Jack shook his head without breaking stride. “Maybe he knows something we don’t.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
She kept moving and tried to push it to the back of her mind. He easily could’ve jumped in the gulley just like they had. Jumped down and started shooting. Instead, he’d stayed above and fired up the machine. Why? What was he up to? She didn’t know but did understand they needed to find a way out of where they were.
She pushed harder. Jack matched her.
As they moved, she thought about this gulley and what she knew. Not enough. Truth was, this might not even be the same gulley she’d explored before. It was narrower than she remembered. Much narrower in this area. Which was good in some ways. She was concerned the other machine was going to the mouth of the gulley and would drive straight up the middle. As narrow as it was getting, that would be a challenge.
Rock outcroppings and gulleys were common in this area. She’d led them to the crevice in the dark more on instinct than anything. She could make out the rocks and believed there was an opening in the formation they could hide in.
But what if that crevice wasn’t the crevice she’d explored in the past? What if she’d become turned around running in the dark and trying to evade the poachers? Now this gulley might not even be the same gulley. She could be leading them into a trap, and maybe the poachers knew it.
The gulley curved gently, and the walls narrowed even more. The trees overhead grew denser, their branches reaching toward each other above the cut, blocking what little light the night sky offered. They had enough light to move, but only barely. She kept her eyes on the ground and her feet moving and her breathing steady, the wayshe’d trained herself to do when everything else wanted to come apart.
The gulley split.
She stopped. Jack stopped beside her.
Two directions. The left branch continued west, deeper into the forest. The right branch angled back north. She didn’t remember this. Either she hadn’t gone this far before, or they really weren’t where she believed them to be.
Jack looked at both branches. Then at her. “We split up.”
“No.”
“Steph— ”
“No.” Splitting up was not an option. Surely he understood that. “We stay together.”
“Two of us moving together, we’re one target.” His voice was low and certain, and she recognized the thinking behind it, but that didn’t mean it was the right choice. “If we split up, they have to choose. Better odds that one of us makes it out and gets to the rescuers.”
“Splitting up in the wilderness is how people die.” She met his eyes and didn’t look away. “That is not my opinion. That is every survival course I’ve ever taught and every piece of wilderness training I’ve completed. You stay together. You stay on the plan. You do not separate. Ever.”
“This isn’t a survival-course situation.”
“The principle doesn’t change because the danger is different.”
“The principle absolutely changes.” The edge in his voice was real now. Controlled but present and not backing down. “We have armed men coming from more than one direction. One pistol. Staying together makes useasier to track, not harder. Two targets moving separately is a harder problem for them to solve.”
“If we separate and something happens to you, I’ll have no way of knowing.” She kept her voice steady and her eyes on his. “I can’t help you. I can’t find you. I don’t know where you’ve gone. The personal beacon is tracking one position. My position. The rescuers are coming to one location, and if we’re in two different locations when they arrive, we’ve made everything worse.”
“You update the position when you get clear.”
“With what? I don’t know that branch.” She gestured to where the gulley branched off to the right. “I don’t know the conditions in there. You don’t either. We’d both be moving blind in terrain neither of us knows.”
“That’s the point. Maybe they don’t know it either. Maybe our splitting up confuses them enough that they don’t know exactly what to do.”
“Jack.” She held his gaze. “We are not splitting up.”
He looked at the new branches, then back down the gulley toward the way they had come. The sound of one of the machines still carried from that direction, and Steph knew she had been right. The operator was in the gulley and heading toward them.
Jack knew it, too, and surely he understood they had no choice but to stay together. She watched him work through it and could almost see his mind turning, the need to be right written across his face. He had spent years making decisions under pressure and trusting his instincts, and she understood that.
She also understood that what he knew about pressure and tactics and splitting up resources, didn’t account for what happened to people alone in winter wilderness when things went wrong.
“I’ve seen what happens when groups separate,” she said. “More often than not, the results are deadly. I’m not doing that.”
“Your wilderness survival training didn’t include men with rifles trying to kill you.”
