Her smile faded. Because they didn’t have a plan. Not really. Unfortunately, all they had was one very small goal: make it through the night.
Seventeen
That was, Claire thought as she blinked open her crusty eyes,the most uncomfortable night ever.She’d woken what felt like every five minutes, whenever the forest creaked or Reyva moaned in her sleep, and whenever a dream felt a little too real.
She kept hearing the shot, both through the phone and echoing across the lake, and she kept feeling the ground slip out beneath her as they fell down the muddy slope. But fortunately, she didn’t feel the familiar shortness of breath that signaled an attack. Her heart rate stayed steady.
Claire was grateful when dawn crept over the forest, because then she didn’t have to pretend to be trying to sleep anymore. Crawling out from the decayed tree trunk, she checked for any sign of Jack or the wild man or any other surprises, but the forest seemed quiet around them. A squirrel skittered up a tree, and a woodpecker tapped a rotted branch.
She peed several yards away from where they’d slept, watching the forest the whole time and pulling up her shorts quickly afterward. She missed her toothbrush and toothpaste. Her tongue felt as if it had been coated in rotten peanut butter. Shescraped it against her teeth and tried to just be grateful they were all still alive.
Scouting the area, she did discover one blessing: the rain had left plenty of water to drink. It had pooled in the curves of rocks, on leaves, and on every surface throughout the forest. It wasn’teasyto drink, but she managed a few mouthfuls before returning to Mariana and Reyva.
Both of them were just waking up.
“How’s the arm feel?” Claire asked Reyva.
Reyva gave her a look. “Fantastic.”
Claire decided not to pursue that. She didn’t need Reyva to say she was in pain to know she was. “Anyone want to talk about what happened? With Jack?”
Mariana shuddered. “No. Rather talk about anything else. Favorite movie? First childhood memory?”
“Sorry,” Reyva said. “But we have to talk about what we’re going todo. Now. Claire, you can’t tell me you haven’t been thinking it through.”
She had been. Of course.
“So what’s the plan?” Reyva asked.
Both of them were looking at her as if she had answers. Not as if she was a problem to fix. It took her breath away, especially after they’d witnessed one of her episodes. Their trust. It was extraordinary.
She took a deep breath.Work it like a puzzle, she reminded herself.A chicken, a fox, and a bag of feed on one side of a river...“First, we take inventory. What do we have to work with?”
They all had wet clothes and mud-soaked shoes.
In fact, they were all wearing a phenomenal amount of mud.
But what else?
Claire dug into her own pockets. She had a limp and soggy mass of dandelions and fiddleheads that they hadn’t had the chance to boil, her Swiss Army knife minus the broken blade, and... that was it. Mariana had her phone, which was about as useless as a slab of plastic, as well as the double-A battery from her nail dryer and her pack of gum, which were much more useful. And she had the second coil of wire from the doorbell. Reyva had a couple of the nails they’d planned to bend into hooks.
Together, they had the supplies to create snares or fishing line... if they had the time for either trapping or fishing.Which we don’t, Claire thought. Both activities required staying in one place, which wasn’t the best idea when you were being chased. They had to stay on the move. Still... it wasn’t nothing. The wire in particular had potential.If we survive long enough to use it, she thought.
“Okay,” Claire said. “We have to establish our priorities.”
“Get rescued,” Mariana said. “Go home. Never see another tree again. Unless it’s a palm tree.”
Claire ignored that. Those were end goals, not immediate priorities, and she knew Mariana knew that. “Reyva, is the splint okay?”
“Don’t love it,” she said. “Won’t die of it.”
Good enough. “We ate yesterday, so we won’t starve yet—”
“Love how she says ‘yet,’” Reyva said.
“—and there’s rainwater. If we can find places it’s collected,like hollow stumps or concave rocks or whatever, then that’s another problem down, for now.”
“What about Jack?” Mariana asked.
