Once Betrayed, Twice Shy

Don’t. Stop

FARAH

The man on my left breathes through his nose. Slightly irregular — a deviated septum or old break, the kind of imperfection that makes itself known under exertion. He’s working harder than he wants to show. The upward slope is doing something to his careful control, the way effort tends to strip away the performance of composure and leave whatever is actually underneath.

I file this away and wait.

The man on my right is younger, which I had already established, but younger also means less practiced at carrying dead weight uphill in the dark, and every thirty seconds or so he adjusts his grip on my arm with the micro-corrections of someone whose hands are starting to tire. He’s been told not to let go. He is holding on with the specific determination of someone afraid of what happens if he fails the instruction.

Also useful.

What I need is a moment in which both of them are thinking about something other than me, which sounds like an impossible condition until you remember that people are bad at sustained attention, that bodies in motion get occupied with the work of motion, that the dark has a way of pressing in on the mind and filling the space that vigilance vacates.

I wait for the slope to steepen.

It does, eventually. The terrain shifts from gradual incline to something more deliberate, the packed dirt giving way to exposed root and loose stone, and I feel the man on my left’s balance change fractionally — the weight redistribution of someone compensating, the knife hand dropping two degrees as his body prioritizes stability.

Two degrees is not enough.

But it is information about the direction things are moving.

I let myself be heavier. It costs me almost nothing — I am already most of the way to a dead weight, and the small addition of deliberate limpness settles into the space between acted and actual with convincing ease. The man on my right makes his micro-correction. The man on my left exhales.

“How much further,” the younger one says. Not quite a question. The kind of statement that means I need to hear a number to keep going.

“Until Declan says stop.” Flat. Practiced at not answering questions.

“She’s not light.”

“Noted. Keep moving.”

A silence that has the texture of resentment in it. The young are so transparent about their grievances before they learn to bury them, which is perhaps the only advantage of transparency — the things they feel move across the surface where you can read them.

I keep my breathing shallow and my eyes mostly closed and I think about the bond.

It has been getting warmer in the way that things get warmer when the source of heat is moving toward you rather than when you are moving toward the source. The distinction matters because it means he’s closing distance faster than we are creating it, which is either a function of his particular quality of relentlessness or evidence that he knows, in some way, where I am being taken.

I wonder what I look like to him through the bond right now. Whether the thinness of it goes both directions or whether he can feel me with more clarity than I can feel him. I wonder if he can tell that I am awake, that I am thinking, that I am doing the slow and methodical work of paying attention because it is the only thing I currently have to offer the situation.

The temperature drops further as the tree cover thickens above us into something old-growth and serious, the kind of canopy that forgets about seasons underneath itself. My dress is entirely inadequate for this and has been for some time. I add hypothermia to the list of considerations without particularly dwelling on it, because dwelling requires resources I’m rationing.

Then the man on my left stumbles.

It is small — a root catching his boot, the lurch of a body surprised, no more than half a second of instability — but the knife lifts from my throat as his arm swings out for balance, and the man on my right’s attention goes reflexively to the sound his companion makes, and my hands, bound though they are, are in front of my body.

I have half a second and almost nothing to spend.

I spend it.

Not magic — there is not enough of that, not yet, not with the binding mixture still sitting in the rope and my reserves scraped down to structural minimums. What I have is the working knowledge of a body that has had longer than most to understand where leverage lives, and I bring my bound wrists up and into the jaw of the man on my right with everything the cold has left me, which is not much, but which is apparently enough to make him lose his grip on my arm.

I drop.

The ground comes up with the disinterest of the ground, and I hit it on my side and the pain from my chest redoubles into something that takes my vision briefly at the edges, and I am already pushing to my knees because staying down is not a current option. My legs are disagreeing with me on multiple points. I am making the negotiation as fast as I can.

“Stop her—”

The man on my right has his voice back before he has his footing. The man on my left has his footing back before the man on my right finishes the instruction, and I am upright in the technical sense but listing, one hand against a tree that is the only reason I am vertical, and the knife is coming back toward me with purpose.

I put the tree between myself and the knife.

It is not elegant. I am not, at the moment, capable of elegant. But the man on my left has to go around the trunk and I have the half-second that buys me to assess the young one, who has gotten to his feet and is looking at me with the complicated expression of someone who has been told what to do but is processing the gap between instruction and reality.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” I tell him, which is honest in that I am in no condition to hurt anyone meaningfully, though I don’t think clarifying that subtext serves my interests.

His expression does something uncertain.

The man on my left comes around the tree and grabs my arm and this time the grip is punishing, the kind that knows about deterrence, and the knife comes back to my throat and stays there.

“That was stupid,” he says.

“Yes,” I agree. My ribs are providing detailed feedback on the landing. “I’m aware.”

“Try that again—”

“I won’t,” I say, and I mean it, because I have used what I had and what I had was not sufficient and the next attempt will require different variables. I let myself sag back into the weight he’s already accounting for. “I’m sorry. I panicked.”

He doesn’t believe me — the experienced ones don’t believe the compliance that comes too quickly after defiance — but the knife doesn’t move, and that is the relevant outcome. The young one retrieves my other arm with more caution than he’d started with, which costs me some of the advantage his inexperience had provided but can’t be helped.

We start moving again.

My ribs ache. My wrists ache. The cold is more serious now than it was a few minutes ago and my body is spending things it can’t afford to spend trying to manage it. The magic sits heavy and wrong and insufficient behind my sternum, and the bond —

The bond has stopped getting warmer.

I notice this the way you notice when a sound you’d stopped registering goes absent, the silence suddenly louder than the noise had been. The directional pull is still there — north, still north — but the rate of change has flattened, which means either he has stopped moving or something has changed about the distance in ways I can’t read from this.

Don’t, I think, at no one in particular.

Don’t stop.

The trees close over us completely and the darkness becomes the particular darkness of places that don’t get sky, and somewhere ahead of us I can hear, just beginning to resolve out of the wind and the cold, the sound of more voices. More fire. Whatever passes for a fortified position among people who have been planning this for longer than I want to consider.

I count my breaths and keep my eyes open and wait for the variables to change.