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He’d pushed himself to get here, and in between floundering with textbooks and reprimands, he’d thought he was being cut from the program.

The mountain was a new challenge. One he could prove himself on.

“I’ll take that deal,” he said.

Gabe almost smiled.

* * * * *

The birds woke her before the sun did, same as always.

Some mornings their song almost sounded angelic, a whole choir tuning up in the pines above her tent.

Not today. Today a murder of crows had claimed the ridge, screaming about some victory, and Whitley lay there wishing she owned earplugs so she could sleep in like the old days.

Some mornings on this mountain she woke up almost at peace. Today wasn’t one of them.

“Even Tom Hanks had a volleyball,” she muttered to the tent ceiling.

She didn’t have an inanimate object with a painted face and a sprig of coconut husk for hair to talk to. And she was no Snow White either. No woodland creatures gathered around to help her dress or hummed her a tune while she worked. Deer bolted the second they caught her scent. Chipmunks scurried into the underbrush because even after two months of living in their midst, the wildlife didn’t trust her.

She was lonely.

She was scared more often than she let herself admit even inside her own head.

She was tired—oh god, she was bone-tired—the kind that no amount of sleeping in would help.

She was sick of just surviving…but she wasn’t ready to quit, even if she was down to her last pair of panties.

Packing light was underrated, especially when it came to underwear. She’d arrived on the mountain with four pairs. One blew off the tree branch where she’d hung them to dry. One pair fell into the fire after she rigged a drying rack out of sticks and burned up. The third pair sank to the bottom of a deep pool when she thought it was a good idea to wash her clothes and take a bath at the same time. Turned out, she was wrong.

She attempted to drag the bottom using her toes, but when she felt something slimy slither across her foot, she left her third pair of undies to the swamp god.

She unzipped her tent and glanced around before she slipped into the small clearing between trees. The air smelled like pine and sap, and all she could see for miles was rock, trees and sky.

So far from home. Salt Lake City felt like a lifetime away.

Rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, she performed her new ritual of facing east and greeting the sun as it rose over the mountain peak in the distance. For two months she’d done this same thing—maybe closer to three. The longer she was out here, the more the days blurred together.

Any way she looked at it, she was officially a missing person.

In her bare feet, she crossed the bed of pine needles she’d scattered on the ground to protect her from sharp rocks. She stripped out of her thick wool pants and pulled on her hiking pants. Even buttoned, the waistband slid straight to her hipbones.

When she pulled on a sweatshirt and drew her hair free, her fingertips brushed her collarbone—sharper than she remembered it being back when meals came from a kitchen.

She’d lost weight. But she’d also gotten stronger. She could haul more water, drag more dead wood, lift her own body weight up onto a ledge without her arms shaking the way they had at the start.

Foraging, though… Foraging could go straight to hell. Whoever wrote the plant guide in her backpack had clearly never been hungry enough to eat the wrong thing on purpose and hope the end came quick.

And god, would she give her left tit for a steak. Medium rare, juice pooling on the plate. She’d eyed every animal on this damn mountain, and though she didn’t have the ability to dispatch one, they were smart to run away from her.

Squatting in front of the cold ash of her fire from the previous night, she contemplated her situation.

Food and clothes were imperative for survival, and she was running low on both. The panty situation was officially a crisis, with her washing them in the creek most nights and praying they dried before morning.

She dragged her pack over and unzipped the main compartment, taking a mental inventory she already knew without looking. Half a bag of trail mix. Two energy bars, both crushed to dust inside their wrappers. Maybe she could dump them into a pot with water and rehydrate them.

She made a humming noise as she continued assessing her supplies. She had exactly one water purification tablet she was saving for an emergency, and she prayed her filtration pump kept working.