Chương 41: Chapter 40: The Other Slope

The improvised tent was still in the bag. I'd thrown it in the trunk the morning I walked to get the car. I'd never unpacked it. I packed the bag on the kitchen table. Dried fish in a cloth. Dried meat. The warmth core. The lightning core. The knife... Ella was already downstairs when I woke up. She stood in the hallway in the good clothes—the dress, the boots, the hair pinned. She looked at the bag on the table and then at me.

"You're slow." Yato followed us to the door. He sat in the hallway and watched us put on our shoes. He looked at Ella. Then at me. His tail gave a single slow flick. I knelt and scratched behind his ears. He leaned into it, eyes half-closed, purring at a frequency that made my fingertips vibrate.

"Two days," I told him. He stood up. Padded to Ella's boot. Pressed his forehead against the leather. She didn't react. Yato looked at me. You see how it is. I opened the door. We drove. The road unwound beneath the tires, and the mountain grew until it filled the windshield. Ella watched it with her cheek against the glass. She didn't speak. Neither did I. The battery had charged overnight. The push-circle sat in my pocket, just in case. The car moved on its own power now—quiet, efficient.

I parked at the foot of the mountain. The usual clearing. The slope above it, unchanged. I killed the engine and we sat in the silence that followed. Ella opened her door. And we soon started climbing. The pack rode my shoulders. Ella climbed ahead of me. She didn't slow. She didn't look back. I focused on putting one foot in front of the other and tried not to think about what it meant that she could walk up a mountain in boots not made for walking and not break a sweat.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. Halfway up, I called for a break. She stopped. Sat on a rock. Looked at the land below—the forest, the road, the village somewhere behind the ridge. I sat on the ground and drank from the bottle. The suns moved across the sky. We moved with them. The summit was colder compered to last time. The cave mouth yawned in the rock. Ella stopped at the edge. I waited. She looked at the cave for a long moment. Her face was unreadable.

Then she turned and walked past it, descending the far slope without a word. I followed. The far slope was different. Steeper. Rockier. Less forgiving underfoot. The tree line ended sooner down here, replaced by low shrubs and exposed stone. We moved slower. The suns dipped toward the horizon and the light went long and gold and sharp-edged. I found a flat patch of ground sheltered by an outcrop. Put the pack down.

"Here," I said. Ella looked at the spot. Looked at the outcrop. Looked at the sky—the second sun already low, the first sinking behind the mountain.

"Acceptable," she said. I unpacked the tent materials. The blanket first. Then the cord. Then the pegs. I laid them out on the stone and looked at them and tried to remember how many times I'd done this in the past weeks. Zero. I spread the blanket across the ground. Then I stood there feeling stupid until Ella crouched beside me and took the cord from my hand.

"Like this," she said. She moved. Not fast. Not impatiently. Just moved, with the efficiency of someone who had done a similar thing a thousand times in different weather. She looped the cord around the outcrop, tied it to a peg, set the peg into the ground with a stone. The blanket became a slope. The slope became a roof. The roof became a tent. It was not elegant but it was better than anything I would have managed alone. I got inside. The stone was hard beneath me.

I lay on my back and put my arms behind my head and looked at the blanket above me, inches from my face, held up by tension and optimism. Ella crawled in after me. She didn't take her boots off. She worked the laces loose in the dark with her usual efficiency. The boots landed at the tent's entrance with a soft thump. Then she lay down beside me, close enough that I could feel the warmth of her body through the space between us.

She had stripped down to her pants — the ones she'd taken from my drawer, the drawstring pulled tight at her waist. Bare legs. Bare face, bare arms. I looked at the blanket ceiling.

"What are you looking at?" she said.

"The tent. You improved it."

"I made it functional." A pause. I felt her shift beside me. The tent was small. There was nowhere to put my hands that wasn't the ground or myself. I chose the ground.

"You could touch me," she said. It was not an invitation. It was the tone she used when she wanted to see what I would do. Curious. Testing. Teasing. I didn't move.

"Your heartbeat," she said.

"It accelerated when you saw me undress."

"It did." I was about to add something, opened my mouth then closed it. She was right.

"You're afraid," she said.

"That's true."

"Are you afraid of me?"

"No, I'm afraid of ruining this." Ella was quiet for a long moment. I listened to her breathe. In. Out. The rhythm was different from before — slower, more deliberate.

"Good" she said finally. Something brushed my shoulder — her hand, adjusting. She settled back. The tent creaked in the wind. The stone was cold through my shirt. She lay there, breathing, and I listened to it. She was inches away. The tease was still in the air between us — the challenge she had issued and was now holding, watching, waiting to see if I'd take the bait. I didn't. The warmth core glowed in my pocket. Ella's breath slowed. Deepened.

I counted the seconds between inhale and exhale until the numbers stopped meaning anything. I fell asleep listening to her breathe.