by Nick Lake
Bob seemed a little less agitated, but he was still sweating, still an unhealthy color.
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
Emily’s dad had washed her mouth out with actual soap and water once when she was seven and blasphemed like that, having heard it at school. He was a Methodist, on top of all that military discipline. They all were.
Even Aidan. Ha-ha.
“And now those men are still coming,” said Emily. “I figure they traced your radio distress signal. So we need to go. Sorry. I know it’s a lot to take in.”
A hollow laugh from Bob. He started to rise but fell down. Emily had to prop him up. “Let’s go, then,” he said. “I mean, none of this makes sense, but we have to keep going, right?”
“You posit a good life philosophy,” said Aidan.
“Don’t talk like that,” said Bob. “Not with that face. It creeps me out.” He paused. “Wait.” He turned to Emily. “You said he can’t help it. Making people see him as…as a kid or whatever. But…” He scratched his head. “I mean, it’s not totally working on me now, is it? I see a kid, but I know he’s not one. If you get me.”
“Once you know,” said Aidan. “You know. You can’t unknow it. Like Emily. And the men in black, as she calls them.”
“OK.” Another pause. “But…what are you doing here? On Earth, I mean?”
Emily turned to Aidan too, curious.
Bob stared at her. “You never asked him?”
“No. I just…It never occurred to me.”
“Jesus,” said Bob. “You kids.”
Aidan nodded, though. They had started walking through the forest, away from the crash site. In the rough direction of the cabin by the lake. Emily was hoping there was some food there, some sort of supplies. Her stomach was fizzing with hunger.
“It’s a fair question,” he said.
“You bet your ass it’s a fair question,” said Bob.
Aidan smiled. “We are here to observe. To protect, you might say. We hope you might avoid some of our mistakes. One thing about my physical appearance is true, though: I am young. Not so young as Aidan, in relative terms. But still a child. When I crashed, when I became…lost…I don’t know. I wanted to see Earth up close. The creatures. But I was not very good with the craft yet, and I got too close and crashed. You could think of me as a kid who lets go of their parent’s hand in a supermarket, and turns, and is alone.”
“You don’t talk like a child who’s lost in a supermarket,” said Bob.
“The analogy is not perfect,” said Aidan, “I admit. But it contains some truth.”
“Like?”
“Like he has to get back to his parents,” Emily said. “They’ll be worried about him. They miss him. And he misses them.”
“Oh, you knew that part?” said Bob.
“Yeah,” she said. “It was the only part that seemed to matter. That’s why we’re here. To get to where we can find him help.”
Bob sent his eyes heavenward, to the slivers of lightening sky showing through the trees. “So where are you going?”
“To a place where we can send them a message,” said Emily. “His family. His real family, I mean.” She felt a twinge of pain at that, of sadness. All of this was about getting him home, but that meant losing him, and she wanted him to be back with the ones who loved him, and also she loved him and didn’t want him to be gone.
As if two forces were trying to tear her heart apart.
“Good Lord,” said Bob. “The kids are in charge, and our mission is some kind of E.T. shit. I may never get out of this alive.” He was stepping heavily over the stones and roots underfoot, his balance wobbly.
Emily looked at the sheen of his forehead. On the exposed skin of his wrist, she saw thin red lines, branching, his blood vessels brightly visible against the paleness.
No, she thought. No, you may not.
The thought made her sadder than she would have expected not long before.
CHAPTER 19
EMILY HAD TO support Bob as they headed down the valley. It was a long slope, a cliff on their left side and rocky scree on the other, leading down to a series of foothills and then the pair of lakes. Bob was wincing as he walked, one forearm over Emily’s shoulder, for balance.
Emily glanced behind. She thought she caught movement high on the hills they had come down from. A figure, maybe, stepping behind a tree. Or it may have been her imagination, or a trick of the light.
Yeah.
Or it was men with guns coming for them. She wondered again why they hadn’t caught up by now. But then, they only had to keep their distance, and wait. This landscape was not hospitable.
She shivered involuntarily.
Aidan walked ahead—if someone tracked them from behind, it would give him another second or two, and that could save him. It was a clear day. Far away in front of them, on the hills overlooking the upper lake, Emily could see a couple of caribou making their way through a stand of low trees. Too far away, even if she’d had a rifle. Her stomach rumbled so loud she felt it could be heard, echoing against rock.
“Is this the right way?” Emily asked Aidan quietly.
“To the HAARP facility? Roughly.” That was where they needed to go to get Aidan home. To send him away.
“How far is it?” she asked.
“Far.”
“Can we make it?”
Aidan glanced at Bob. “Not all of us, I don’t think.”
A little later, Bob went down on one knee, swore, and got up again. They paused. An eagle rode a thermal high above them. Emily would have been interested, usually, but barely glanced at it. She was more worried about the veins sticking out on Bob’s forehead.
“Sorry,” said Emily. “Sorry for all of this.”
Bob glanced at Aidan. “All you did was find him,” he said eventually. With half his usual gruffness. “If it hadn’t been you, it would have been someone else. Someone less kind, maybe.”
“No. I mean, the SPOT tracker. If I hadn’t taken it, if I’d—”
“Then they’d just have got to us quicker, like you said. Maybe in the night, when we were sleeping, that first night after we…after I…crashed. They’d have found us, and Aidan…Aidan would have been lost.”
She nodded. This was probably true. But still: the pilot was shivering, and his blood had soaked through the T-shirt sleeve she’d tied around his arm, and there were dark crescents under his eyes. The sun was low in the sky. The sun was nearly always low in the sky up here.
“Maybe someone else might have come,” she said. “Someone who would have rescued us.” She swallowed. “Then you wouldn’t have got shot. I mean, I wouldn’t have got you shot.”
Aidan cleared his throat; she thought he might say something, but he didn’t. They walked on in silence for a moment. Bob kept putting his hand on Emily’s shoulder for support. But he was pretending like he wasn’t doing it, kind of, so she was always careful not to meet his eye.
“You don’t always get to choose who finds you,” he said with a grimace.
“Huh,” said Emily. She wasn’t sure if he meant that in an angry way or a nice way, and she didn’t really want to ask. Maybe it was both.
“We don’t work as a team, we die,” said Bob. “We’ll get out of these mountains, and then…” He trailed off, the implication clear.
“Then we’re on our own?”
“Uh-huh,” he said, nodding. “I don’t want to get tangled up in your shit any more than I have to. You can call your parents or something.”
“Hmm,” said Emily.
He watched her face. “You don’t think they’ll be looking for you?”
“No, I do.” In fact, she could very easily imagine her father and mother trekking through the snow, backpacks on, in layered clothing, carrying compasses and water and knives. Like when the
y used to go camping—hiking for days through the Rockies or the Adirondacks. “I just…I don’t know if I want them to find me.”
“Like I said, we don’t always get to choose,” said Bob. He walked in silence for a moment. “What’s so bad about them anyway?”
“There’s nothing obviously bad about them,” said Emily. “They’re just…different. Intense. My dad, I guess he never got over busting his knee and having to leave the army. Sometimes I think I’m like his mini-me, and he wants me strong because he can’t be, totally. Or whatever. And my mom…she’s just, like, a bunch of clichés about work and teams and stuff. She doesn’t…she doesn’t get me.”
She doesn’t understand dancing.
She doesn’t understand what art is.
Bob was looking at her. “Longest thing I’ve heard you say.” An echo: she’d thought a similar thing about him.
She shrugged. “Plus,” she said, “they made us move here.” She glanced at him. He wouldn’t have become a bush pilot if he hadn’t loved Alaska. “No offense,” she added.
He grunted.
She could have said:
They’re tent pegs and engines and screws and knots and mindfulness and homemade granola and inspirational posters. They’re short days with no light. They’re a place with one store with a few paperbacks on a rack, which they call a library, and they don’t mind any of that—they like it, they want to be in the middle of nowhere.
“We want to give you everything.”
But what if she didn’t need any of it? What if what she needed was a different life altogether?
“What do they do?” asked Bob, though she guessed he must know; it was a small town, after all, and he was the de facto mailman. He was clearly making conversation to keep them going, to keep himself going.
“My dad teaches shop at the school,” she said. “My mom helps out at the general store sometimes, and she’s always jogging around town. You must know her.”
“Gray hair? A little…severe?”
“Yep.”
“I know her. Pioneer type. A woman out of her time.”
Emily was surprised at that: it was good, and true, and perceptive. “Yeah,” she said. “They’re…outdoorsy. When I was a kid in Minnesota, we spent more time in tents than in the house. National parks, the Adirondacks, the Rockies. When we weren’t in church.”
He gestured at the mountains around them. “You’re in your element, then,” he said.
“No,” she said. “In theirs.”
“Fine. So what do you want?”
She didn’t say anything to that, just shrugged.
“OK,” said Bob. “Air of mystery. I can respect that.”
His words were coming out with a wheeze. He stopped to get his breath and shielded his eyes from the sun, looking around. They had come nearly to the end of the valley, a few hundred yards from the trees, the cliff on their left—Emily didn’t know if it was a thin, knife-edge ridge or a thick bluff—coming to an end. She didn’t know what was on the other side.
“Shit,” Bob said. He pointed, back the way they had come.
Emily turned and saw a white figure—no, two white figures—making their way down the valley above them. Within firing distance, if they had telescopic sights, which surely they did.
Yes—she saw the rifles now, long black lines against their bodies. There wasn’t much black on the mountainside, so they stood out.
Oh, she thought.
Oh, no.
CHAPTER 20
EMILY SCANNED THEIR surroundings: no shelter, no cover.
Of course not.
Just snow, and the trees too far to run for. They could take cover behind the cliff, maybe, though first they’d have to get to the end of it, and find out what was below it—here, it was just a wall hemming them in. But at the end, there might be a sheer drop.
Something zipped overhead, followed—confusingly—by a pop like a firework going off.
Emily yanked Aidan down hard; Bob was already on his knees, though she didn’t know if he’d done that deliberately or fallen. Behind them, up the mountain, she saw the first white figure raise the rifle again. There was another, a little way behind. Two. The other must not have survived the blast from the helicopter that had punched him to the ground. A part of her was glad of that. A part of her was very definitely not. That part of her felt sick.
She moved in front of Aidan, pushed him behind her. “Run!” she said. “Run downhill!”
And then she started running up the slope, away from him, jagging left and right. It was instinctual, almost, the only thing she could think to do: make herself a bigger target, give Aidan time to get away. Maybe even avoid the bullets until she could get close enough to…what? Well, she’d come to that. She had:
Fists, teeth, forehead, fingernails.
Though, of course, they had guns, so it was all academic, really. But time. Time, she could give him.
Zip. Another bullet, whipping past her right side, so close she felt its slipstream. Then the bang.
What the hell was she doing? Was she really risking her life for someone who wasn’t even a real person? Yes. Apparently, she was.
And then:
A rumble from farther up the mountain. She was still moving, still dodging sideways, but her eyes were on the snow at the top of the valley, which was starting to move, to shift, to flow downward—as if the mountain was turning to liquid, was melting. The two men in white turned too, guns falling by their sides, and then they were running toward her, away from the rushing avalanche.
She spun around. “Avalanche!” she shouted to Bob and Aidan as she ran back to them, a pointless warning, given they could surely see the mass of snow heading down the mountain toward them.
She was on them now—she grabbed Aidan’s hand and pulled him toward the shadow of the overhang. To the end of the cliff, she was thinking. To the end, and then left, and hope it’s not just a drop—hope there’s some kind of plateau there to stand on. Bob was limping along behind, not fast, but she had to be practical. She couldn’t carry him.
Aidan slipped, went down, and she dragged him a little without meaning to—she was holding his hand, his body spinning. She dropped to one knee, picked him up, and threw him over one shoulder: fireman’s carry. She glanced back at Bob, who was gaining now. Her eyes were drawn to the avalanche itself. The first man, the lower one, was running fast, or as fast as he could in the powdery snow.
So was the other one, but he was higher up, and it was too late. She saw him fall forward, as if thrown, as if pushed in the back, and then the white engulfed him, roaring now as it gathered speed and force.
One down, a detached part of her mind thought.
Then: the rock to their left came to an end, and below it, yes, below it was a kind of wide ledge, and below that a deep ravine—but the ledge, the ledge was the important thing.
She rounded the corner, and then it was stopping her momentum that was the problem: she planted her feet, skidding as if on skis, dropping Aidan at the same time as if he were ballast. She came to a stop with one leg dangling over the ravine. She lowered her face to the cold, icy ground, and breathed out. She needed to get up, to bring her whole body onto firm ground, but for now she was unable to move; she dug her fingers into the cold rock and held still. She wasn’t safe yet, but she wasn’t dead, either.
She looked up. Bob had got there just in time: he stood, holding on to the rock face as the leading edge of the avalanche poured past and down the valley they had just been in, roaring as it went, a deluge of snow—but they were untouched by it, protected by the wall of rock.
Bob saw her, and came over, and gave her his hand. He grunted with pain as he pulled her up, but he did it: she was on the ledge, rock under her feet.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Thank you,” said Aidan,
coming to stand with her. “You saved me.” He was looking at her with wide eyes.
“What else was I going to do?” she said.
He smiled.
Then:
“Don’t move,” said a voice behind them. A man’s voice.
Emily turned, and there was an assault rifle aimed at her head.
“Try anything and I’ll shoot,” he said.
CHAPTER 21
KEEP CALM AND CHEER.
It was crazy, but those were the words that rang in Emily’s head as she stared down the barrel of the gun.
It was crazy too that she was almost certainly about to die; impossible. That a man might simply shoot her on a mountainside.
It was crazy that she was going to die without seeing her parents again. Without telling them she loved them.
She still blamed them, of course, for making her move here. For replacing Jeremy and dance with loneliness and cheerleading. In theory. But it was getting harder and harder to hold on to that anger. To make it pulse inside her. Part of it had to do with Aidan. Part of it was just…tiredness.
And all of it, with that rifle pointed at her head, just seemed so pointless. All the anger. All the trouble at the school.
She hadn’t meant to burn down the locker room—Miss Brady had just assumed.
It was all because of the cheerleading.
She hadn’t wanted to do it—but the school didn’t offer any dance classes, so cheerleading was the closest thing. Her mom had been ecstatic, of course, when Emily said she was trying out: she talked about “spirit” and pride and teamwork, and said it would be good for Emily’s social life and college applications. And Emily had done gymnastics, hadn’t she? And enjoyed it?
Yeah. But she’d stopped when Jeremy’s mom introduced her to ballet. Not that there was any point discussing it with her own mom. The woman would never understand.
The tryouts were straightforward: Emily did a cartwheel into a backflip, and that was basically it; she was light enough that they made her the flyer from the start—her job to be lifted into the air by three of the backstop team, spun, turned, thrown, and caught.