But my muscles have other ideas.
Jonah and I walk as quickly toward the sound as our bodies will allow, and when I see the stream in the distance, my legs nearly give out.
I don’t even feel bad sobbing right now, vulnerability be damned.
Jonah’s fucking crying, too.
When we see the sparkling bank, he does break into a run, and I’m not far behind him. It’s stupid, probably, but I can’t help it.
I swear, I wouldn’t be capable of more excitement if a helicopter landed in front of us and offered us a ride back to paradise.
We reach the riverbank, and Jonah drops to his knees to fill his water bottle. I do the same thing, pouring the sweetest water I’ve ever tasted down my throat.
It’s not rushing, which is nice, because, I don’t know. Maybe we can like . . . catch fish or something. I don’t know the way this works.
The point is it’s moving, giving us a path to follow, and we’re drinking.
“Be careful,” says Jonah, even though I don’t think he’s really being particularly careful. “Take it slow, man, you’re probably dehydrated, and—”
“Jonah,” I say between mouthfuls of water.
“Hm?”
“EMT,” I say.
“Right,” he says. “Right.”
He breathes out, nostrils flaring, and stares at his water bottle like he’s physically holding himself back from downing the entire thing in a single swallow.
Suddenly the world is slow and languid, and I can feel energy seeping back into my muscles. Can feel the pangs in my belly subside enough for me to think.
Not enough, not really.
It’s false.
But it’s something.
It’s . . . hope.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
WE SIT ALONG THAT riverbank for far too long—like we’ve reached the Promised Land, we can stop now, MAZEL TOV YOU’VE COMPLETED THE FINAL LEVEL.
As long as we stay here, we can live in that reality: the one in which we’ve reached the end. The one in which the final challenge is over, or, at the very least, our odds of survival have jumped by 40 percent, not by like . . . 2.
It doesn’t matter.
Suddenly, when the whole world around you wants to eat you or starve you or close in on you piece by piece and you don’t know if you’ve got two hours left or a day or a week or your whole life, things begin to feel shockingly temporary.
It feels . . . urgent, almost, to focus on every single thing happening to you at this very moment. Because, not to sound like a cheesy motivational speaker or something, but because suddenly, this might be it.
This might be the last drink I take, or the last time I discover something, or just the last afternoon I’ve got.
And if it is, it’s important.
To just slow the hell down and languish in it.
“We should . . .” Jonah starts. He’s still sitting, running his fingers over one of the few dry spots on the mountain. But he’s looking up at the sky, and I’m wondering whether the sun is still on its journey up or if it’s already on its way back down.
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah. We should . . .”
Neither of us wants to be the one to say it.
But I guess languishing in it, though it fits nicely with my whole newly discovered carpe diem thing, doesn’t fit particularly well with logic. It doesn’t interlace well with the goal of, you know, staying alive.
We have to keep moving.
The fact is that both of us are freaking starving, and the longer we wait to crack into the last granola bars in our bag, the slower we move.
The farther away everything seems.
The fact is that the longer we sit here in the cold, the stiller and cooler our blood gets, the harder it will be to get moving. The less the influence of that sudden water in our systems. The less the influence of the thrill of adrenaline at discovering the thing we’ve been looking for.
It would be foolish to waste the motivator of hope.
I am the first to stand.
Jonah looks out over the river, and I shut my eyes against the bright white and the sharp tingling in my legs and toes. I listen to the water rush.
When my eyes open, they find Jonah, hands in his pockets, standing next to me. He’s staring at the water, blinking, mouth a grim line.
Jonah is a thousand miles away.
I say, “What?”
He shrugs. “Nothing.”
I wait a beat. This is our dynamic, right? He’s reticent and I’m chatty and I should probably just let him keep his thoughts to himself.
I say, “It’s not nothing.”
Jonah purses his lips and blows out a long, long breath through his nose. He mutters, “Jesus Christ.”
“What?”
“I’ve been stuck away from civilization on a mountain for four days, and still, I can’t get any peace.”
I roll my eyes and shove his shoulder and his lips tick up for a heartbeat.
He says, “I don’t know what I thought would happen when we found water.”
I watch the river roll by.
“I guess it just seemed like . . .”
My breath clouds on the air. I say, “A finish line.”
“Yeah.”
We start moving.
It’s a quiet walk; neither of us has much to say, or if we do, I don’t think we’re interested in saying it.
It’s too much, the questions are too big, the stakes are too high. And it’s so stupid, but the disappointment of finding the river this many days into this fucking nightmare and not finding a whole town attached to it is too breathtaking.
Not like that’s what I actually expected to happen.
But it seems like . . . it seems like everything is vast and empty and impossible.
So we don’t say much.
The glittering white landscape just spreads. And spreads and spreads, scrub brush and pine trees and aspens occasionally breaking up the white-as-a-men’s-rights-meeting-in-Idaho panorama.
Jesus.
I’m getting so sick of white.
We crunch along in the cold, cold quiet, far enough from the river that it doesn’t spray us, but close enough to keep it in our periphery. We’re not risking losing it again; it may not be the key to paradise, but it’s the only lifeline we have.
At least we know it’s possible to get back here, if a hunter rigged a blind. That somewhere along the line, someone came out here. With gear. On purpose.
That and the water mean something, dammit.
It goes like that, me being quiet and contemplative, Jonah somehow managing to kind of be aggressive about it, until broad daylight shifts into evening.
The quiet, even though it’s empty, even though it makes it almost impossible to focus on anything but the gnawing pain in my stomach, branching out to my limbs, my head, god, my head, is kind of peaceful, almost. I can begin to trick myself into thinking it’s just a hike, just a cold-ass, poorly planned outing, and we’ll be curled up in the bed of a truck in a couple hours. He’ll have brought a thermos of cocoa and a couple blankets and we’ll watch the stars and he’ll try to seduce me and I’ll say, “Jonah, I bet you do this for all the girls—” and be totally into it when he laughs that fucking sexy laugh, even when the hard ridges of the truck bed dig into my back, and—
He hisses, “Hallie.”