WILD RIVALS

The Landing

Later, Mara wouldn't be able to say which of them moved first.

What she remembered was the rock shifting, the man's arms windmilling, his phone flying out of his hand and disappearing over the edge before he did — and then Jonah was past her, faster than she'd have given him credit for, closing the distance in a dead sprint down a slope she would have told any client, any day, not to run on.

She was right behind him. There wasn't time to think about whether that made sense.

The husband — Ray, she'd have to remember his actual name later, not just "the Henderson who almost died" — went down hard on his hip, sliding, grabbing at loose scree that came away in his hands. Jonah hit the slope at an angle, dropped low, and got a hand on his jacket a second before the ground gave out completely under both of them.

For one very long second, nobody moved and everybody could have died.

Then Mara had her rope around a boulder that wasn't going anywhere, and she was sliding down to them on her own two feet, controlled, the way she'd trained for exactly this a hundred times and hoped to never actually use. She got a hand under Ray's other arm. Between the two of them, they hauled him back onto solid ground, Jonah's boots skidding the last few feet before catching.

Ray sat down hard in the dirt and started laughing the way people did after — too loud, too fast, eyes too wide.

"I dropped my phone," he said, like that was the headline.

"You're welcome," Jonah said, breathing hard, and Mara would have found that funny on a different day, from a different person, in a moment that hadn't just taken ten years off her life.

She checked Ray's arms, his legs, his pupils, the automatic inventory she ran on every client after anything remotely like this. Scraped hands. A hip that was going to bruise spectacular colors by tomorrow. Nothing broken, as far as she could tell without an X-ray, which counted as a miracle on a mountain like this one.

"You are never," she said, "leaving the marked trail again. Not for a photo. Not for anything."

"Understood," Ray said, still grinning like an i***t, already looking around for where his phone had landed.

She got him back up to the group — his wife alternating between fury and tears, the other three couples doing that thing where they all suddenly needed to check their own boot laces — and by the time she'd finished explaining the new, much stricter rules about staying on marked ground, the adrenaline had started to drain out of her all at once, leaving her hands shaking in a way she hoped nobody noticed.

Jonah noticed.

He fell into step beside her a few minutes later, once the group had regrouped and started moving again, voice pitched low enough that only she could hear it.

"You good?"

"Fine."

"Your hands are shaking."

"So are yours."

He looked down at them, like he was surprised to find that true. "Yeah," he admitted. "Yeah, okay."

They walked in silence for a stretch after that, which was new — three years of knowing each other and she couldn't remember a single silence between them that hadn't felt like a standoff. This one didn't. This one felt like something else entirely, something she didn't have a name for yet and wasn't in a hurry to find one.

"You moved fast back there," she said finally, because the silence had gone on long enough that leaving it alone felt like admitting something.

"So did you."

"I had rope. You just ran down a scree slope like it was a good idea."

"It worked."

"It almost didn't."

He glanced at her, something more serious in his face than she was used to seeing there. "I know," he said. "Believe me. I know exactly how that could've gone."

There was a weight in the way he said it that didn't match the rest of him — not the easy charm, not the guy who joked his way through every industry mixer she'd ever watched him work. For a second she almost asked. The question sat right there on her tongue, obvious, easy: what happened to you out here before.

She didn't ask it. Not yet. Some instinct told her it wasn't hers to ask, not after three years of mutual dislike and one shared afternoon of nearly watching a man die.

"We should keep moving," she said instead. "We lost time."

"Right." He nodded, and whatever had opened up between them for those few seconds closed again, smooth and practiced, like it had never happened at all. "Try to keep up, Vance."

"You first, Reyes."

But she caught him looking back at her twice over the next mile, quick glances he probably thought she didn't clock, and she found herself doing the same thing once, which she blamed entirely on adrenaline and told herself she'd stop doing by tomorrow.

By the time they reached the first camp, the sky to the west had gone the color of a bruise, and neither of them had checked a forecast in six hours.