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“How can we figure it out?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Everything looks damaged, and I think we washed away pretty far. If we look for a trail, we might find something, but we risk losing this cave as shelter if it starts to rain again.”
I looked up. I couldn’t see through the canopy of leaves to see what the sky looked like, but I didn’t get the feeling it was a bright, sunshine day.
I had to think. I’d watched a lot of documentaries about survival, and I’d taken classes—in theory, I knew what to do. It was different in reality, though.
“Let’s get water from the stream,” I suggested.
Celine nodded. As long as we had water, we would be okay.
Careful not to slip in the mud, we made our way back to the river branch where we’d gotten out. It was a lot wider than I’d thought, and the water rushed by fast.
I came close to the water’s edge and filled one bottle, handing the full one to Celine and taking the other so that we had drinking water again. It would taste like mud, I was sure, but it would be safe enough to drink since it hadn’t been stagnant.
“What now?” Celine asked.
“We should follow the river,” I said. “If we move downward, following the water, we’ll find a road or a trail or something eventually. Towns all start close to the water, so it’s more likely we’ll find someone or something that can help.”
“What if the storm starts again?” Celine asked, looking up.
“We’ll deal with that if it happens,” I said. “There will also be no trees around the water, so if a helicopter comes past, it can spot us easier.”
“A helicopter?”
I nodded. “The others will have alerted the authorities that we’re missing by now, it’s been almost twenty-four hours.” If they were okay—but I had to believe that they were. I hoped Gino had kept his head about him.
“That makes sense,” Celine said.
“Come on.” I put the water into the backpack and strapped it around my waist the way I had before. It had been the only reason we hadn’t lost all our things, and it had been a saving grace.
We started walking. It took a while before the anabranch joined the larger river again, but eventually it did. When we reached the river, I checked my phone again.
Still nothing.
The river was large and rushing, crashing its way down the mountain, swollen with rainwater. We stayed a few feet away from the water, just in case the ground gave way again. It was still very muddy, and we had to move carefully so we didn’t slip.
While we walked, we talked.
“What have you done since college?” I asked Celine.
“Nothing,” she said with a snort. “Everyone asks me that, and I always make it sound like those charities are everything but it’s just something we do—my mom always did it and so I do it too. It’s not like it means something to my personal development.”
“What would you want to do?” I asked.
Celine snorted again. “I don’t know. Pathetic, right? I was born to be an incubator, to marry and produce babies for the next male heir of some kind of important bloodline. I was never asked to think about my own future, to decide what I want… now that I’m here, living a life that I want to claim as my own, I have no idea how to do that, and it makes me so angry.”
I glanced at her. Celine’s life was very different from mine. I’d always assumed she was happy where she was but the way she talked about it made it seem like she felt trapped.
“I’m pathetic,” she said.
“You’re not.”
She glared at me. “I can’t take care of myself if I don’t have the money to get people to do shit. This is a perfect example.”
“We’re stranded after a storm in the mountains. Even someone who knows exactly who they are won’t know what to do. It’s not a big deal, you know. You can’t measure yourself by this.”
“Well, I measure myself by others’ success and drive. Take Anna, for instance. She had nothing—everything she does, she does for herself. I’m not like that.”
