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How helpful.“I’m freezing. Where do you think we are?”

He gestures toward the sack, his brows rising in challenge. “You could get back in.”

I can’t tell if he’s serious. We’ve known each other for a year, and I still find myself questioning his humor.

“I’d rather freeze.” I hug myself because he’s too much of a fool to think of wrapping me up in his arms. But he’s my fool, my friend. My voice softens in response to the invasion of fear. “You think he’ll kill us?”

He strokes his chin in thought, a little too dramatically. “Are you hungry?”

I slide down the wall. “So you think we’re doomed then?” Why else would he avoid answering?

“I think you’re hungry.”

“Stop trying to take care of me, Kelt.”

“Stop not letting me.”

“Fine. I’m hungry. What does it matter?” I pull my arms tighter around me as the cold ventures deeper into my veins.

“It doesn’t, I guess. It’s just…” He seals his lips in thought.

“What?”

He tilts his head, pondering. “What would you have wanted for a last meal?”

“You can’t be fucking serious.”

He shrugs. Such indifference for a man waiting for death.

“You want to talk about an imaginary meal instead of figuring out where we are and how to get home?” That’s it. I’m going to lose it. All the years of faking sanity will be for nothing when I’m found slumped against the wall with a melted brain. Thanks to Kelter.

He crosses his arms and looks thoughtfully at nothing. “I would have wanted chicken.”

“This is serious, Kelt.” I try to hide my shivers.

“Iamserious. What else are we going to do while waiting to die?”

I stand up, rising with my rage. “We keep looking. We scream. We dig a hole and crawl out—anything but talk about chicken.”

“We can’t dig through a stone floor.”

“I know!”

He asks question after question, none mattering, none saving us, none comforting. All pointless words, teasing my temper and getting me nowhere except wrapped up in resentment. I pace back and forth, spinning the rings on my fingers and pivoting every five steps in the small space, my heart beating violently. He gave up. On escape. On living. Onme.

And when I think he couldn’t be more maddening, that I’ve reached my limits of lividness, and I wish again for the quiet corpse in the sack, he taps his chin and says, “I think you’d want a baked potato.”

I stomp past him. “You’re so morbid imagining my last meal.”

“Somebody should.”

I stop in front of him, such a fire in me that I could singe his long lashes with a scream. “Why won’t you help me?”

“I am!”

Finally some emotion out of him. “How so?”

He lets out a breath, his chest flattening, and looks away. “I’m keeping you from freezing.”