“All right, we're heading back now?” Joule asked.
Across the connection on the walkie talkie, she heard Malcolm and Gisela both agree. “We’ll just turn right around and meet you back at our starting point. Cage, Aurora, check in?”
She released the button, waiting for her brother’s voice. disconnecting them from the other line, grateful that Cage had had the idea earlier that if they were going to be out here in the middle of the night, with limited cell phone connection, that it was time they started having some kind of dependable communication on hand.
They’d spent the afternoon trying to find satellite phones but had settled on expensive but long range walkie talkies.
She buzzed her brother and Aurora and waited a moment but got no response. She buzzed again, then again. Nothing.
Joule and Amber looked at each other. Joule pushed the button one more time. This time, when no one answered, she became worried. Was Cage and Aurora’s handset broken?
“Gisela, Malcolm?”
Malcolm answered right away. “Yes?” Of course, he sounded worried.
“I don’t hear Cage and Aurora. Can you talk to them?”
“No.” The word was drawn out with concern she knew she'd put there.
“Can you try them?” She wasn't going to worry, she told herself, not until she knew she had a reason to. But she hung up, motioning to Amber for the two of them to get started back to the original meeting point.
Malcolm and Gisela had gone northward. Amber and Joule had headed mostly east, while Cage and Aurora had headed more toward the south. They had all aimed east after the first check in, not wanting to get too far away. Heading back to the starting position was the correct direction. Joule also knew it was where Cage and Aurora would meet them if something had happened to their communication.
If need be, she and Amber could turn south and hopefully intersect the other two. She worked through all of it mentally, keeping her feet moving, until just a few moments later when, the walkie talkie sounded off again.
Malcolm’s heavy tone came across, followed by a long pause and, “They're not answering for me either.”
Fuck, she thought. Fucking fuckballs!
What was the protocol if none of them answered?
They had planned where to go, when to check in. But stupidly, they'd not made a decision for what to do if someone completely failed to answer.
“What do we do?” Gisela asked.
“We go back to our starting point.” Joule was confident that was the right first step. And hopefully the only step.
Because as much as she had just thought that she and Amber could simply turn south and intersect the other two, that only worked if they knew exactly where Cage and Aurora were.
She'd been out here for several hours, stepping over trash, passing by small bushes, slightly altering her path to avoid things and at one point, staring down a pair of eyes that she was relatively certain belonged to a bobcat or a jaguar.
So the idea that she would just “see” Cage and Aurora and intersect them was not going to happen. Not tonight. Not with only the moonlight to guide them.
Beside her, Amber looked worried and Joule felt the need to maintain the calm.
“We head back.” She told Malcolm and Gisela. “We'll meet you there.”
If something had happened to the walkie talkie, she knew Cage would follow the same plan. If the batteries had died, if it had broken somehow . . . there were options, she knew. Options that weren't that bad.
She held tight to the faith of that.
Joule and Amber trekked back at high speed, not looking for anything other than immediate perils. She kept her eyes out for snakes, thinking she might trip over one if she wasn’t paying attention. She buzzed Cage and Aurora three more times, but each time the silence greeted her back, her heart grew a little tighter.
She told herself there was nothing to worry about. Yet.
By the time it was their next check in, they were almost back to their starting point. Malcolm and Gisela picked up on the first try, nagging Joule again with the idea that the walkie talkies worked fine—that maybe there was a reason Cage and Aurora weren't answering. But she refused to be driven by worry.
Just a few minutes later, she and Amber were at the starting point, the first to arrive. But quickly, she spotted the two shadows in the darkness. They weren’t that far away. It was creepy how close they could get and still be covered by the night, even when it felt like the moon lit up everything.
The looks on Gisela and Malcolm's faces told her they’d had no luck raising the other two either. Though of course they would have buzzed her and Amber if they had.
Her worry crept all the way in and finally took hold.
Cage and Aurora were not here. Despite the number of times she had told herself that they would show up and everything would be okay, it hadn’t happened.
As the four who’d made it looked at each other, Amber asked, “What do we do now?”
It was Malcolm whose attention Joule caught. He, too, was missing his other half.
She pointed in the southeastern direction. “We trace their tracks until we run into them.”
Her tone was decisive. She had to be.
They would run into Cage and Aurora.
Hopefully alive.