He shook his head. “I can’t imagine he is. He’d be hurting too much to do anything but stay put.”
Steph shuddered before setting her jaw.
He opened his mouth.
The noise from the second machine increased instantly. Not the circling pattern, not the searching sweep. Loud and direct, closing fast, the sound of an operator who had found his line and was committed to it.
Then the engine dropped to an idle.
“We need to find a better place,” Steph said, looking around. “This is too close to the road. We need to go deeper. There’s another set of rocks on the other side of the timber.”
Jack touched Steph’s arm as he met her gaze. Her expression made it clear the anger hadn’t faded—but survival came first.
“Lead the way.”
Chapter 33
Steph
She kept her eyes on the trail ahead and her breathing as controlled as she could manage.
Steph didn’t know exactly where the snowmobiles were or where they might come out, but she knew they couldn’t stop moving. Not yet. She wanted to. More than anything, she wanted to stop running. Stop moving. Stop fighting.
But that wasn’t an option.
Those men wouldn’t give up, and neither would she. Her legs were burning, and her hips were screaming. She was deep in the pain cave. Deeper than she’d ever been in the past.
She understood the difference this time. Every other time, she was in it for the challenge. For the fun of doing something hard. A common comeback among endurance athletes, as they good-naturedly shared war stories of the event, was, “Yeah, but did you die?”
This was different. This could most certainly be life or death. In an ultramarathon or a brutal endurance event, she always had an out, an opportunity to quit if it became too tough. That opportunity didn’t exist this time.
The only choice was to keep moving.
Wind kept shaping snow as they hid, ran, then hid again, driving it into drifts along trees and rocks and stripping some stretches nearly clean. She found one of those sections and angled onto it, the hard-packed surface giving nothing away underfoot.
No tracks. That was a plus. If she could keep them on bare ground, they’d be harder to find. She picked the next patch and aimed for it.
Jack matched her line without being told. His footfalls had a quality she recognized, the sound of someone managing significant pain without acknowledging it. She could only imagine how he felt, yet he said nothing about the pain in his feet or how cold he must have been.
The rock outcropping appeared through the trees ahead, a mass of dark stone rising out of the snow, larger than the one they’d just left. There was no obvious crevice they could squeeze into, but the formation had depth to it, a section where two faces of rock came together at an angle and left a recessed area backed on three sides. A large boulder sat detached from the main formation, positioned in a way that gave a fourth layer of cover from the direction they’d come.
“This might work,” she said.
“Let’s try it.”
They moved into the recessed area, and Jack immediately positioned himself at the boulder’s edge with the rifle, his eyes on the approach through the trees. She settled into the rock behind him and let herself be still for a moment while she caught her breath.
Then she looked at his feet.
His socks were crusted with ice on the outside. That was expected. What was underneath the ice was the concern. The fabric showed dark patches. Maybe mud. Maybe blood.
She suspected blood. Most likely, he’d cut himself on something and hadn’t said a word about it. He’d barely even slowed this entire time. She scanned from his feet up to his wrists. Blood showed from where the twine had dugin, and his hands were red and blotchy from the cold. As she watched him, she noticed they were shaking. His entire body moved as a shiver took him. Shivering was good.
“How many pairs of socks do you have on?” she asked as she removed her pack.
“Two. Toe socks for my first layer. Both pairs are wool.” He paused. “I’m fine.”
Steph snickered. “Oh, I’m sure.”
