When it feels like it’s been long enough, I pull out the GPS Gideon gave me, just to check. I feel a little lost in time and space and seeing that our dot is closer to the cabin dot and further from the truck dot helps me feel… less lost in time and space.
Gideon glances back over his shoulder without stopping.
“We going the right way?” he asks, like he doesn’t know, which he’d better be lying about.
“As long as this is right,” I say.
He bounces on a step, adjusting my pack a little. I bite back an offer to take it from him, because I know he’ll refuse and maybe get annoyed about it.
“It’s satellite-linked,” he says. “Weather doesn’t matter. It’s right.”
I slide it back into my pocket and focus on walking: the snow crunching below my feet, the creaks and groans of the snow-laden forest around us, the sweat trickling down the back of my neck. I’m in decent hiking shape, but cross-country through the snow is something else.
“Gideon,” I finally say, when my lungs are starting to hurt. He glances over his shoulder. “Can we take a break?”
He stops without answering, the beam of his headlamp traveling over the landscape in front of us. It’s mostly trees and snow except for one rock, which he points to.
“There?” he asks, and I nod.
Ice-cold granite on my butt has never felt so good. We both guzzle some water. I’m overheated, so I take off my hat and gloves for about thirty seconds before I realize that now I’m freezing, so I put them back on. We both stare, silently, into the darkness of the woods. After a moment I turn off my headlamp. Gideon looks over at me, then does the same.
“Don’t want to waste the battery,” I say.
“Dark is good,” he answers, and then we’re quiet again. Shapes form out of shadow, all shades of the same gray-blue: the lightness of snow and the darkness of the trees; the glow of the moon behind clouds and the inky black of the branches against it. It’s spooky. It’s beautiful.
“I’m sorry,” I finally say.
“I needed a break too,” Gideon says, drinking again from a water bottle.
“No, for needing rescue,” I say, because obviously.
He doesn’t answer or look over at me, breath fogging the air, visible when it rises.
“I know this is bad and it’s my fault,” I tell the trees in front of me, not looking at Gideon. “I should have thought ahead, or planned better, or taken a GPS or a satellite phone or something instead of just assuming everything would be fine and there was nothing to worry about.”
There’s a long pause, because Gideon’s quietness hasn’t changed.
“Why did you chain yourself to a tree on Christmas Eve?” he finally asks.
“Technically, I chained myself to a tree on December twenty-third.”
He looks over at me, unimpressed.
“Because Chloe asked if I would do it with her,” I say, which is not a great explanation. I rub my face with my gloved hands. “I said yes because I don’t have a lot of friends here yet and I like her, and because Lucia and Frank are on a Mexico cruise and Dad and Rick couldn’t make it down and I didn’t go up, so it’s not like I had anything better to do.”
I blow out a breath, watching it steam in the dull moonlight.
“Also, I like the environment and fracking is bad for it,” I say, as an afterthought.
Gideon is frowning at a tree, which I get the feeling he does a lot. “Chloe Barnes?” he asks. “Friends of the Chillacouth, Chloe Barnes?”
“Yeah, she founded it, or something,” I say. “She organizes a lot of these headline-grabbing environment things.”
“Was she here?” he asks, swinging his head around to look at me, and I realize he’s alarmed.
“Yeah, but she had to go back into town because she forgot she also volunteered to help with the canned goods drive at the Hootenanny,” I say. “She was gonna come back, but then it snowed. Shit. I hope she’s okay.”
Gideon hasn’t moved a muscle.
“She left you here,” he goes on, voice oddly flat. “Chained to tree.”
“I have the key,” I point out, because I do. Somewhere. “And I told her she could, it’s not like she just disappeared on me.”
“Chloe Barnes,” he says, slowly, “Talked you into chaining yourself to a tree for a good cause, and then she left you for the Hootenanny?”
Okay, fine, it does sound bad when you put it that way, but I don’t want to throw Chloe under the bus right now. She’s passionate about causes and a little impulsive, but she’s not evil.
“We should keep walking,” I tell Gideon, and we get back to it without saying anything else.
“What kind of food?” I ask Gideon’s back, once he seems like he’s calmed down about Chloe.
He grunts, but it’s a grunt with a question mark.
“At the cabin,” I go on, breath frosting in the air, my voice nearly swallowed in the quiet, snowy night. “You said there was food.”
“Canned chicken noodle soup,” he says, over his shoulder.
“Which kind?”
He walks for a few more steps, like he’s focusing.
“Campbell’s, I think,” he says. “The regular one. Not some healthy bullshit.”
“Fuck, that sounds amazing,” I grumble, because it does. “How much further is it?”
I pull out the GPS I’m holding so I can answer my own question.
“We’re close,” he says, still trudging.
I stop in my tracks, frowning down at the screen.
“We’re there,” I say, because our dot is smack in the middle of the little cabin symbol.
However, I am not smack in the middle of a cabin, so something’s gone wrong. At night in the woods in deep snow, probably with a pack of wolves lurking just out of sight beyond those trees. I don’t think there are wolves in Virginia, but I’m willing to bet some materialized just for this occasion.
I’m sure it’s fine.
“Not quite,” he says.
“This says we—” the GPS’s screen adjusts a little, and our dot is now past the cabin. “Passed it?”
“We didn’t pass it,” he mutters, pulling the second GPS out of his pocket. “Did you see a cabin?”
“I can’t see more than twenty feet in any direction,” I point out.
“These aren’t accurate down to the foot,” he says. “They’re useful as a directional guide, but sometimes they—”
“Forty minutes ago, they were God’s extremely accurate gift to lost hikers!”
Gideon ignores me and keeps frowning at his GPS. Then he frowns at the trees. It’s not making me feel any better.
“We’re at least close, right?” I say. I’m not about to panic so much as I’m about to sit down in the deepest snowbank I can find and cry, because I’m hungry and exhausted and I fucked everything up. “Maybe if we walk in a spiral pattern or something?”
“Hard to do with this many trees,” he says, still not really paying attention. “I think the clouds messed with the signal a little.”