Cold Springs(107)

And then she noticed her backpack was gone.

She walked downstream for a long way, but there was no sign of the pack. It had been ripped off her back and carried away.

Now, for the first time, Mallory felt truly alone. She looked at the GPS bracelet—that small green eye glowing at her, daring her to give up. She was in deep trouble. She could die out here. Just her goddamn luck, to freeze to death in Texas.

No, she told herself. You can do this.

But the darkening sky and the river and the trees seemed to be telling her otherwise.

She tried to remember what Leyland had told her to do in an emergency.

S.O.S. Survey. Organize. Strategize.

Okay, the survey was easy. Night was falling. She was wet and cold—her clothes soaked through, her backpack and med kit and thermal sleeping bag gone. Her limbs felt numb.

Mallory organized her supplies. She stripped off her jacket. She checked her leg sheath to make sure the knife was still there. The metal match they'd shown her how to use was still in her pocket. That was it. That's all she had.

Strategize? She needed warmth, right away. She needed to make a fire.

The only good thing that had come from her river ride was that she seemed to have lost whoever or whatever was following her. She couldn't hear it anymore—didn't feel its anger. Fire light might attract it to her again, but she had no choice. She had to have warmth.

After a fire, she'd create a shelter. She'd have to spend the night here, move on in the morning. Thirdly—only thirdly—she'd need to satisfy the gnawing hunger in her stomach.

She'd done lots of fires in base camp. It had been one of the prerequisites for the solo trip. Nevertheless, she had to remember the steps, mentally walking herself through.

She found an enormous tree that was hollow inside and decided that would be her shelter. She'd build her fire next to it. She used the hard dirt as her platform, put down a wrist-sized branch for the brace, piled the tinder on this. It took her three strikes to spark a flame to the tinder, and by that time her fingers were losing feeling. In a few minutes, though, she'd started a curl of fire and began to add the kindling. She got to the fuel stage, began adding larger twigs, then small logs.

She stood as close to the blaze as she could, feeling like something that had been pulled prematurely from the microwave—boiling on one side, frozen on the other.

A dot of ice melted on her cheek. She looked up. Snowflakes were falling, a scatter of oversized dust motes evaporating in the halo of her fire.

Great. Just great.

When her hands felt warm enough to work, she began cleaning out the tree trunk. Grubs and worms and beetles squirmed out of the dark, and these she threw onto the tarp of her jacket by the fire. Just in case, she told herself. Just in case.

By the time dusk was truly setting in, she had made her shelter. The snow had begun to stick to the ground like a crust of salt. Mallory backed into her hollow tree, now lined with moss and grass, and kept the fire blazing. She drank spring water from her canteen, but she avoided the grubs for now.

She couldn't seem to control her shivering. She wondered if hypothermia could set in so quickly.

She imagined she was back on the ropes course above the river, suspended in the dark, her harness tearing. She was ready to make a deal with God, to get her the hell out of here.

Her last visit to her father's, just before she'd run away to the East Bay, she had walked into his bedroom and found him on his knees, his back to her, hunched over his bed in his business suit, praying. She couldn't have been more embarrassed if she'd found him in his underwear. Her dad, who'd never been to church in his life, who'd told her when she was a kid that God was a fairy tale, like Cinderella—her dad was praying. He didn't notice her. His fingers were laced, his lips almost kissing them as he spoke.

She'd stayed just long enough to hear him pleading quietly, promising God he would give anything. Please.

Then she'd left, easing the door closed behind her.

She understood finally what he'd been praying for . . . Her.

She'd blown up at him, cursed him, called him a monster because he didn't like Race, because he'd hit her mother once, years ago.

She had hurt him, just like Pérez said, and all he wanted was for her to be safe.

He'd sent Pérez to get her. That was a way of telling her he loved her. A twisted way, maybe. But he had tried.

She started crying—knowing that the tears were some damn chemical imbalance, her period making everything seem worse than it was.

Her dad was gone. She wanted to think she'd feel a hole in her heart if he were dead, but she wasn't sure.

This was her mother's fault—her mother and Chadwick. They had started everything going wrong, just because they wanted to f**k each other. They'd ruined two families. Her father's disappearance was on their heads.

Maybe Chadwick had treated her okay. Maybe he was even serious about helping her. Maybe, for a while, when she was scared in Fredericksburg, she'd even thought about confiding in him. But in the end, Mallory knew the main reason she hadn't told her dream about Katherine to anyone wasn't that she didn't believe the dream. She wanted to see what would happen if her worst suspicions were right. She wanted to see Chadwick punished.

She huddled into her hollow tree, facing the flames, her knife at her side. Her empty stomach seemed to be ripping itself out of her body. And as the night grew dark, her only company was the river and the fire and the sound of the hills moaning as they contracted under a hard freeze.