The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

he’d supposed it would be. She weighed maybe forty pounds more than the pack, and she hadn’t been designed by North Face to distribute the load to his frame. Uphill distances became leg-press workouts. Downhill was worse, every step compressing his ankle and threatening to roll it over into a sprain. Which, in a roundabout way, he realized, would amount to a fatal injury. For both of them.
    It helped to consider what Paige had gone through these past three days. All his discomfort was a shin-bump against a coffee table by comparison.
    He lifted her carefully now from beneath the cedar. Her eyes opened for a second but didn’t focus on him. He wanted to believe that her catatonia was mostly a result of the drug and the sleep deprivation, but had to accept that the infection’s role was considerable, and growing. Her forehead beaded like a windshield in rain.
    He left the cedar stand and got moving, pushing the pace faster now than at any time before. The open space ahead was the physical distillation of anxiety itself. He imagined that this was how agoraphobics felt in shopping malls. Like prey.
    There was no reason to think the chopper might be friendly. Had Paige’s people somehow located the wreck, they’d have shown up in greater numbers: fighters overhead, and multiple helicopters offloading personnel along every ridge for miles. It would have been the confident presence of a force on its home soil.
    This lone chopper was more like a prowler in someone’s house.
    Ahead, the valley curved gradually, revealing that the open space continued farther than he’d seen at first. He’d hiked this route on his way in, but couldn’t recall the specific layout of tree cover.
    He recognized the high, rocky crest on which he’d seen the Dall sheep, his first night in the park. At that time he’d been a few miles east of it, on the Coldfoot side; he was far west of it now, still deep in the range. Adding up the rough distances, and considering his speed—slower than he’d traveled with just the pack, despite the urgency pushing him now—he put Coldfoot at least another twenty hours away.
    He wouldn’t sleep, of course. Paige would live or die based on how soon she received treatment for the infection. Hours would count.
    As he walked, he thought of what she’d told him in the clearing.
    Tangent. The Breach. The Whisper.
    He had in his pocket the piece of clear plastic he’d retrieved from the dead ATV riders. The Whisper’s key. What exactly would the Whisper do, when its key was applied? Paige’s words came back to him:
    We didn’t build this thing.
    We as in people.
    The implications were hard to get his mind around, and not because he didn’t believe her. Just the opposite.
    Paige interrupted his thoughts, murmuring something in her sleep. No words—just a scared sound, miserable and pleading. It lasted only a few seconds, and then she was quiet again, though Travis felt the tension in her muscles linger, and saw her eyes flitting back and forth behind their closed lids. He wondered how long it would be before she could dream anything other than nightmares.
    “You’re safe,” he said quietly. “They’re gone.”
    He didn’t expect it to work, but it did. She relaxed almost at once, into what passed for dreamless sleep.
    Mostly, he tried not to look at her.
    Tried not to notice her eyelashes, or the way her bangs fell on her forehead, or the nearly invisible traces of long-lost freckles across the bridge of her nose. Tried not to think of how, in spite of his muscles burning as if battery acid were flowing through them instead of blood, this was the best he’d felt in a decade and a half.
    She was something. No escaping it.
    In a way, she was everything. Everything that his future would never contain. A year out of prison, he hadn’t even humored the idea of dating again. He’d spent fifteen years learning not to think about what he was missing. He’d gotten pretty good at it, too, and his freedom had brought little reason to change that perspective. His body might not be constrained behind razorwire borders any longer, but his chances with a woman like Paige sure as hell were.
    It wasn’t that he’d be alone forever. There were ways to take the edge off his past, and he was working on them. He’d been doing construction in Fairbanks for most of the year he’d been there, on a contractor’s crew. Working hard at it, and working smart, paying attention to the business side of the job.