31. Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-One
Reid
He’s already awake when I open my eyes.
Sitting at the cave entrance, his back to me, watching the grey light come up through the trees. He’s been there a while. The position has the quality of something settled into, not just assumed. His pack is ready. So is mine. He didn’t wake me.
I watch him for a moment before I sit up.
His shoulders shift slightly. That small adjustment means he’s aware I’m awake. He still doesn’t turn.
I can be a partner. That’s what I can manage right now. Not forgiveness. Not understanding. Not the thing I’ve been circling since 0200 when I asked him do you love me and he said yes and I said I hate that and meant it and also didn’t mean it at all.
Just partner. Just this.
“How far?” I ask.
“Thirteen miles.”
I sit up. Everything aches. I find the ration bar he left beside me and eat it without tasting it.
“You didn’t sleep,” I say.
“No.”
“You should have woken me for second watch.”
“You needed rest.”
I want to argue. I don’t. He’s right and we both know it.
I stand and stretch. At the cave entrance, I pause. Don’t turn around.
“Partner,” I say. “That’s what I can give you right now.”
“Okay.”
A beat. Then I step out into the pale morning.
He’s good at being only what I asked for. I’ll give him that.
When I call the route, he follows. When I signal, he moves. When I don’t speak, he doesn’t. He exists in exactly the perimeter I’ve set and doesn’t push past it. Something about that precision is both reassuring and infuriating in ways I don’t have the bandwidth to examine right now.
We move well together. Tired, but functional. The first hours of the morning are almost like before—the shorthand of a practiced partnership, bodies moving in sync, the terrain talking to both of us in the same language.
Almost.
But under it, always, the footage. The interviews. The calm matter-of-fact way Cassius described what was done to him, which was somehow worse than if he’d been angry. And laid over all of it, underneath everything else: mea lux, whispered against my collarbone in firelight.
Both real. Both true. Impossible.
Around hour twenty-six, the river.
We hear it, then see it through the trees as we crest a rise—forty feet across, fast current, white where it breaks over rocks. Different river than Day Nine. Bigger. But the same cold.
We stop at the bank. I assess it.
The natural crossing is upstream: narrower span, calmer water, better footing. I can see it from here. Sulla’s looking at it too. We both know it’s the right call.
“Upstream?” he asks.
And something in me says no.
I know what the right call is. I’m looking right at it. Sulla’s looking at it too.
This is not a tactical decision. I know that.
I’m making it anyway, because I can control the route and the pace and the distance I keep from him, but I can’t control what’s been sitting in my chest since yesterday morning, and it needs somewhere to go.
This crossing. One thing that’s purely physical. Mine to make.
“We cross here.”
A pause. “This current’s—”
“I know what the current is. I’ve done cold-water immersion. I know my limits.”
“Reid—”
“I said I know.”
I hear myself. I hear it clearly, like watching from the outside, and I can’t stop. I gear up, secure the pack, test the straps.
He says nothing else. Instead he secures his pack and wades in.
I watch from the bank. He's methodical, reading the current, weight transfers deliberate and slow.
Makes it look manageable. But fifteen feet out, the channel tightens and the water climbs his thighs and I watch his body angle downstream—not much, just enough—fighting to hold the line.
For a long moment he makes no progress, the current pushing him sideways, boots hunting for purchase on the riverbed.
Pack torquing his center of gravity wrong.
Then he finds his footing and pushes through. Climbs out on the far bank.
He turns back. Breathing harder than the crossing should warrant.
"Reid." Just my name. His voice carrying across the water. "Do you want to reconsider?"
I gear up. Secure the pack. Test the straps.
"I know what I'm doing."
I wade in.
The cold is immediate and total, not the shallow sting of day nine but something that goes straight to the bone. The current grabs my calves, my knees, a living force trying to redirect me. I plant each foot, read the river bottom through my boots, and transfer weight only when I’m certain.
Fifteen feet in. The water’s thigh-deep. Current stronger here where the channel tightens.
Twenty feet. Halfway.
My left foot finds a rock. Reads it as solid. Commits weight.
The rock shifts.
The current takes me before I can recover—a sideways lurch, pack throwing off my balance, and then I’m down and the river’s over my head and the cold is everywhere at once.
I surface gasping but the current’s already moving me downstream faster than I can fight it.
My arms work. My pack drags. My fingers are already losing sensation.
I should release the pack. The straps are right there.
My hands won’t close.
This is how it happens. Not in Iraq. Not in combat. Drowning in a Scottish river because I was too angry to cross upstream.
Something hits the water beside me. A rope. Emergency line from his pack—he carries it clipped to the outside, I’ve seen it every day, I never registered that I’d seen it.
I grab it. Both hands. It goes taut.
And then he’s pulling.
He runs the bank parallel to the current, taking the angle, using the rope and my weight and the physics of it to swing me toward shore. I scrape over submerged rocks. The current fights him and he doesn’t stop. After what seems like forever, I get a hand on vegetation. Then a foot. Then I’m out.
I collapse on the bank. Coughing. Vomiting brackish water. Shaking. The cold so deep it doesn’t feel like cold anymore, just a fundamental wrongness.
Sulla’s here immediately. He doesn’t touch me—he knows better—but he’s crouched in front of me, assessing.
“Can you stand?”
I try. My legs don’t cooperate.
“Okay. Stay.”
He’s already moving—pack open, emergency shelter coming out, practiced and fast. He got in the water to pull me. His clothes are soaked from the knee down, the rope still in one hand.
He gets me inside the shelter. Emergency blanket around me. Finds my dry layer in sealed plastic in my bag and looks at me steadily.
“I need to--”
“I know. Do it.”
He changes me out of the wet layers with the same deliberate precision he does everything: fast, practical, not once making it something it isn’t. He’s not looking at my skin. He’s managing a casualty. I’d do the same for him and we both know it.
Dry thermal. Dry fleece. Dry socks.
He finds the knife at the bottom of his pack and tucks it into mine without comment. Practical. I lost my blade at the river crossing, it’s somewhere downstream. He’s thought of it before I have.
Then he strips his own wet outer layers and gets into the shelter beside me.
“Medical necessity,” he says. “Core temp.”
“I know.”
He waits. Doesn’t reach for me.
I nearly drowned because I crossed at the wrong place. He told me not to. I crossed anyway because I was angry and needed to control something—anything—after twenty-six hours of feeling ambushed. That’s the truth and I know it.
Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. My father’s care. Gone because I let my emotions override eight years of field training. I know better. I’ve known better since Ramirez. I did it anyway.
My call. My river. My consequences. Not his.
I’ll own that. Later, when I can say it out loud without coming apart. I’ll own it.
He pulls me against his chest. Arms around me. Emergency blanket around both of us.
This is nothing like the bothy. No tenderness in the architecture of it, no desire, just two bodies and the physics of heat. But he’s warm, and I’m shaking, and I press my face against his sternum and let myself shake.
He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t ask how I am or tell me I’m fine or say he told me so. Just holds me while my body figures out what normal temperature is again.
I’m crying, slowly, tears mixing with the river water still dripping from my hair. Silent. I can’t stop it.
His arms tighten. Just slightly. No words.
I cry, and he holds me, and outside the shelter the river runs on without us.
HOURS 30-42 | 1200-2400 | DAY 29
The shaking stops eventually. Core temp coming back. I should pull away. Re-establish the perimeter, the professional distance, the version of this I can manage. I don’t. Not for a while.
I’m so tired. Thirty hours of carrying everything alone, but right now I don’t want to carry anything. I just want to be warm.
His heartbeat under my ear. Steady. Slower than a normal person’s, which I noticed weeks ago and filed away. Everything about him is outside the normal parameters and I fell in love with him anyway.
Fell. Past tense. Present tense. Both simultaneously. Which is the problem.
“I’m sorry.”
Barely a whisper. I think for a second I imagined it.
“I’m so sorry. Not for what I was—that can’t be changed. But for the bothy. For taking that from you. You deserved to choose.”
He said it into my hair. Quietly. Like he thinks I’m asleep or close enough that it’s safe.
Maybe I was supposed to be asleep.
“You were right,” he says. “About all of it. The cowardice. Making the choice for you. You were right and I was wrong and I don’t know how to undo it.”
The river outside. The wind.
“I love you.” A long pause. “That’s the only true thing I have. It doesn’t fix anything. I know that. But it’s true.”
I close my eyes. Let the tears go quietly, without making a sound, so he keeps thinking I’m asleep.
I don’t know what to do with this.
But I stay where I am. Warm, for a little while longer.
When I wake up, I’m alone in the shelter and the light outside has shifted to afternoon gold. My kit’s repacked. A ration bar beside me. The emergency blanket folded.