Page 29

"I can take a joke, Jax Badd." She blinked at me. "Is Jax short for Jackson?"

I shook my head again. "Nope. Name on the driver's license is Jax. No middle name."

"No middle name?"

I shook my head. "Nope. My whole ass name is Jax Badd."

"Your whole ass name," she echoed, laughing. She sobered again almost instantly. "I apologize for barging into your room like that, and I do appreciate that you've been cool about it."

I could only shrug. "It is what it is."

Tea rolled her eyes. "I despise that phrase. It's semantically null." She tapped the map with the tip of her pencil. "As far as I can tell, this is our best bet. Looks like it's probably not much more than a logging camp sort of place, but it's the nearest thing to civilization reachable on foot."

"How far?"

"Ummm…looks like roughly…a hundred and fifty clicks, or thereabouts."

"Ah, that clarifies things,” I mocked. “Let me just do some quick conversions.”

She rolled her eyes. "Clicks are kilometers. A hundred and fifty kilometers is ninety-three miles and change.”

I scrubbed my face. "Jesus, help us in this, our hour of need." I blew out a breath. "Ninety-three miles through this shit." I waved a hand at the forest: thick and dense, not exactly impenetrable, but rough going.

"Hey, look on the bright side, Jax." She grinned at me, her voice artificially bright, but it didn't reach her eyes. "The only thing that's gonna try to kill us out here is nature. Crash-landings are even more fun when it comes with a side of being chased by homicidal Afghans with AK-47s and a thousand years of knowledge of the terrain."

I blinked at her, absorbing this. "That's the ten?"

"Ten?"

"On the pucker scale?"

“Oh, yeah,” she said, her voice quiet, her gaze fixed somewhere else, some-when else. "Yes, that was the ten. Shit, that was a fifty on a scale of ten."

I stayed silent, because other than questions she wouldn't answer, what could I say?

"You're really determined to not ask any questions, huh?"

I shrugged. "I've said it before, and I’ll say it again: I'll listen to anything you want to tell me, but I don’t have any right to anything. You tell me what you want to talk about. And that, clearly, seems like a seriously painful memory. Not something to talk about easily."

"You're not wrong." She wiped both hands down her face. "Let's go. We're wasting daylight."

She closed the atlas, using the plotter to mark the place, and shoved it into the backpack along with the survival kit, the bottle of soda, the blanket in a bag, and some clothing from my suitcase—socks, t-shirts, a flannel shirt, a pair of joggers, and the knit cap. Not much by way of supplies—no food, only a 20oz bottle for water and the contents of an onboard survival kit.

But then, Tea had survived crashing behind enemy lines in Afghanistan, apparently, so this by comparison ought to be a literal hike in the woods.

Me? I was trying to play it cool, but I was freaking the fuck out. Camping in the bush with Uncle Ram, on purpose, with huge packs full of food and tents and canteens of water and a radio in case of emergency? That was one thing. This? This was life or death. Either we survived until we reached civilization or rescue found us, or we died out here. There were no other options. And while I was assuming rescue would find us, considering we'd filed a flight plan, got out a mayday, and had a locator beacon, nothing was guaranteed. Especially not if the weather didn't clear up—and the glimpses of the western sky I got through the canopy revealed thick, dark, heavy mountains of storm clouds racing directly for us.

This was going to be…interesting.

Chapter 6

Tea

Fucking rain.

We hiked steadily northeast for most of the day, stopping to rest now and again. We finished the nasty-ass soda and, at one brief stop, rinsed the bottle out in a small stream, filled it—filtering it through a clean sock—and popped in a purification tablet. Once the chemicals had had time to do their work, we were able to drink it, and yes, it tasted like chlorinated sock, but it was better than getting the screaming shits; go ahead, ask me how I know.

It was cool and gray most of the day, and then as evening fell, the cool turned nearly downright cold, and then a light drizzle started. Just enough to make your hair and clothes uncomfortably damp and cold, the kind of chill that sets in and doesn't relent.