by Mindy Mejia
When we reached the next lake and emerged from under the canopy, the moon felt like a spotlight, a hundred times brighter than it had been before. I looked for the tracks again, but they were gone.
We loaded up and pushed out into a smaller channel lined with collapsed drifts of marsh grass. The ice was thicker here in the shallows and I punched at it with the oar, breaking a path into the open water around snow-covered boulders. We veered wildly in some places and not wide enough in others. The canoe scraped the bottom several times and at one point we lodged on a rock shelf, but not hard enough to ground. I shoved us off the shelf with the paddle and we tried another path, then another, breaking our way through by trial and error. It seemed to take forever for the channel to widen again and I wondered if we’d be forced to portage until finally the banks receded, our oars stopped hitting bottom, and we came into a glossy moon mirror of a lake.
This one was smaller and it didn’t take us long to paddle to the center, powered by Lucas’s long, sure strokes. When we reached the middle, I rested my oar across the gunwales and slipped a hand under my coat, gingerly feeling the edges of the bandage. It took a minute to register that Lucas had stopped paddling, too.
“Look up.” Lucas breathed, and I did. Overhead the cloudless sky showcased thousands of glowing and pulsing stars. As our paddle ripples faded off the surface of the water, the pinpoints of light reflected back from below, and it felt like we were floating in the middle of an endless galaxy.
“I missed this.”
I’d forgotten how quiet it was, the total silence of the Boundary Waters. It was nothing like living at the mouth of Superior, which consumed everything in its white noise of wind and waves, and I understood why I hadn’t been back here, why I’d never come looking for the necklace. It wasn’t fear of a dead man. The dead man found me in my dreams no matter where I was. I hadn’t returned for the same reason Dad couldn’t; we didn’t want to have this without her.
I drew a shaky breath as I gazed from horizon to horizon. “Did you know we’re made of stardust?”
“Really?”
“Cosmic explosions from before time was time.”
She’d told me. It was written in the note she’d left on my nightstand before she’d tucked me in my bed, brushed a salty kiss over my forehead, and locked herself in the bathroom to eat two bottles of aspirin.
We’re molecules of living, breathing stardust, Maya, and just like the rocks, we’re all different. Some people are strong and beautiful and they can withstand glaciers. Others are weak and brittle, and the best thing we can do is birth a gemstone.
She hadn’t signed it with a goodbye or any words of advice or regret. There wasn’t even a Love, Mom at the bottom. Just a note about stardust, before she tried to turn herself back into it.
“Then why don’t we shine?” Lucas asked, pulling me out of my head. I slid my hand up to touch the agate pendant, making sure it was still there before grabbing the oar and setting my jaw against the fire that was going to start raging in my side.
“Maybe we’re not far enough away to see it.”
* * *
We paddled into a larger lake and then portaged in a direction I’d never gone. The trail was a narrow, steep incline and the snow made everything more slippery. I fell twice and hit my head on the back of the canoe once. Just when I was about to break down and ask if we could make camp, Lucas froze on the peak of the hill.
“What is it?”
“Shh.” He hoisted the canoe down and propped it on a fallen log, then scanned the perimeter. I held my breath, trying not to make the slightest noise. Finally, he pointed to a spot ahead and to our left.
“There.”
He dropped his pack and cut away from the path, his form disappearing in the trees.
“What?” I asked again, and again he shushed me. Sighing, I dropped my pack, too, and picked my way behind him through the standing and fallen trees. Gradually my eyes adjusted and I concentrated on Lucas’s feet, watching where his heels landed and putting my boots in the same spots. When we scaled logs, he helped me over and I was too weak to resist. We hiked for at least ten minutes, to the point where I started panicking we’d lose our way back to the canoe. Was he leading me to his father, to their hidden campsite? I’d left the gun in the pack and had no idea how to find my way back to it alone. Then a familiar scent cut through the woods and I lifted my head to see a faint, flickering light eclipsed by Lucas’s silhouette. A campfire.
We slowed down and approached cautiously, using the muffling effects of the snow to our advantage.
“—too goddamn early to be breaking camp. You’re insane.”
“I want to get a jump on today before the storm hits. No chance of finding Blackthorn in a whiteout.”
That drew a groan from the other person. I leaned carefully around a tree trunk and tried to count heads at the campsite, which was still a good two hundred feet away. Lucas crept even further up and crouched behind a boulder. I was calculating the risk of trying to join him when a familiar voice spoke up.
“We’re not going to find shit until sunrise anyway, which is still an hour away.”
The voice belonged to Micah, the U.S. Forest Service ranger who’d volunteered to be part of the Congdon search party, the veteran who had no problem with crazy people. He’d been at all the planning meetings and had kept in contact with Dr. Mehta even after the expedition had fallen through. I could only see one other head beside his, crouched near the fire.
The rangers talked for a few more minutes, discussing routes and lakes. I couldn’t tell, though, which Blackthorn they were looking for. Did these two represent the search party Dr. Mehta had assured me was still looking for Josiah? Or had they been alerted of the kidnapping and sent to find and arrest us? As I tried to get a better look at the man tending the fire, Micah stood up and walked straight toward us. I ducked behind the tree as the crunch of snow and pine needles became louder and louder. Holding my breath, pulling my legs in, I pressed myself into the base of the tree trunk. Silence. Then came the sound of a zipper and a thick stream of urine hitting the ground. I closed my eyes and waited until he finished and moved back to the camp. I heard the bang of a pot on the grate just as Lucas appeared at my side.
I touched my ear and pointed at the men, but he pointed in the opposite direction, making a gesture I didn’t understand. I shook my head. He pointed away again and leaned in until his mouth grazed my ear.
“Now, before it gets lighter.”
Then he drew me to my feet and we moved like shadows into the fading night.
Lucas led us back to the canoe as easily as if we were crossing through my yard to the garage. We didn’t speak until we reached the portage trail and stood over our packs.
“We’ll make camp here.”
“We should get farther away. Head in the opposite direction of where they talked about going.”
He moved until he was only inches away and his fingers caught me in the side, pushing enough to make me wince.
“You’re not going any further tonight.” Then he lifted both packs, one in front and the other on his back, before shouldering the canoe and stepping back onto the trail we’d just made. “Anyway, the safest place to be is the site they’re leaving. Get a branch and cover our tracks.”
* * *
We waited until they packed and left before setting up a few hundred feet away, close enough to catch a glimpse of the icy water but still well hidden, situating the tent behind a giant fallen pine, jeweled with cones. By the time I crawled inside, the hand warmers had given out and my boots were covered in ice from hauling the canoe in and out of lakes. We ate and drank without speaking, then rolled out the sleeping bag.
“Just one?” He raised an eyebrow.
“It’s a double. Better for body heat.”
His eyes caught mine in the dim flashlight, before skimming down my body.
“Lay down.”
“Lucas—”
“Now.”
&
nbsp; When I did, he pulled my shirt up and redressed the wound. The soiled bandage had bloodstains mixed with a greenish-tinted fluid that had soaked to the edges of the padding. Neither of us commented on it. Silently, he swabbed the stitches with alcohol, found more clean dressing, and bandaged me with ridiculously tender fingers, as if trying to make amends for poking me on the trail. I blinked at the ceiling of the tent, illuminated by the first, fragile morning light as he smoothed tape over my ribs and tugged the shirt back down. Then he slid carefully to my other side and zipped us both into the bag. There was enough room to sleep side by side and that’s what I should have done. I should have turned as far away as I could, but I was cold and hurting and too weak to resist the warmth of his body. Instinct took over and we curled into each other, fitting curves into hollows, cushioning bone with flesh. For eight years I’d dreaded going to bed, preferring insomnia to the nightmares and ghosts. I’d never spent the night with a live person before; I’d never felt this foreign surge of comfort or experienced the gift of listening to someone else’s heartbeat through their chest, and I knew I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t deserve anything about Lucas Blackthorn, this boy who’d gone from a panicking, violent kid to someone who lovingly redressed wounds in the arctic dawn, whose lips were brushing over my hair and whose fingers nestled in the dips between my vertebrae.
He should have choked me to death the first day we met, I thought as I drifted into the no-man’s-land between consciousness and sleep.
Because I was going to avenge my mother. I was going to orphan him.
27
* * *
I WOKE UP shaking, turned my head to check for Lucas, and sat bolt upright in the sleeping bag. He was squatting near the tent entrance and rummaging through my pack.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting us something to eat. I wanted to let you sleep a little longer.” He didn’t move away from the bag.
“The protein bars are on top.”
“That’s not the only thing in here.”
Adrenaline flooded my chest and I tried to keep my voice steady. “What do you mean?”
Turning, he held up a small pot and two bowls of instant udon noodles. His lopsided grin told me he remembered eating them at my house and I stuttered, because it was the exact reaction I’d been hoping for when I packed them a lifetime ago, planning his rescue and the journey to rescue his father. Leaning over to kiss me, he promised to go start the fire and make me some “delicious food.” I nodded and forced myself to smile.
The snow started as we finished eating, slurping the last of the broth and heating a fresh batch of filtered water over the dying embers. I was trying to find us on the map, the one I’d taped together at the library, but the snow quickly covered the paper, falling in swirls of obliterating white. Snow was good. Snow meant we’d be harder to track. It also provided a layer of insulation over any lakes that had started to freeze, preventing further ice formation. We added layers, packed up, and hiked back out to a different trail that led us through towering pine shadows, down into a frozen marshlike clearing, and winding over another hill. I started to wonder if we were even on a trail anymore, but Lucas didn’t hesitate. Every once in a while, he reached a hand out from under the canoe to skim the trunk of a tree, running his gloves over them like they bore messages in braille. A roaring noise grew louder as we made our way through the white world until Lucas stopped and gestured to an opening in the trees. I looked over the edge of a cliff and barely made out the still-rushing rapids below. Finally, we descended to a winding river where the force of the current kept the water open. As we climbed into the canoe and pushed our way through the frozen weeds, I glanced into the shadows on either bank.
“Are there campsites along here?”
“No, people canoe through here but they don’t get out except when they have to portage the rapids.”
Which was exactly where the rangers would be looking, in the most remote spots. We knew their route for this morning, but after that they could be anywhere. Maybe the snow didn’t matter at all, maybe they used infrared scanners, or even more advanced tracking equipment. We were close, I knew. And the closer we got to Josiah, the more scared I became of being caught before we could reach him, before I could make him pay.
We paddled to another set of still-rushing rapids and portaged up the hill, a fifty-foot climb that felt like five hundred. After we set back in I started getting warm, too warm, the heat burning through my clothes and throbbing into my side. My wound didn’t feel any worse, though. I wondered if I should eat again, even though the thought of food suddenly made my stomach turn. Water sounded better, but everything seemed out of reach. The filtration bottle might as well have been at my mother’s cabin as in the pack behind me. I took off my hat and unzipped part of my jacket.
My deteriorating state wasn’t lost on Lucas. He wanted to pull the canoe over and find a spot to rest, but I pushed us away from every bank he steered us toward. Fumbling blindly in the pack behind me, I grabbed the first aid kit and took another dose of antibiotics and a half pain pill, trying to pacify him and keep him carrying us forward, which was becoming more of an abstract concept. The white in front of us was impenetrable. Boulders and bends in the river appeared like they’d been conjured from the storm itself, obstacles with less and less meaning.
The quote on Dr. Mehta’s office wall snaked through my consciousness. What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. Something within me had begun to burn.
“Maya, I want you to promise me something.” I’d long given up paddling when Lucas’s voice floated through the whorl of white.
I waited, not sure if it was really him or something my ill brain was manufacturing.
“Promise me you’ll hear him out. Listen to him like you listened to me. That’s all I’m asking.” A pause, drifting into the wind, bowing the groaning branches of a pine tree over our heads. “Maya?”
Bracing myself on the gunwales, I nodded, hoping he could see me through the whiteout. I didn’t notice I was crying until the tears had frozen on my cheeks.
I didn’t know how much time passed. There might have been a shooting star. There might have been a whole cascade of comets blasting through the storm, or it could have just been my eyes on fire. I stopped being able to separate the flaming, dizzying flashes in my body from what was happening around me. It wasn’t until the canoe grounded, scraping bottom on an ice-covered rock ledge, that I registered the outcropping of giant boulders we had wedged ourselves in between. I blinked and looked back to see Lucas hunched close to my face. His hand felt like an ice pack on my forehead.
“Welcome to my home.”
* * *
The boulders gave way to woods where Lucas dragged the canoe and hid it under the drooping limbs of a listing pine. I shouldered my pack before he could take it and followed him into the dense trees. There was no trail, no campsites here where the forest seemed impenetrable. I concentrated on Lucas’s back, which squeezed through gaps and disappeared in between giant snow-laden branches like magic or a hallucination. He was there and then he wasn’t. Heat radiated through my body in waves, adding to the illusion; I could no longer tell what was real. As the pain medicine kicked in, I became clumsier. Needles scraped my clothes and face, combed my matted hair and showered it with flakes. The forest thinned as we moved into an old growth area where the lower branches, deprived of light, had lost all their needles and clawed at us even as the canopy above kept the snow away. Then we descended into a frozen marsh and struggled through quick-sand drifts of dead summer grass buried in white. I wanted to give up, to lay down in the marsh beds and let the cold sink into me, but Lucas pulled me forward. The farther we went, the more excited he became. He pointed out landmarks in a language only he could read. A trio of birch—the three sisters. A branchless trunk rising into the sky—the eagle’s nest. And finally, a dead pine partially uprooted and sagging into the wide branches of another—the h
ugging trees.
We ducked underneath the hugging trees into a shadowed place, old growth on rock bed, and Lucas stopped as his breath made short, quick puffs in the dark.
“There,” he whispered.
At first I didn’t see it. A rise of rock covered in dead moss and decaying needles blocked the way in front of us, but as Lucas moved forward and I followed him, the perspective suddenly shifted. What appeared to be part of the hill was actually a moss-covered wall, camouflaged so well I wanted to run my hands over it until I found the edges. It arched at least seven feet off the ground, sloping in gradually to a peak where I spotted a glint of metal hiding in the needles—a chimney. A few rocks were scattered around the base and one seemed planted directly into the side of the wall, all overgrown with winter lichen and giving off the impression that this was exactly where the glaciers tossed them ten thousand years ago.
Two boulders flanked the narrow entrance, covered by a flattened piece of bark. Lucas dropped his pack and lifted up the wood to reveal a zipper underneath, a tent inside the hill. He unzipped it and ducked inside. I stumbled forward, squeezing through the rocks with my pack and lowered my head into the void.
