On the other hand, there was more chance for it to have hit stuff as it went through—but if it had nicked an artery, he’d already be dead, right?
She wished she had a knife—a knife was pretty much an essential for survival generally and would have been useful now in particular—but instead she tore off one of the sleeves from her long T-shirt, then put her sweater and jacket on again. She couldn’t really afford the loss of layering, the loss of warmth, but she couldn’t afford for Bob to bleed to death, either. She made him take off his sweater—she saw the tears standing in his eyes, magnifying them, when he eased it over the wound.
She bent down and scooped up some clean snow, pressed it into the wound as hard as she could. She figured it would clean the hole and slow blood flow at the same time. Then she wrapped her shirtsleeve around it as tightly as she could, tucking it under itself.
“Best I can do,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said. The mountain was doing something to their speech. Grinding it down to essentials.
She looked across at Aidan, who was watching her intensely, and she took his hand. It was cold in hers—that was bad.
“Are you OK?” she said, looking down at him. He was as pale as the sliver of moon in the sky above them.
“I think so,” he said. “I have very little frame of reference.”
“That kid freaks me out,” said Bob.
Emily smiled weakly, leaned down, and kissed Aidan on the top of his head. “Yeah, me too,” she said.
“You’re going to give me the whole story, yeah?” said Bob.
“When we stop to camp,” said Emily. “Let’s get as far as we can from the plane first.”
“I’m going to hold you to that,” said Bob. “Remember, I’m the one with the lighter.” There was heat in his voice, as if smoke might come out with his words. His eyes were round stones, unyielding.
Emily looked at Aidan. He shrugged.
“Yeah,” she said. “I remember.” She turned, trying to orient herself. Her head was still spinning from the crash, but she could see the track they’d scoured in the snowy slope. As their pursuers would too. “Northwest is that way, right?” She pointed.
“Right,” said Bob.
“So let’s go.”
CHAPTER 10
THEY SET OFF through the trees. Movement would keep Aidan from getting too cold. They were lucky in one thing: he was still wearing his puffy coat, the one she’d bought for him at Mackay’s general store, but she worried it wasn’t enough.
The snow was deep, powdery—hard to walk through, her weight pressing down into it. Aidan was walking more easily: he was lighter.
“Where are we going?” her little brother asked.
“Where we were always going,” she said. “The antennas.”
“Walking?”
“We don’t have much choice,” she said.
A pause as they picked their way through roots and snow.
Aidan put his hand in his jacket pocket and took out a plush toy monkey. He held it close.
“That’s why you went back to the plane?” she said.
He glanced at her—a quick glance, which ran off her and down, like water. “Yeah. I wanted Goober. I found him under our seats.”
“Seriously?” she said.
“Oh, come on,” interrupted Bob. “Don’t be hard on the kid. He wanted his toy.”
A complicated expression passed over Aidan’s face. Emily felt the earthquake friction of different layers of reality rubbing together.
“He could have been killed,” she said eventually.
“He’s just a kid.”
Emily didn’t say anything, but she gave Aidan’s hand a squeeze, just one, hard. He was quiet after that.
So: Aidan had his monkey. Which she had also bought for him at the general store, because without her he would have had no clothing and no toys. They had a lighter. Boots—and she was glad she’d had the presence of mind to dress them both in good, sturdy ones. She was acutely conscious of everything they did not have, however. They did not have:
Water.
Food.
Clothing, beyond what they were wearing. It was a good thing she’d had her jacket on when the helicopter arrived.
Rope.
A knife.
The rifle, even.
But she did have herself, her own experience. All those trips with her mom and dad. God, she’d hated them at the time. Living the dream. That was what they called it. Being in the outdoors. Good for the soul. As if suffering, as if being cold and sore and covered in blisters and bug bites was going to make you a better person. She would have been happy becoming a better person by staying in her contemporary dance class in the city and not moving to a place where people thought jumping up and down to rock covers in the Crescent Moon bar was dancing.
Still, it was all there, or some of it, anyway, what had been drummed into her about survival. Shelter, fire, water, food. None of which, at this point, she had.
But she had:
Aidan.
And she had:
Her own will, and her own will was a knife; it had cut her away from the isolated town that was her new and only world, had made this different reality. She would kill the world with her bare hands, if the world came for Aidan, with the strength of her will, which was a knife. She would cut the world into a million pieces.
She squeezed his hand again, this time without realizing.
He squeezed back.
“I love you,” she said.
“I know,” he said matter-of-factly.
She laughed. “Jerk,” she said.
He frowned at her, and she marveled at the things he still didn’t understand.
Then she heard a rustle from the undergrowth over to their left, and held up a hand to stop the others.
An impression of brown fur, and she breathed out, relaxed—it wasn’t the men with the guns. But then the fur advanced, grew, and was a bear.
She froze, all the breath out of her lungs, the warmth of it fading as it mingled with the Alaskan air.
CHAPTER 11
THEY COMMUNICATED WITH their hands and heads. Emily pointed to the bear and then made a shushing, calming gesture, palms down. Like: keep very still. It hadn’t seen them yet. The trees loomed over them, casting long thin shadows on the snow.