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7

Nora

The walkie crackles against my ribs, and I stop breathing.

I've been on the big granite slab at the top of the boulder field for an hour. I can't see my own hand. The fog has weight. It beads in my hair and sits cold on my cheeks, and it swallows the near sounds and throws the far ones into your ear. A kid shrieks miles down the valley and it lands three feet behind me.

I quit believing he'd come forty minutes ago.

"Nora."

His voice through the speaker. Low and cracked down the middle. Not the one that talks strangers home. His own.

"Stay on the line with me."

My thumb misses the key twice. Press. "I'm right here."

The words go out of my hand and come back out of the fog, a half beat late, from everywhere. He could be ten feet away. He could be one.

"I called her," he says. "She said go."

My eyes sting. "Cole."

"I'll tell you all of it. Later." The channel hisses. His breath on it is rough. "You told me to find you in this."

"Yes."

"Then I'm giving you a head start."

I stare at the speaker. "A what?"

"Sixty seconds. Stay on the slabs. The drop is on your right, so keep the rock under your left hand and you're safe. I know every foot of it." A pause. "Run, Nora."

Heat drops down my spine and settles low.

"Fifty," he says.

I go.

I'm up off the granite and moving, left palm dragging along cold stone, my boots finding the flat places because he told me where they are. Even now. Even like this, he's keeping me off the edge.

"Forty." His voice is in my hip. "I can hear you."

"No, you can't."

"You're breathing like a woman who wants to get caught."

I laugh, and it's a wet, shaky sound. I keep moving.

"Twenty. Ten."

The speaker hisses once, long. Then the key clicks off, and the channel goes dead.

No voice. No static. Only the fog, and my pulse, and every sound that isn't him.

I stop. I hold my breath. Stone. Drip. Somewhere above me a rock clicks, and I turn toward it, and it's behind me. It's everywhere. The fog is lying to me, and he knows it, and he's using it.

I step. I step again. I put my back against a slab and wait, shaking, wet between my thighs, my whole body tuned to one thing.