WILD RIVALS

Radio Check

By morning, the trail had dried enough to move fast, and Jonah found himself falling into a rhythm with Mara that he hadn't expected and wasn't sure what to do with.

It wasn't just that she'd stopped snapping at him every time he opened his mouth. It was smaller than that ,the way she'd started handing him things before he asked, same as he'd been doing for her since the storm. The way she laughed now, actual laughing, at something Ray said about his ruined phone, and caught Jonah's eye right after like she wanted him to have seen it too.

He was trying not to make too much of it. He was failing.

"You're staring," she said, not looking at him, adjusting her pack strap.

"I'm supervising."

"You're staring."

"Fine. I'm staring." He didn't see the point in denying it anymore, not after last night, not after she'd told him about her dad at seven in the morning like it was something she was confessing out loud. "You laughed. It's disorienting. I need a minute to process it."

"I laughed?."

"Not at me, you didn't."

That got a small, reluctant smile out of her, gone almost as fast as it appeared, and he decided that counted as a win too. He was racking up quite a collection of those, this trip.

The radio crackled at his hip around noon — check-in protocol, standard for any multi-day trip, base camp confirming both companies were still accounted for. He answered it without thinking much of it, same as he had a dozen times a day for years.

"Summit Edge, base, go ahead."

The voice on the other end wasn't the usual dispatcher.

"Jonah? It's Priya. Didn't know you were out on this one."

His stomach did something complicated and unpleasant. Beside him, Mara had gone very still, listening in that way people do when a name means something and they're trying to figure out what.

"Priya. Yeah. Booking mix-up, long story." He kept his voice even, professional, the voice he used for clients and investors and anyone he didn't want reading too much into a conversation. "You covering dispatch this week?"

"Filling in. Heard you switched routes last minute — figured I'd say hi." A pause, just long enough to mean something. "You should call me when you're back in range. It's been a while."

"Will do. Reyes out." He clicked off before she could say anything else, before the conversation could go anywhere he didn't want it going in front of an audience, and became aware, a half second too late, that Mara was watching him with an expression he couldn't quite read.

"Old friend?" Her voice was carefully neutral in a way that told him it wasn't actually a neutral question.

"Old something."

"That's not an answer."

"We used to work together. At the company I told you about." He shifted his pack, more to have something to do with his hands than because it needed adjusting. "It got complicated. Not the frostbite stuff — different complicated."

"You dated her."

"Briefly. Badly." He glanced at her, surprised by how much he wanted to explain this properly, how much it mattered suddenly that she understood the shape of it. "It ended around the same time everything else did. I'm not sure either of us handled it well."

Mara nodded slowly, filing that away with the same careful attention she gave everything, and he couldn't tell if what he was seeing on her face was jealousy or just information processing, and he found, uncomfortably, that he wanted it to be the first one.

"She sounded friendly," Mara said, which wasn't quite what he'd asked for but was, he suspected, as close as she'd get to admitting anything.

"She's friendly to everyone. It's not — " He stopped, recalibrated. "There's nothing there anymore. Hasn't been in two years."

"You don't have to explain yourself to me."

"I know I don't." He held her gaze a beat too long for the conversation to still be casual. "I want to anyway."

Something passed between them then, quick and unmistakable, the kind of moment that would've been easy to lean into if they hadn't been standing in the middle of a trail with eight clients strung out behind them and a ridge camp still four hours off. Mara looked away first, adjusted a strap that didn't need adjusting, and said, in a voice that came out rougher than she probably intended:

"We should keep moving. Losing daylight."

"Right." He fell into step beside her, close enough that their shoulders brushed on the narrow trail, neither of them moving away from it this time. "For what it's worth — there's nothing complicated happening on my end. Just so we're clear."

"Nobody said there was."

"You've got a very specific face for someone who's not thinking about it."

"Keep walking, Reyes."

But she was fighting a smile when she said it, and he counted that, too, among the small collection of things about this trip he hadn't expected and wasn't ready to stop noticing.