he says in a way that holds no room for debate.
He puts my foot down and looks up at me.
“We are a team, Carla. If something is wrong with you, I need to know about it. Don’t hide things like this from me again.
I need to know what’s going on with you. What if we have to run and you can’t?”
“I thought running was bad.”
His mouth twitches, and I have to work not to stare at it, because he has a great mouth.
“Only if you run away from me,” he whispers.
“Got it.” I nod.
He holds my gaze for a second longer. “Wait right here.”
“Like I’m going to go anywhere.”
“I never know with you.”
He disappears into the undergrowth for two or three minutes.
When he comes back, he has a handful of large, broad leaves.
The kind with a waxy surface and thick central veins.
He also has several strips of the soft fibrous moss that grows in thick mats along the base of the trees out here.
He tears the moss into workable pieces and folds one of the leaves in half along its spine, testing its flex.
He kneels back down in front of me.
He picks something from the cut on my heel with two fingers.
I wince.
“Sorry.”
He holds up a thorn.
“That explains why my sole hurt so badly.”
He nods.
Then he layers a pad of folded moss over one of my cuts and wraps the whole thing in leaves, tucking the edges under in a way that holds without needing anything to tie it. He does the same with the bruising on my right foot, padding the ball of it, wrapping, and tucking.
He sits back and looks at his work.
“That should feel much better,” he says.
“Much. Thank you.” I smile.
He gives a single nod and pushes to his feet.
I stand up. I take a few steps. The improvised padding takes the edge off, enough that the wince I’ve been swallowing every third step stops coming. It still pulls. It still aches when I hit the ground at the wrong angle. But it’s manageable now.
“I think I should carry you for a while,” he says, and picks me up in the next breath.
“No…um Magma, don’t…um I—”
“It’ll just be for a little while. You need to give your feet a break.”
“You can’t carry me. That isn’t fair to you. I can walk, I—”
“I know you can walk.” He adjusts his hold, and I am now very securely against his chest with very little say in the matter. He starts moving through the jungle in fast strides. I’m embarrassed by how much faster he is. “Don’t argue with me on this.”
“Put me down.”
“No.”
“Magma.”
“Carla.” He says my name back at me in the same tone I used on him, which is both infuriating and, annoyingly, a little funny.
“It isn’t right. You’ve been walking all morning. You need your energy.”
He chuckles under his breath. “I could walk two days without rest and not feel it. I could walk three and be fine. You’re human. Your body is not built the way mine is. You need to stop measuring my limits by yours.”
I look up at his jaw. He’s scanning the tree line again, head moving in that slow sweep. Even now. Even holding me, he hasn’t dropped his attention for a single second.
I think about arguing again. I decide against it.
“Fine,” I say. “But only for a little while. And then I’m walking again.”
He doesn’t respond, which I’m choosing to interpret as agreement and not, as it probably is, absolute indifference to my protest.
My feet are already grateful. The throbbing in my cut heel quiets to something more background once the weight is fully off it.
He’s very warm. He moves so smoothly that there’s almost no jolt to it, just this steady, quiet rhythm that makes it easy to let my shoulders come down from around my ears.
I keep my arm around the back of his neck. His skin is warm under my forearm. I look at the ink on his shoulder, the dark lines of it curving around the muscle.
I like being in his arms far more than I should.