The vultures were already circling overhead.
Beck held out Imogen’s discarded boot and she stepped into it. They dressed her: Beck tied her laces, Tilda put the shirt over her head, guided Imogen’s hands through the armholes. Reality was slightly out of alignment, nothing seemed quite right. Beck and Tilda whispered to each other like she was in a coma and they were afraid to awaken her.
“What should we do with the knife?” Whisper whisper.
“Are you going to want your stick back? For walking out?”
“No.”
“Then leave it.”
They held Imogen’s arms, as if she couldn’t walk on her own. No one spoke as they made their way back. They went directly to the creek. Everything was so ceremonial that Imogen wondered for a time if she had died. They helped her sit. Took off her shoes, her socks. Eased her to the edge of the water. Took off her shirt.
She had died and they were bathing her body. It felt so good. The cool water. The sun’s warm fingers—the goddess hadn’t forsaken her. Together, they’d slain the monster. Imogen finally looked at her crimson hands. Arms. Belly. She was as blood-spattered as a murder scene. She was murder.
No, she was course-correcting. Course-correcting for the violence that had interrupted her life. She’d experienced what one man could do. One man who didn’t care about the web of misery he left in his wake. One man, and another man, and another man.
This was what one woman could do. Bloody as a newborn.
Beck sent Tilda to dig through their things in search of their washcloth, their biodegradable soap, Imogen’s clothes.
It seemed like hours before they got the blood off. They washed her hair. They scraped the red from under her fingernails. She closed her eyes and they scrubbed her face. At some point, a moment that went unnoticed, they all became naked in the water, to keep the stains from spreading. We are goddesses. Beck, so flat and slender, pale as a moon. Tilda, with her fertile breasts and hips, glistening like a holy chalice.
Beck dried her with their little hand towel. Tilda dressed her in clean garments. They brought her back from death. Rebirthed, they made her presentable for the coming life. In everything they did Imogen saw the mothers they would become: tender, strong, capable, protective.
When had they all stopped speaking? Or maybe they were speaking. Perhaps Imogen couldn’t yet register their mortal voices, their imprecise words. She understood the creek and the creek said everything that needed to be said.
Clean
Clean
Clean
Things happened around her while Imogen sat in her half trance on an inflated mattress pad and watched. Tilda took everything out of the packs. Here’s Beck’s living room, the night before our trip. She reorganized, redistributed, refolded. With an orderliness that made Imogen proud, Tilda arranged their things as they once had been, in the right packs, the right pockets. Everything that didn’t belong to them was set aside for the stranger’s backpack.
Beck tended to her own wounds, her knee, her arm. She had Tilda help her with some butterfly stitches, and then she checked Tilda’s sting and Imogen’s head. As she sat crisscross applesauce beside her steady old stove, flames licked the edges of the pot, but the water wasn’t in a hurry to boil. She scrubbed at the bloodstains on Imogen’s left boot.
At her fingertips, Imogen found a canteen and drank, long and deep. It was delicious and cold. Tilda and Beck glanced at her every other minute or so as they went about their tasks. The tableau was ordinary, familiar. The hearty roar of the tiny stove. The creek, happy and pure. The infinite landscape of rock formations, donning their deep imperial colors as the sun sank lower.
Everything was so calm, so easy. Imogen felt herself in a parallel dimension where the trip had gone smoothly, where Beck held her intervention and apologies were exchanged with declarations of love. Where they bonded during the days and rested contented in their sleeping bags each night, so appreciative of the all-encompassing and simple joys. But wait. That had really happened—not all of it, but enough. Enough to revive her, to make this dimension real.
“Did you find the gun?” Her voice startled them.
“No. Not yet,” said Tilda.
Imogen nodded. There’d been a question, scratching on a door at the back of her mind. “How did you get free?”
“You didn’t know?” Beck asked, surprised.
“Know what?”
“That we had a plan, for cutting the rope.” Tilda looked at Beck, then Imogen, her confusion becoming something more like shock.
“How could I know that?”
“You went with him? Really not knowing?” Tilda sounded astonished.
“Of course. That was the agreement.”
Beck’s face reddened, but she didn’t let herself cry. “We had shards, of the rock Gale used to smash the scorpion.”
“Ohhh.” They had slithered around while alone in the shelter.
“Stashed in the back of our underwear,” Tilda said with an abrupt laugh.
“They were too big, too risky to hide in a closed hand.”
“We had a chance to move them when we squatted for a pee—Beck’s idea. Slipped them into our boots.” Imogen remembered Beck’s little boot-kicking dance, and understood now she’d been signaling to Tilda. “Then it was just a matter of waiting until we were sitting again—”
“As long as he kept our hands in front.”
“The second you two headed off we grabbed our shards and started slicing.”
“It was a long shot, weren’t sure they’d be sharp enough. But the rope was thin. You really didn’t have any idea?” Beck asked again. “You went out there…”
“I just…I was prepared. Knew I’d have my moment.”
Slowly, Beck and Tilda nodded, their gazes dawning with awe. And respect. And if Imogen saw in them a little uncertainty, too, a little fear, well, even she hadn’t known the extent of her own power.
“What now?” Imogen asked.
“Spend the night here,” said Beck. “Tomorrow we’ll walk to Hermit for our last night, and leave right on schedule.”
“Wow.” Right on schedule. A surreal conclusion to a surreal week.
“We can’t get out tomorrow? Hike it in one day?” Tilda asked.
“It’s too far,” said Beck. “It’s not practical to push ourselves, and with our injuries we should be cautious. I’m just glad Afiya won’t have any reason to worry.”
While they’d been plunged in a nightmare, time had kept its steady rhythm. No one knew what they’d been enduring. Imogen found something reassuring in that; everyone they knew had gone about their lives, with Imogen, Tilda, and Beck probably far from their thoughts. Out of sight, and out of mind.
“Everyone else is fine,” Imogen said contemplatively. “Like nothing ever happened.”
Beck exhaled through her nose and Imogen saw her thinking of her unborn child, of the family they were still going to be.