Page 54 of Silver Elite

“You seriously grew up here?”

Xavier’s voice slices through the darkness.

“Only for three years,” I answer. “Stop. Stop, damn it.”

“Stop what?”

“You’re walking too fast. You need to slow down and be more careful.”

“Like I keep telling you, I’ve been a soldier far longer than you,” he grumbles.

I halt. Grabbing his arm by feel, and not because I can see it. I curl my fingers around his biceps, keeping him in place.

“You don’t get it. This isn’t a Silver Elite operation. One wrong step and you’re drowning in a pit of black sand. So please, stay close to me. Follow me and I’ll get us where we need to go. And should you continue to be stubborn, I’m going to step aside and let the horned bear eat you.”

His breath hitches. “Fuck off. There isn’t a horned bear here.”

“Don’t worry. He doesn’t usually come out in the morning.”

“This is morning?” he squawks.

“Of course. It’s positively bright.”

He snorts out a grudging chuckle. “I kind of see why he likes you.”

“He more than likes me. He’s obsessed.”

That gets me another chuckle.

We press forward.

—

The first predator strikes thirty minutes into our trek. Some breed of cat. Too hard to discern in the dark. The loud flapping of wings reverberates around us as my rifle shot rings in the darkness and sends the birds scattering.

Xavier’s breathing is heavy. So is mine as I ask, “Are you okay?”

He sounds a bit stunned. “Yeah. What was that?”

“I think it was a mountain lion.”

I crouch in the darkness and stroke the dead animal’s fur, skimming over the damp spot where the bullet penetrated. The fur is coarser than a mountain lion’s, the legs shorter.

“No, it’s a red cougar,” I say in delight. “They are delicious.”

“You’re a weird woman, Darlington.”

We keep walking. The sound of rushing water, a low, lazy gurgle, soon fills the disconcerting silence. Relief tickles my throat. I can’t see the creek, but I can hear it, and that’s all that matters.

“We need to follow the sound of the water,” I tell Xavier.

After the cougar attack, he stopped complaining about me taking the lead. I feel him behind me. His soft, even breathing. The slow echo of his footsteps. I sense his frustration at our pace, at the stifling blackness. Losing a vital sense, particularly to a soldier, is not an enjoyable experience.

“You really a ’fect?”

“What, you think Cross was lying to you?”

“No, he’s never lied to me. It’s just you hid it well.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m sorry I wrote on that report that you weren’t cut out for covert ops.”

I throw my head back and laugh.

“I’m more surprised that he is,” Xavier confesses.

“Who?”

“Cross. He told me last night.”

“Yeah? What else did he tell you?”

“Last night? Not much. Just that he has telepathy. But this other time…This one night, a couple of years ago…He was still with Eversea at the time, but he was thinking of ending it with her.”

I’m not sure where he’s going with this, but I don’t stop him. Curiosity tickles my stomach.

“So we went to a bar in the city. Pounded synth whiskey until we were both good and boozed. When I asked him why he was dropping Ivy, he got this really serious look on his face and then said, Because she’s not the girl of my dreams . And I laughed and said, Okay, then who is? ”

“What did he say?”

“He said the girl of his dreams loves daisies.”

I smile in the darkness.

“Said he’d loved her his entire life. I thought he was just talking crazy, drunk off his ass, so I laughed and said, Sure you have, buddy. ”

I feel a poke in my ribs.

“I think he meant you, Darlington.”

My smile grows so wide it almost cracks my face in half.

—

We walk on. Slowly. Painfully, vexingly slow. As a sniper, I can remain still as a stone for hours. Here, inside this black nightmare, my body is wired, feet impatient inside my boots, fighting the impulse to speed up. Xavier is feeling it, too, and soon he gives up trying to match my pace. He stalks ahead of me, only to curse in dismay when his foot reaches the edge of the first black pit.

I hear it as the toe is instantly sucked into the quicksand like the slurp of liquid through a straw. I lunge toward him, and it takes considerable effort to help him pull it out. He almost loses the boot.

“Why do you refuse to listen to me? I’m not making this shit up!”

“Noted,” he mutters.

“Thank you. Now walk slow, stay behind me, pay attention to your footing, and don’t fucking touch anything.”

Literally twenty seconds later, he touches something.

I growl in the darkness, so annoyed that I’m willing to risk alerting the predators to our presence. At this point, maybe he deserves to get mauled by a cougar.

“Why are my hand and arm burning?” He releases a string of curses. “What the hell was that?”

“You touched a cluster of black snakeroot leaves.” I smelled that snakeroot from ten feet away. It releases an unmistakable sour odor.

“Is that what it was? Isn’t that shit poisonous?”

“Yes. But if you don’t touch or scratch your arm, the hives will go away in a couple of hours. You need to ingest the leaves for the poison to do any real damage. When it’s boiled, it corrodes your insides like acid. And you should never eat an animal you killed with black snakeroot. It taints the meat. Passes the poison to its eater.”

“How do you know all this shit?”

“This was my childhood home,” I remind him with a wry laugh. “My uncle taught me about every inch of this forest. There are tons of poisonous plant hybrids in here, some of them far deadlier than the animals.”

“I hate plants,” Xavier grumbles, and I laugh.

—

We reach the clearing seven hours later. Seven hours of painstaking steps, another dead predator, and an itchy, burning arm courtesy of black snakeroot. And then we see it.

Light.

The moment we stumble onto the sun-drenched grass, Xavier exhales in relief and sinks to his knees.

“Holy shit.” He shakes his head at me in dismay. “Why was that so awful?”

“Is now a bad time to tell you that I don’t know if we’re even halfway to the end?”

He glares at me. “Fuck you.”

Grinning, I drift toward the small hut that Uncle Jim built for us all those years ago. I can’t believe it’s still standing. In twelve years, in fact, it’s barely changed, except that it looks so much smaller now. It felt enormous when I was a child.

I shift the strap of my rifle to my other shoulder and wander into the wooden structure. I’m…overwhelmed. Overcome with memories. I suddenly see Jim’s eyes crinkling at the corners as he flashed me a rare smile. I see myself chasing birds in this clearing, while Jim whittled a piece of wood or cooked us a rabbit on a skewer over the pit.

Speaking of fire. “We should get a fire going,” I tell Xavier over my shoulder.

He glances warily at the tendrils of mist rolling in at the outskirts of the clearing. “Think I’ll be safe grabbing some firewood from there?”

“Yep. Just stay on alert for cats and horned bears.”

“Fuck you,” he says again.

I venture into the hut, smiling at the pieces of twine nailed along the log wall and hanging from the ceiling. All the stupid, silly knickknacks I forced Uncle Jim to display when we lived here. Feathers. A white coyote tooth we found in the forest. In the corner of the hut sits our supply chest. I should scavenge it, although it might be prudent to leave most of its contents here in case I ever need to come back. The thought is depressing. But not outside the realm of imagination.

I shuffle through the wooden crate, cataloging the various first-aid supplies, balms, solar batteries. Two handguns and several full clips of ammunition. I frown when my fingers feel something plastic at the bottom of the chest. It’s a bag, I realize.

Furrowing my brow, I pry it out and flip it over to study the contents. The plastic bag contains a faded white envelope.

My heart leaps into my throat. I instantly recognize Jim’s handwriting.

Wren

Eagerness clamps around my throat. The urge to read the letter is so strong, I’m practically clawing the envelope out of its protective enclosure. Before I can unseal it, Xavier’s muffled voice comes from beyond the hut.

“Hey. Let’s get this fire going.”

Shit. I can’t do this now. I have no clue what Uncle Jim would even write in a letter to me, and the last thing I want is for nosy Xavier to be peering over my shoulder while I read Jim’s words.

I fold the envelope and tuck it into my pocket, then step out to help Xavier.

—

We decide to break camp, even though it’s probably only about two in the afternoon. That’s usually when the light starts to leave us. When the shadows start dancing over the clearing as they are now.

“It’ll be pitch black soon,” I warn Xavier.

“At two ?” he whines.

“Yep. Suck it up, sweetling.”

We just ate dried beef from his pack and a can of soup we heated over the fire. He used a lighter to get the fire going, and he’s toying with it now, popping the lid open and closed, absently striking it to release a hiss of orange flame.

“Why does this work here but not in there?” He nods toward the mist that surrounds our small haven from all directions.

“I don’t know. It’s something about the way the light refracts in this clearing.”

“You’ve really never gone all the way to the end? Gotten out from the other side?”

I shake my head. “I was five years old when we came here, and we left when I was eight. There was no way Jim was letting me gallivant around this nightmare at that age.”

“Did he ever try? Did he leave you here while he went to investigate?”

“Yes, but the longest he ever left me alone was maybe sixteen hours or so?”

Xavier does the math. “So let’s say he managed to make his way to the end of this nightmare…That’s eight hours there and then eight hours to walk back here.” He rubs his forehead, looking unhappy. “You’re saying we have at least eight more hours to go tomorrow?”

“At least. We might even have to make camp in there.”

“Sounds fun.”

“But we get to sleep here tonight,” I say, trying to cheer him up.

He looks toward the hut. “I call possession of the adult-sized bed in there.”

I glower. “It’s my house.”

“I’m the guest. And I will not share with you.”

“I wouldn’t even suggest it,” I grumble. But it’s fine. My child-sized bed, as he would phrase it, isn’t actually that bad. I sleep curled up in a ball, anyway.

“Okay, then I’ll head to bed. What do you say? Let’s try to get a good seven hours to shore up our energy for the journey?”

“Sounds good. I’m going to stay out here a little while longer.”

Wary, he appraises our surroundings. “Are those red cougars going to creep into the clearing at night and try to rip our throats out?”

“They might.” I’m not going to sugarcoat this experience for him. “But as long as we keep the fire going, most predators should stay away. They don’t like the smoke. And if that fails, that’s why you sleep with a rifle.”

“Good night, Darlington. We’ll regroup in the morning. Or night. I don’t have any concept of time in here.”

I’m grinning as I watch him disappear into the hut. The moment he’s gone, the excitement flutters in my stomach like birds taking flight.

I get to talk to Jim now.

His energy signature is no longer in my head, his voice gone, his body full of bullet holes, but here, right now…I get to talk to him again.

I fish the envelope out, smoothing out the creases. With a steadying breath, I break the seal and unfold the letter, my fingertips grazing the delicate paper. For a moment, the words blur before my eyes, a jumble of emotions swirling inside my chest.

I press my lips together to contain the joy. His handwriting alone is enough to trigger a big, silly smile. I feel like a kid again. I draw my knees up and hold the letter out in front of me.

Wren,

If you’re reading this, then I’m probably dead. Because if I were alive, I’d be there with you right now and I damn well wouldn’t let you read this letter.

A laugh tickles my throat. He’s an asshole even in written form.

But if you are reading this, I need you to pay attention, little bird. There are some things you need to know.

My smile fades.

The more I read, the weaker my pulse gets. I draw another deep breath, but the oxygen barely reaches my lungs. My mind stumbles over the words. I’m forced to read it a second time in order to make sure I’m seeing it properly.

Why is he telling me this?

The clearing is quiet save for the crackles of the fire and the soft whisper of the wind. My lips tremble as I glance toward the hut where Xavier sleeps. My fingers tremble. Everything trembles.

Sharp, shaky pants escape my throat as I slowly close my fist around Jim’s letter, crushing it into a tight ball.

And then I toss it into the fire.