“Yes.”
“Not Fox.”
Pav stepped over a fallen branch. “Fox is an optimist.”
For a moment there was only the wind moving through the trees.
Then something shifted beside him. Not quite a laugh. The ghost of one—a soft sound caught in her breath, like the idea of humor had surprised her.
“He is.” Warmth softened her voice. “The cache was in case everything went sideways?”
“Yes.”
Pav slowed, studying the slope ahead, then angled left without explanation.
“So this was always a possibility.” Her voice was quiet. “That it would go wrong.”
He increased the pace. “Yes.”
“And you didn’t think I needed to know that back at the camp?”
“You didn’t.”
She made a sound—a sharp exhale through her nose. Frustration compressed into a single breath. “You were prepared to leave people behind.”
Cold air scraped down his throat and left a metallic taste on his tongue. “I prepare for worst-case scenarios.”
Because sometimes the worst case was the one that happened.
She hummed under her breath. Not agreement, but not quite an accusation either. “And after we make it to the cache? What then?”
“We head to the border.”
“The border?”
Pav slowed, studying the lay of the land before answering. “Rendezvous with Fox and Zak. Three days if we keep moving.”
Longer if her feet failed. Shorter if they located transport. Pav focused on the pain in his ribs. He needed quiet and a clear head to calculate the remaining distance to the river, the hours until the dogs arrived, the daylight window, the temperature drop after sunset.
Instead, he had Harper beside him, conducting a tactical debrief.
And yet.
She wasn’t panicking or asking him to make her feel better. She was building a picture. He couldn’t fault the process, even though it made it very difficult to focus on anything other than the fact that the way she worked was deeply, unhelpfully impressive.
“What happens if we don’t make the rendezvous?”
He kept walking.
She grabbed his elbow and brought him up short. “Pav. What happens if we don’t make it in three days?”
The trees thinned ahead of them, black spruce giving way to sparse birch. Moonlight leaked through the bare branches, turning the snow to dull pewter and stretching the forest into long black shadows.
“We’ll make it.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one that matters.”
