Nellie blinked several times, then looked around as if she might identify any details which proved she’d somehow landed in a parallel world.
“Right, well… thank you, Martha,” she finally said.
Sawyer arrived at eight fifty-three, seven minutes early, which Nellie suspected was less a choice and more a constitutional condition. Her clothing represented a clearly effortful compromise between her natural habitat and the one she was about to enter: dark technical trousers, a charcoal quarter-zip that was doing its best to look outdoorsy but was almost certainly designer, and the boots—definitely the only hardy shoes in Sawyer’s wardrobe. The cashmere coat was absent.
Nellie leaned against the porch rail and took it all in.
She had been, she realized, somewhat insulated from the full effect of Sawyer Alburn’s face on their previous encounters—by the chain, the rare fungus, the low light of a cottage kitchen. In the clear morning light, with no occupation to redirect her, the effect was considerably less manageable. Pale-blonde hair pulled back cleanly into a long ponytail. High cheekbones that could have been used as a geometry teaching aid. Icy blue eyes set under a brow that communicated, even in repose, that it had seen everything and formed opinions about most of it. The overall impression was of something sculpted rather than born—winter-sharp and beautiful in the way that certain things were captivating precisely because they were also somewhat frightening. Like a cluster of foot-long icicles above your head. Or a very expensive knife.
Nellie’s brain produced, helpfully:oh, that’s a problem.
Her brain had excellent timing.
“You look—” she started.
“Don’t.”
“—like you Googled ‘what to wear in a forest’.” Nellie chuckled anyway.
Sawyer surveyed the equipment spread across the porch: two packs, the topo maps, the field notebook, the sampling kit in its labeled pouches. “Is all of this necessary?”
“Yes.”
“Both packs?”
“Yes.” Nellie slung hers on. “The second pack has the sample vials, the conductivity meters, and lunch. You could carry it if you want to be helpful.”
She’d offered expecting it to land as a teasing suggestion and be declined. Instead, Sawyer picked up the pack and slung it over one shoulder. “Lead the way.”
Nellie blinked slowly a few times before she remembered how to move her feet.
The northern ridge ran along the upper edge of the boundary in a long diagonal, climbing from the eastern drainage through three distinct habitat zones before cresting at a rocky outcrop Nellie had been mentally circling for a week. The route was not technically difficult terrain. It was also not, by any stretch, a path. It was undergrowth and gradient and the kind of ground that required you to think simultaneously about where your feet were landing and what your hands were doing, a skill that developed naturally after years in field gear and did not transfer automatically from boardrooms.
Sawyer Alburn was used to boardrooms.
“Step over,” Nellie said, at the first nurse log, not looking back.
“I see it.”
Having said this somewhat defiantly, Sawyer clipped the bark on the landing, boot toe catching the edge, and Nellie—who had developed eyes in the back of her head somewhere aroundher third field season—caught this in her peripheral vision and said nothing. The restraint was heroic.
The sword ferns on the mid-slope were thick enough that pushing through required forward momentum and a certain amount of faith, and Sawyer hit them at roughly the pace and body language of someone approaching a cold swimming pool. Nellie watched from ten paces ahead, pretending to check her compass heading.
“You can just—” she started.
“I know how ferns work.” Sawyer pushed through, fighting rather than reading the terrain. “This is fine.”
“Sure.”
“It’s a fern.”
“Many ferns.”
“I’m aware of how many ferns there are, thank you. I’minsideof them.”
Nellie tucked the compass away and kept walking. Behind her, a branch snapped—not dangerously, just the sharp report of someone who had committed to a route and was not going to be argued with by vegetation. She pressed her lips together hard.
They climbed for an hour without stopping. Nellie moved at a pace that she’d been told before was unsettling for people unaccustomed to fieldwork; she didn’t hike so much as track, forward and diagonal and crouched and upright again in a rhythm that made no accommodation for aesthetics. Behind her, Sawyer kept pace. Not easily, and not silently, but without complaint. Which was its own category of stubborn, and she found herself, quietly and somewhat against her will, respecting it.
