She thought Gale meant for her to go to the creek alone and her mind moved its scrabbled tiles around, trying to form a coherent idea: What could she do? When he came scurrying along behind her, spear in hand, she swiftly rearranged them: What could they do? Could Beck and Tilda get themselves untied? Waylay him upon their return? Gale must have been feeling confident but Imogen knew her sister would do something; Beck wouldn’t let this opportunity go to waste.
He made her scamper along faster than she would have liked, so she tried to think of ways to distract him, ways to slow them down, if only a little. Give Tilda and Beck that much more time.
“Is your arm feeling any better?” They were almost to the creek.
“A bit. Yer sis is right, helps to rest it.” Gale held the spear like the walking stick it was, blade pointed to the sky. He looked out toward where the man had come across the day before, as if he expected company any minute. Imogen had long given up hope that the backpacker had companions, but that didn’t mean other people weren’t on the way.
She knelt by the edge of the water. It could only sluice into the canteens at its own rate, but she prayed for it to run a little slower. Please? For me? Maybe there was still a chance for her to strengthen her connection to him; she still worried she was the only one capable of it, despite Beck’s personal ammunition with Afiya’s pregnancy. Beck and Tilda didn’t believe they had anything in common with Gale, but Imogen understood that certain desires and fears were universal.
“Maybe this sounds weird,” she said, “after everything that’s happened, but…we appreciate how you’re trying to look after us. And know you don’t want to hurt us.” She hoped she could get him in a chattier mood. At least Gabby Gale could seem like a sympathetic person, and Paranoid Gale was always bad news. “And we understand now, about time, how precious it is. Maybe this is all you have left.” She looked up at him, hoping to draw his attention, wanting him to read her sincerity. When he met her eyes, she went on. “I know you might not believe me, but…I think we all have empathy for you. For how this got so…out of control.”
He scoffed. “I know what yer feeling fer me and it ain’t ‘poor Gale.’”
“Actually it is. Sort of.” She closed up the first canteen and started on the second. “I understood it, Gale, what you said before, about how things can go wrong. In life—not just one day. My life hasn’t gone as I thought it would. There are things that’ve happened that…messed me up, messed up everything else. There were things I used to want, and I pushed them away for so long, until eventually I believed I didn’t want them anymore. But the truth was, I didn’t know how to do anything differently, with my life. Beck was the one who really saw it. Sometimes it’s hard to look at your own crap. But I want to try to fix it. I see that in you—see you wanting to try to fix the things that got all screwed up. I know it’s not easy.”
And she really did see that, his desire for things to be different, his desire to change and be better than what he was. Beyond his regrettable actions, she believed he possessed the capacity to love. And he’d shown glimpses of kindness. The only real difference between them was that she’d directed all her frustrations and anger inward, attacking herself, while Gale directed his outward.
“Sometimes people get turned around,” she said. “If things had been different…I know you didn’t want to end up here.”
“So ya get it then.” He nodded—at nothing, at the distance. “I fucked it all up, I admit that. And it’s too late fer me now.”
“Are you sure?” She meant that earnestly. There were times when the thought of him, the fear of what he might do, was worse than his actual presence. Talking with him one-on-one, her optimism returned. “It might not be too late—and even if you feel like it is for you, it doesn’t have to be for all of us. I think you feel bad, about a lot of things. You don’t have to add me and Beck and Tilda to your conscience.”
She finished another canteen, set it aside, and immediately started on the next.
He shifted his jaw, chewed on the inside of his cheek. Imogen thought he might be fighting back tears. “I like you girls, I do,” he said softly. “Yer different, from other people I met. Kinda weird, but ya got pluck. I like that. I kinda wish…wish we could sit around a campfire and share stuff, real stuff, about our lives. I think…I think you’d actually listen. You, anyway.”
“I would.” It touched her, more deeply than she expected, that he saw something of value in her—patience, or compassion. An ability to listen to and understand someone else’s story. “We should do that. Maybe later, when we get resettled at Slate.”
The thought of it brought her a warm rush of hope. It’s working! But Gale was lost in another universe.
“I wish…” He sounded dreamy, wistful. “I wish we had some poison, and we could have our meal, eat up everything we got left, and then…drift off to sleep. Peaceful.”
What? How could he be fantasizing about them all dying together while she was trying to give him reasons to let them live?
He snapped back to the here and now, his tone turning harsh. “You finished?”
Imogen pressed the last of the canteens deeper into the water, now urging it to hurry. He sure knew how to suck the oxygen out of a room.
“That’s enough, come on. There a creek out at the other place?”
“I don’t know—”
“Don’t matter, this is enough.” He shooed her away from her task and she twisted the lid on the last canteen. She carried all four, and they hung heavily by the fingers of her manacled hands. Gale strode slightly ahead of her with his spear–walking stick, fast enough that she had to jog to keep up. But he stepped aside, grinning, to let her take the lead on the final scramble up to the overhang. “Just in case they got an ambush planned, they’ll club you first.”
Imogen needed a second for her eyes to adjust to the shadows at the back of the shelter, but whatever she’d been hoping Beck and Tilda might conjure in Gale’s absence…They weren’t free, hiding in the wings, ready to attack. Everything was just as she’d left it. Tilda and Beck were lying on their sides, a gap between them where she had once been. As Imogen secured the canteens to the packs, she studied their sleeping area more carefully. Was the dirt more scuffed up than it had been? Had Beck and Tilda shifted around? And wiggled back into place so it looked like they hadn’t been up to anything? Or maybe Imogen was seeing what she wanted to see.
“How far out to the other place?”
Beck lifted her head to answer him.
“Maybe there’s somewhere better,” Imogen suggested quickly, locking eyes with her sister. After hearing his morbid thoughts at the creek, Slate was the last place they should go—they needed to head toward people, not away. Counting on his ignorance, she threw out an idea. “Maybe Phantom?”
There were always people at Phantom Ranch. It even had small, year-round cabins; their dad still sometimes mentioned celebrating New Year’s there, if they could get it together to make reservations far enough in advance. Tilda looked from sister to sister, cautious and uncertain. Imogen couldn’t read Beck’s tense face. The walk to Phantom Ranch was ridiculously long, two solid days of hiking, but reaching it wasn’t her goal. Heading that way would take them back through the main corridor of trails, where they’d start passing other backpackers with increasing frequency.
“That closer?” Gale asked.
“Farther,” said Beck.
“More private?”
Beck gave Imogen a tiny, sad shake of her head. “We’d have to go back through Hermit. And cross the Tricky Spot.”
This information was for Imogen, not Gale, and she got it: her sister was afraid to cross the gorge, hands bound, one eye out of commission, and with her knee still a question mark. Beck considered her odds for survival better at Slate. Oblivious, Gale strapped on his backpack.
“Ferget that, let’s stick with the other place. Better get ’em untied.” Gale gestured with his head and Imogen went to Tilda first, and started to undo her knots. “How long’s it gonna take?”
“No more than two or three hours,” said Beck, “and it’s a level walk.”
“Great. We’ll have breakfast there. Get away from…” He made an impatient, sweeping gesture—toward the walls, toward the world beyond the overhang.
It struck Imogen that he had no names for the things he was running away from. This canyon. The next one. The man he’d murdered. The thousand ghosts fast on the wind, threatening to catch up to him.