Chapter 2
PART 2
Luke deleted the draft.
Dana watched his thumb move across the screen.
It was not enough.
“Say it,” she told him.
He tucked the phone close to his body to protect the battery from the cold.
“We need coordinates first.”
“You know the coordinates.”
“I know the grid.”
“Then send the truth with it.”
The wind pressed Dana’s frozen hair harder against her cheek. Luke could feel the tremors running through her body where she leaned against him.
He wanted to wrap both arms around her and call that protection.
Dana would not let him.
“You don’t get to carry me out under your version,” she said.
Luke looked toward the raised root line. The wolf’s tracks curved northwest through the pines, away from the game trail he had marked as the route to the road.
His map said the road lay west.
Dana’s field notes had said the safe winter ridge ran northwest before bending back.
He had removed that bend because it added forty minutes.
Forty minutes had been the difference between the contract and another empty season.
Now it was the difference between standing snow and black water.
Luke opened the emergency channel.
The phone took six seconds to find the satellite. Each second burned cold through his glove.
A tone sounded.
He entered their grid.
Then the message field opened.
Dana’s eyes stayed on him.
Luke typed: TWO ADULTS. ONE UNCONSCIOUS, NOW RESPONSIVE. COLD EXPOSURE. UNSTABLE GROUND.
He paused.
Dana waited.
The battery dropped to eight percent.
Luke added: WE ARE ON AN UNAPPROVED ROUTE.
Dana’s jaw tightened.
“Whose route?”
He closed his eyes.
The snow hissed across the fallen trunk.
Luke typed: I SUBMITTED IT USING DANA MERCER’S APPROVAL CODE WITHOUT HER CONSENT.
He pressed send.
The phone held on the message for three seconds.
Then the confirmation appeared.
Dana looked away.
Luke expected relief.
There was none.
The contract had not mattered in the moment he pressed send. The lodge, the roof, the loan, the spring bookings—none of them had been in his head.
Only the fact that his sister might die beneath a lie carrying her name.
That did not make the confession noble.
It made it late.
A reply flashed across the screen.
MESSAGE RECEIVED. MOVE ONLY IF SAFE. WEATHER WINDOW LIMITS RESPONSE. CONSERVE BATTERY. REPORT CONDITION AT HIGH GROUND.
No promise of arrival.
No miracle moving through the trees.
The battery read seven percent.
Dana laughed once, without humor.
“You always wanted the mountain to answer fast.”
“This isn’t a mountain.”
“You know what I mean.”
Luke put the phone back inside his parka.
“We need high ground.”
“I can walk.”
“You can barely sit.”
“I said I can walk.”
She pushed against the fallen trunk.
Her knees folded immediately.
Luke caught her under both arms before she hit the snow. Dana’s face twisted with shame and anger.
“Don’t,” she said.
“I’m not saying anything.”
“You’re thinking it.”
“I’m thinking your legs aren’t working.”
“They’ll work if you stop carrying me like I’m already gone.”
Luke loosened his hold.
Dana got one boot beneath herself, then the other. She stood bent forward, breathing through her teeth.
For ten seconds, she remained upright.
Then she took one step.
It was not graceful. It was not safe.
It was hers.
Luke moved beside her without touching.
The wolf’s tracks led northwest across the raised roots. Dana studied the line and nodded toward it.
“Animals don’t use the low cut after the seep opens.”
“You told me that.”
“I wrote it.”
Luke absorbed the correction.
Dana took another step.
They moved slowly, Dana setting the direction, Luke taking her weight only when she gave it to him. The arrangement was harder than carrying her. It forced him to feel every hesitation, every time she chose help and every time she refused it.
After fifty yards, the pines tightened.
The game trail disappeared under windblown powder.
The wolf tracks remained visible in broken pieces.
Dana stopped.
“What?”
She pointed with two stiff fingers.
The tracks crossed a patch of snow, then vanished beside a cluster of icy brush.
Luke stepped closer.
“Wind covered them.”
“No.”
Dana crouched with difficulty and brushed the powder aside.
Beneath it lay a narrow depression lined with frozen grass.
“Drainage,” she said. “It’s moving under us.”
Luke looked back.
The root line had brought them onto a long island of firm ground between two hidden channels.
The ridge was narrower than he remembered.
Or maybe he had never remembered it at all. Maybe he had only remembered the clean version on the route brochure he built in his head.
Dana leaned against a tree.
“We go north until the red pines thin out.”
“The road is west.”
“The road is across the marsh.”
“The map shows—”
“My map showed the bend.”
Luke stopped.
Dana’s breath shook.
She looked at him with a tired, brutal clarity.
“You didn’t just remove a warning. You removed the only safe way out.”
The words changed the cold.
Until then, Luke had treated his falsification as a business decision that had gone wrong in weather.
Dana named it for what it was.
He had not merely put her signature on his plan.
He had erased her knowledge and then brought her into the forest to prove she was unnecessary.
Luke looked north.
The wolf’s tracks reappeared beyond the brush.
He wanted to say he had done it for both of them.
He wanted to say their father would have lost the lodge.
He wanted to say Dana had walked away when the bills came due.
Every defense sounded smaller than the black water beneath the snow.
Dana pushed off the tree.
“North,” she said.
Luke nodded.
They continued.
The battery in his pocket pressed against his chest like a countdown.
At the edge of the next rise, the phone vibrated once.
A second message waited.
REPORT REQUEST: WHO AUTHORIZED ENTRY INTO CLOSED CORRIDOR?
Luke read it twice.
Dana did not ask what it said.
She already knew.
May you like
The cold had taken feeling from Luke’s fingertips.
The question took the last place he had left to hide.
