by Roxie Noir
“I could do that, if you want,” she offers, her eyes laughing. “My laptop’s probably still got juice in it. I’m sure there’s a point of diminishing returns when you consider staying at a crash site where no one’s rescued us yet versus setting off into the wilderness on our own with nothing but our wits.”
“And a hatchet.”
“You’ve got a hatchet?”
I just point to the left side of the huge pack I’m wearing, a hatchet strapped on. It’s probably not the best way to carry a hatchet, but it’s not like I’ve got a good one at the moment.
“Oh, well, if you’ve got a hatchet,” Imogen deadpans. “By all means, let’s go.”
Inside me there’s a flicker of something, some spark lighting in the dark and trying to catch. I don’t know what it is, whether it’s familiarity or friendship or the sudden recognition that this feels like things did between us, once upon a time.
I walk over, hold out one thickly gloved hand to Imogen. Her eyes alight on it and even now, there’s a moment of hesitation before she grabs my hand with hers and I heave her to her feet.
We don’t talk as I help her into her own heavy pack and adjust it, her slight frame surprisingly sturdy as I yank on straps.
That’s another strange thing about our situation: the plane was well-stocked for an emergency situation like this. All Flint Holdings, Inc. planes are outfitted with the worst-case scenario in mind, since they’re small planes that are regularly flown over rough terrain. That this one still had its emergency gear means that it’s been regularly maintained, checked, its stuff updated.
There’s no reason for the instrument failure, no reason that we crash-landed way out here. I’d suspect sabotage but that just seems ludicrous, because sabotaging planes happens in spy movies, not real life.
Imogen walks for the door. She’s slow, but I wrapped her ankle up pretty well this morning, and she’s barely limping at all. I just hope I’m right that it’s only sprained, not broken, because that seemed like what she needed to hear.
I’m pretty sure it’s just sprained, but I’ve only got a little bit of emergency medical training. I’m not a doctor or even a medic, but as she steps out of the plane, her foot sinking into snow that comes halfway up her calf, I don’t think Imogen’s in that much pain.
She stands there, looking over the scene in front of us. I come out of the plane behind her, shut the door, turn the handle to seal it just for good measure.
Imogen watches me do it, looks at me with eyebrows raised. I shrug.
“May as well,” I say, but she’s looking at the horizon again and I’m looking at the way that the mountains reflect in her dark eyes.
“It’s pretty out here,” she says quietly.
“It is,” I agree, because she’s right.
It’s beautiful. It’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been, with white mountains poking their jagged gray tops above the tree line, the sun bursting over the ragged ridges. Everything about them is sharp, hard, unforgiving.
It looks dangerous, desolate, cold, like ten thousand avalanches waiting to happen, but this landscape still has a draw on me I can’t explain or escape.
Imogen’s looking forward, toward the boulder scramble, face set, gloved hands holding onto her backpack straps by her hips.
“Okay then,” she says, partly to me but mostly to the wilderness all around us. “Let’s do this.”
It’s a quarter mile, maybe less, to the big rocky patch, but neither of us talks on that walk. Imogen keeps looking back over her shoulder at the plane slowly getting smaller behind us, like she’s afraid she’s left the stove on or something, but she doesn’t say anything.
I landed the plane on a long, snowy flat spot sort of near the rocky ridge of a mountain, maybe a thousand feet above tree level. At the time I didn’t exactly have a choice, but now I wish I’d stayed calmer, guided the plane down lower, maybe landed on a frozen lake or something because getting down is going to be rough.
On two sides are steep drops that aren’t quite sheer cliffs, but they’re close enough that I’m not risking them, even now. The third side of our plateau rises in a long, slippery gravel field up to the sharp peak of a mountain, all hard rock and ice, the ridge line so steep it’s bare of snow.
That leaves us with one choice, a slick boulder scramble down to a steep snowy field, the huge rocks pitted with ice and snow. I have no idea if they’re stable or if we’re about to set off a landslide. Once we’re down it I have no idea if we’ll just be stuck on another ledge that’s even harder to get down from.
But I know it’s pretty much our only chance, and it’s better than the chances of rescue, which have dwindled to nearly zero.
When we get to it, we stand above the long gray patch, staring down. Up here most of the rock is granite, hard and unforgiving, and here the boulders are patched with the white of snow and the lighter gray of ice, the occasional brown of dirt where the wind has blown the snow and ice away.
“What if we’re not where you think we are?” Imogen asks suddenly, breathing hard beside me.
There’s a hint of accusation in her voice, but I turn to look at her, meet her beneath her hat and behind her glasses, and strangely there’s nothing. No malice, no flash of enmity, just an honest question.
“What’s it change?” I ask, taking a long glug from my water bottle. I don’t have a lot left, but once we’re down in the valley there’s going to be something running through there.
She expels air from her lungs, looks around at the scenery, hands on her hips while she catches her breath, because walking through eight inches of snow at serious elevation is tiring work.
“Maybe we should go the other way,” she says, looking back over her shoulder at the plane and the ridge line above it, the yellow bright against the snow. “Over the mountain, and then there might be another valley with more people on the other side…”
I consider her offered plan quietly for a long moment, looking at the sharp, bare mountain.
“Do you really think you can get over that?” I ask.
She pushes her glasses up her face, appraises it.
“It could be better than getting down this,” she says quietly.
She looks away and I study Imogen’s face for a long, leisurely second, letting her look away while I look at her.
Imogen’s pretty. You know those movies where there’s a nerdy girl who puts on a dress and makeup at one point and suddenly she’s totally hot? That’s kinda how Imogen is, or would be, except it’s blazingly obvious that she’s pretty with her glasses on and with no makeup, face pale and cheeks red and a hat jammed down almost to her eyebrows.
I always knew it. Fucking everyone in high school always knew it. We used to talk in the locker room about which girls were secret freaks, and her name always came up, every single time, back when freak just meant girl who’d fuck.
Only I stayed quiet about her back then because the other guys could speculate, but I knew.
Imogen heaves a breath out, the white puffing in front of her face and then disappearing almost instantly in the dry, cold air.
She’s also scared. That’s obvious too, and whether or not she realizes it she’s looking for ways to put off committing to one course of action and cut herself off from the others. I saw it all the time flying in the Navy, guys panicking at the last second that they were doing the wrong thing.
I see it all the time in the helicopter, rich men who brag to their friends about how great the powder is at the inaccessible top to some mountain only to ask me to fly around for a fucking hour, trying to find something they’re not terrified to ski down.
At least Imogen’s justified and not here by her own fault.
“You really think you can get over that?” I ask.
Her jaw tightens, the muscles flexing below her skin.
“I could.”
“Now? With your ankle and your pack and no clue what’s on the other side?”
“My ankle�
�s not that bad.”
She’s lying. It’s swollen and purple, and it’s slowing her down a lot. I can tell the only reason she’s not limping is because I’m here and she’s not about to show weakness in front of me.
“No?”
“I could do it,” she says defensively. “If there’s something better over there, a ranger station or a radio tower or something.”
I shove my gloved hands into the pockets of my outermost parka, annoyed that we have to do this now, when we’re so close to making real progress.
“Well, is there?” I ask, a bite coming into my voice. “If you’ve got secret knowledge, or if Stanford installed x-ray vision on you, the time to tell me is now.”
Imogen rolls her eyes.
“Actually, the time to tell me was two days ago when we first crash-landed, but I’d forgive that if you were a top-secret government experiment,” I go on, the words still pouring out. “I’m sure they’ve got secret biotech that they install in their best and brightest—”
“All right, I fucking get it, Jesus,” Imogen snaps, glaring at me. “The devil you know and shit. Fuck, just go down the fucking boulders already.”
“I guess Stanford didn’t teach you to be ladylike,” I say, just to taunt her.
“I guess the Navy didn’t teach you not to be a mean asshole,” she says.
I step onto the very first boulder, make sure I’ve got my balance, walk out onto the rock and survey the land below me, Imogen’s words rattling around in my head.
“Nope,” I finally answer.
“Or how to fly planes properly,” she says, just to get a final dig in as she steps up onto the same rock as me, wobbling slightly for balance, not looking at me.
Anger flares deep inside me and I want to grab her shoulders, shake her, shout it’s not my fault we crashed something went wrong but instead I clench my teeth, look at the splendor of nature, study the rocks below us. And I remind myself that right now, in our precarious position, isn’t the time to get into a useless, meaningless fight with Imogen.
“There,” I tell her, pointing at another rock.
Her eyes narrow. She pushes up her glasses.
“What about—”
“You have to look at the whole path, not just the first step,” I cut her off, not in the mood for her know-it-all-bullshit just now. “From there we go there, and there, and there, and we keep our options open and are less likely to need to backtrack.”
She presses her lips together. The color goes out of them, but she doesn’t say anything.
“I’ll go first,” I offer, and hop off our rock.
Chapter Fourteen
Imogen
When Wilder jumps, my heart goes straight into my mouth. I mean, it’s been there for most of the past few days anyway, concussion notwithstanding, but I feel the sudden urge to grab his arm, yank him back and say oh my God don’t that’s dangerous.
“Come on!” he says, standing two feet away on the next boulder.
The cold wind curls around my body, trying to find the places where my insulation is lacking. The sun’s outrageously bright, blinding light bouncing off hundreds and thousands of acres of snow, making me squint at Wilder and the rocks and the sky above and the earth below.
I shift my weight. My ankle complains, but I try to ignore it.
It’s two feet. Not even that. It’s nothing.
I grab the straps on my backpack, take a deep breath.
“Imogen, you’ll be fine,” Wilder says, stepping forward and holding out a hand.
Yeah, you pussy, you’ll be fine. Stop overthinking it, stop imagining that your ankle could give out at the worst possible second and you’d stumble into that, probably break a leg when the weight of your—
“Do you need help?” he asks, his voice suddenly gentle, the mockery gone.
That does it.
I take a deep breath and leap over the small crevice, landing on my good ankle several feet away from the crack and ignoring Wilder’s outstretched hand. It could have been twice the size it was and I’d still have made it, for God’s sake.
“See? I knew you’d be fine,” Wilder says, his voice irritatingly smug.
I don’t look at him. I don’t want him to see the tears in my eyes for no reason. I don’t want him to know how much that unnerved me, because even though I know there are perfectly good reasons — I’ve got a concussion, my ankle hurts, food is scarce, it’s cold and we’re probably going to die — for me to be a wimp about this, that doesn’t mean I want him to know.
“Great. Thanks,” I say, my voice flat as I look around, blinking. “Where next? That one?”
“Yup,” he answers, and we take off slowly across the boulder field.
It’s long. It’s hard, and it’s unpleasant, and I lightly wrench my ankle at least once, but we’re getting closer. Every few rocks I look up, back at where we came from, and watching it get farther and farther away makes me feel slightly panicked but mostly good, like what we’re doing is really working to get us somewhere.
We’re almost at the bottom when I realize something’s wrong. So far, I’ve been tiredly just following Wilder, watching where he goes and doing the same, sometimes handing my pack up or down to him if I can’t manage with the thing on, but now he’s just standing on a broad, flat rock, pacing back and forth.
Like a lion in a cage, if the lion were wearing a thick parka, and it sparks a bolt of panic in me because we can’t go back now, we have to get off this rocky part of the mountain somehow and it’s already late afternoon.
We’ll freeze to death if we stay on the rocks, I think. It’ll be windy and cold, we need to get to somewhere that we can find at least some shelter, not to mention a little water, and God knows we can’t keep moving in the dark because we’ll just slip on some ice and then we’ll definitely die—
“There’s a snag,” Wilder’s voice says, low and calm despite the thumping in my chest. “C’mere.”
I swallow and walk over to him, standing in the shadow of the rocks above us. He’s looking across a gap to another boulder, that one at an odd angle, the sides jagged.
“We gotta jump this,” he explains, and I look down.
It’s big. Wide. Too wide, probably four feet and it’s straight down, the bottom dark and forbidding and probably filled with spikes and wolves and spiders and mud.
There’s no way I can climb down it and back up the other side, but no way I can jump it, either. The rock on the opposite side of the gulch is angled up and slippery-looking, like even if I got a foothold there I’d slide right back off of it and into the gulch.
“We can’t jump that,” I say, hoping my voice sounds reasonable and not shaky.
“Sure we can,” Wilder says, adjusting his pack slightly. “If these were just two lines on the ground, you wouldn’t think twice about it.”
“But they’re not,” I say, cinching my own pack tighter in my nervousness. “This is one giant rock and that’s another giant rock, and there’s a seventy-foot drop between them—”
“It’s forty if it’s a foot.”
“—there’s a huge drop between them and that rock looks hard to land on, and my ankle is all fucked up, so I really think that we should head back and find another route down—”
Wilder jumps. Motherfucker makes it look easy, just leaping across this mile-wide gap and landing on the other side, leaning forward and grabbing an outcropping to steady himself before he turns around to look at me, grinning.
“See? It’s fine,” he says.
It’s not fine. Nothing about this is fine, nothing about this is good or normal or even kind of okay because I’m on a bare granite rock in the middle of nowhere with a busted ankle, a concussion, and this person who I absolutely positively completely hate more than anyone else.
Vaguely, in the back of my mind, I know I’m being kind of unreasonable. It’s a big jump, yeah, but I’m not unraveling right now because of that. I’m unraveling because I’m hungry and cold and tired and
my stupid ankle hurts and because I childishly want to be at home, in front of a fireplace, or even in an Arctic research station sipping tea and discussing the mating habits of musk oxen.
Anywhere but here. With him.
“I can’t,” I say. “I’m going back, I’m gonna find another way down, that’s just too far and if I fall and get hurt I’ll be really screwed…”
“There’s not another way,” he says. “C’mon, throw me your pack.”
“Of course there’s another way,” I say, my chin jutting out a little. “Maybe three hundred feet back, when we climbed that one rock with the big quartz vein in it there was another way we could have gone—”
“Cliff,” he says.
“No, it wasn’t, there was another rock down there and then we’d have had to—”
“We’d have had to scramble up an incline full of loose rock which only got steeper at the bottom,” he says. “You really think sliding to your death is better than jumping over a little crevice?”
“That’s not little when you’ve got a sprained ankle.”
“Throw me your pack.”
I grip the straps, heart racing, because despite everything deep down in my heart of hearts I don’t want to trust him.
“Imogen,” he says, holding out one hand.
I stare at it.
“If there were a better way down, I swear we’d be taking it,” he says, an impatient edge finally in his voice. “I promise I’m more interested in getting off this boulder field and to shelter before nightfall than torturing—”
“Okay, okay,” I say, yanking the buckle at my chest apart and shrugging it from my shoulders. “Okay. Fine.”
I heave it down, grab it in both hands, and fling it across underhand. Wilder catches it easily, slings it to the ground behind him in one motion, making it look as easy as the jump.
Everything was always easy for him, I think bitterly, out of nowhere. Sports, people, me.
Especially me.
“You coming too?” he asks, tugging at his gloves.
