16 – 2
We find our place in a dry creek-bed, its banks rising high enough to hide the light shed by our little fire. It's a lively crackle of lifesaving warmth, well-fed by broken branches and errant twigs. We are invisible to the road and untouched by the wind, blessings both, but there's no escaping the snow. It falls thicker now, its flakes fatter. It won't be long until there's enough to cover the ground; until our steps leave tracks to follow or find.
I shudder, either from the specter of Rolly Pike on our trail or the flush of fever on my skin. Clarke is alive and slumbering in my arms, her body cradled in mine. Lighting the fire had exhausted her, and though I am weary to my bones, it would seem that I won't be joining her in slumber. Not tonight.
Every time my eyes close, I'm back on the pier, freedom in a fishing boat behind me and Juliana's death in front. He didn't hesitate, did he? Not even a moment of it. He aimed, he fired, and she died. With us, it was different; right from the beginning. He got us up, forced us out of the city, and then he left us there.
Why?
I toss another twig onto the fire and watch as it smokes, then catches light. Clarke thinks he toys with us, like the bramble-beast did. If she's right, then where is he? Shouldn't he be lurking in the nearest shadow, waiting for the best moment to cause the most fear? I lift my tired eyes from the fire's lively dance and look up at the trees along the riverbank.
Is he there now? If he's not, where in the moonlit hell is he?! If Clarke's wrong, then he left us, he spared us, and I don't know why. What makes our lives worth more than Juliana's? Why did we get to live when she didn't?
Another shudder, another shiver, and I feel so utterly horrible that my aching eyes fill with stinging tears. I seal my mouth into a thin line and let them fall, my nose in Clarke's hair. She smells like sweat and sickness, like smoke and snow. Her heart beats on under my palm. It helps.
The night goes on. My tears cease, I feed the fire, and my fever feeds on me. I feel its ache in my shoulders and hips, its chills running down my spine, and its fog in my thoughts. It'll be an absolute beast to endure before it breaks, and I'm sure to worsen it with stress and exertion, but there's nothing for it. We can't stop until we find somewhere secret, somewhere safe. My eyes flutter closed, the pier flashes through the fever-fog, and before I fall asleep I find myself with one last question: where, exactly, might that be?
I wake without an answer, to a risen sun and a risen Clarke. My head is in her lap, her hands in my hair, and the fire's warmth on my skin. I open my eyes to a snow-shine brightness that rouses my headache and leaves me squinting. “Hi,” Clarke says softly, her blue eyes worried and her voice thick. She looks no better. I feel much worse. A sort of groan is the best I can do to show I'm alive. She nods, brushing cold fingers across my fevered brow. “You're burning up.”
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Another grunt. A jerky nod. I lick my chapped lips with a tongue that feels dry and swollen. The beast has made a desert of me, it would seem. I take a shaky breath and, in a croaking voice, ask, “What about you?”
“I'm – ” she turns away to cough into her fist, every one seeming to tear free from deep in her chest. When it's over she clears her throat and spits a vile, discolored wad of phelgm into the snow. “I've been better,” she answers, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “but I should be alright to keep going. What about you, are you ready?”
No, I'm not, but we can't stay here. We've no food, water, or shelter; the nights will only get colder; and the longer we stay in one place the more likely it is that we'll be found. We cannot be found. I listen to what my body is telling me, of its aches and chills and shaky weakness. “Help me up?” I ask, and it must be quite the sight: the fevered supported by the sickly. My head spins like a child's toy and she struggles to catch her breath, but in the end I am standing. In the end, she's kicking snow over our smoldering fire and coming back to my side.
She pulls my arm across her shoulders and together, we eye the challenge of the creek-bed's banks. They hadn't looked or felt so steep last night; now they might as well be mountains. I refuse. “It should be shallower further along,” I offer, and she nods, puffing a strand of hair from her brow.
“Which way?”
I look, eyes still narrowed against the snow-shine. Upstream it seemed to worsen, so, “This way,” I answer, tilting my head opposite.
“And after?” she asks.
We set off, snow crunching under our boots. My head swims with every step. “I don't know.” Still and always, I don't know.
The bank-slope gentles into something manageable. We manage it, and after Clarke catches her breath she says, “I think I might.”
- - -
Sockeye Bend.
The road is slick, a layer of snowmelt slime overtop hard-frozen ruts. If one of us were to fall, the other would be brought down with them, leaving us both covered from head-to-toe in clinging, freezing muck. We stick to the road's edge. It's better there, firmer.
I don't know anything about Sockeye Bend, but there is where Clarke thinks we ought to go. “Why there?” I ask.
“It's close, firstly,” she answers hoarsely, her voice ever more wrecked by her cough, “maybe another day up the road.”
Can we make it another day?
My illness grows worse by the moment, it feels. The chilled shivers turn to uncontrollable shaking, the light-born headache becomes a piercing agony, and my very bones ache. It has made me weak, and dizzy, and unbalanced, and it is burning me alive. An absolute beast of a fever. I hate that I'd been right.
Clarke fares no better than I, for all that she tries to hide it. She spat out blood not too long ago, brightly red among the usual and ugly shades of phlegm. There's a wheezing edge to her breathing now, along with a tightness in her chest that she rubs when she thinks I'm not looking.
No, we can't, but we must.
“Secondly?” I prompt.
A gentle slope robs her of breath to speak. We stop at the peak until she recovers it, all the while rubbing her chest. “Secondly,” she all but whispers, “it's small and remote. No reason for Merigold to have people there.”
“And if she does?”
She shrugs, exhausted, “Does it matter? She thinks we're dead.”
I feared being found. I know I did. It's why we would only travel by night, why we would hide during the day. It's why even a hint of light in the dark would send us scurrying into the trees. I was so afraid of being found that it made us sick, and now I don't care at all. It's as if the fever burnt it out of me. Now all I want is somewhere warm and soft to close my eyes, and food; fuck, I'm hungry.
“Alright,” I say, “Sockeye Bend, then.”