Siena

SIEN A

Emmett paced the small interior of the outpost. "If that was The Shadow, then what does it want? Why did it lead us here?"

"The same reason he didn't come after us in the swamp." sat at the table with the hand-painted map, copying every structure and trail to her own over a steaming cup of instant coffee fresh from the camp stove.

"Because it wants to lead us into a trap?" Emmett asked.

"Because he wants to show off."

Emmett stalled in his pacing, sipped his coffee, and swallowed. "You keep calling it a he ."

"Isaac called him he , I think." She couldn't remember if that actually was true, but it didn't matter. The Shadow had told her what he was the first time she ever saw him, and if she explained this to Emmett, he'd harass her about taking her meds.

"Why would he want to show off?" Emmett asked.

"He's trying to stall me. He knows I want to figure him out."

"Maybe the more he stalls you, the easier he can use you," Emmett said.

He will hurt you and force you to do things more horrible than you can dream. That was what Isaac had told her. These horrible things were still undefined, which scared her more than this game The Shadow played with her.

glanced up from the maps. The sweat beading on Emmett's forehead glistened in their camp light. Again, he was shaken. Maybe even on the verge of tears.

"Are you upset because you're worried he'll hurt me?" she asked.

Emmett took a deep breath. "I'm worried he has an agenda, and whatever that agenda is will inevitably slow us down. You'll die if we're stuck here too long."

So he fully believed what Isaac had said about The Shadow killing her. "You weren't like this at the cabin," she countered. "You thought we'd be too vulnerable if we left. Did Isaac's death change your mind?"

He hesitated, wiping the sweat from his face. "Isaac's a part of it. I told you, I had time to think."

"Fine." She pulled the elastic out of her hair and fixed her braid, listening beyond the outpost walls. No rain yet. No hunger rumbling from the forest. Nothing but crickets, the occasional rustle, and a lone howl in the distance. The howl was new; other than The Shadow, she'd yet to cross a predator in the Briardark.

She lifted the shutter near the table, the night so dark that not even the firs and maples at the edge of the clearing were visible. It was her third night traveling. One of those nights she hadn't slept, the other two spent in these outposts. Unless the black gash across the sky made another appearance, there would be no wall between them and this darkness tomorrow night.

She'd absently scraped a huge divot in the shutter with her fingernail, so she closed it and distracted herself with her bag, which needed repacking, pulling everything out onto the table. Her storm-drenched clothes had finally dried, so she folded them.

At the bottom of her pack, rediscovered the mysterious deck of cards she'd taken from the research cabin. She repacked everything except the cards and the first aid kit, and sat back in her chair. From the kit, she retrieved an alcohol wipe and tweezers .

Emmett approached the table and picked up the pack of cards. "We playing slapjack?"

She smiled. "You hate card games. Plus, gin rummy is more fun." She motioned to the table. "Let me clean your cut first."

He sat in the chair across from her, peeled the bandage off, and extended his hand.

studied the cut with a frown. The edges of his torn skin were inflamed, the inside of the cut glistening with a yellow patina. "How did it get infected so quickly?" She ripped open the alcohol wipe packet. "Does it hurt?"

Emmett shrugged. "Kind of."

She snapped on her kit's only set of neoprene gloves and cleaned the cut, conscious of Emmett's winces when she took extra time scraping away the pus. She liberally applied antibacterial ointment before covering and waterproofing the wound with gauze and tape.

"Do you have gloves?" she asked. "Even just knit gloves? Mine are too small for you, but you should keep that hand covered."

"Gloves weren't on my list when I left the cabin." He returned his attention to the cards at the table's edge. "So, what's with them?"

picked the cards up, slid them from their delicate box, and fanned the blank faces across the table.

Emmett shook his head. "I don't get it."

shuffled the cards and stacked them, trying to remember how to draw tarot cards. These weren't tarot, but the presentation felt similar. During one of her high school sleepovers, a girl named Krista drew 's cards, convinced they predicted a prom date in 's future. No one had asked her to the prom that year. There was a reason science had been her most reliable boyfriend.

She flipped over the top card. The card wasn't blank, even though they'd all shown blank faces a moment before. And it wasn't one of the two cards she'd dealt for herself in the past.

A withered old man framed by branch prison bars stared at her, his eyes hollow and haunted. The man's face was so wizened, it looked melted.

The Warden.

If the man in the drawing was a Warden, then he wasn't peering out of prison, but looking in, at her. A chill ran up her arms. Her intention was to deal for Emmett, and somehow the deck knew that.

"I don't get it," Emmett repeated.

"Just wait." She drew the second card. This time, she recognized it, but it still wasn't a card she'd played for herself. She'd seen it on the table in the cabin kitchen right before she left. The face of the card was onyx, The Shadow written in white script across the top.

Emmett stared in bewilderment at the two cards. swept them from the table and shuffled them back into the deck. She fanned out all the cards faceup, showing him they were all blank. Then she stacked the cards and dealt for him again.

The Warden.

The Shadow.

"If this is some dumb magic trick, it isn't funny," he said. "Where did you find these cards?"

"In the cabin." She scooped the cards into the deck and dealt two for herself. They were the same cards she'd dealt for herself before: the woman with the arrow in her chest— The Butcher's Daughter; and the upside-down evergreen tree— The Verdantry .

Emmett steepled his hands in front of his face. "I give up. What's the trick?"

"There is no trick," said.

His voice rose. "Stop with the bullshit."

All she'd done was show him. She wanted him to wonder just like her. She wanted him to look for answers, not just demand them from her.

This was a mistake.

"I shouldn't have taken them out," she said. "I don't know how they work, which is why I brought them with me. I want to run tests on them when we get out of here."

As she stacked the cards to put them away, Emmett's hand fell on her wrist. "I'm sorry. I'm glad you showed me, I'm just..." He drifted off, but she knew. He was fragile right now. Traumatized by this place, and from putting Isaac out of his misery. And perhaps something else he wasn't telling her.

Rain pattered across the roof as the storm began.

"We should go to bed," she said.

lay next to Emmett on the floor of the outpost. Rain spilled from the eaves, and beyond the clearing, the trees groaned as though they couldn't bear their own weight. The familiar sounds comforted her, and eventually she dozed off, before being jolted awake by sunlight beaming through an open shutter.

It was late. Too late. She reached out for Emmett, her hand coming to rest on his empty sleeping bag.

shot up and dashed across the outpost's creaking floor. As she threw open the door and stepped forward, thick vegetation ensnared her feet. She cursed, freeing herself from the vines and ferns.

"Emmett!" She scanned the dense thicket. Where was he?

The thought of Isaac disappearing and reappearing decades older careened into her mind. "Oh no," she whispered. She took a deep breath and shouted Emmett's name into the woods.

The brush to her left rustled.

"Jesus, can't a guy take a shit?" he growled.

"I'm sorry," she gasped in relief. "I thought the worst. You can't blame me, I?—"

The sight of him throttled her words. His eyes were sunken, and sweat glistened across the whole of his face. He wiped his too-pale lips with the back of his hand .

"Did you throw up?" she asked. He shook his head, but she wasn't convinced. "Don't lie."

"It's probably exhaustion," he admitted.

So he had puked. Her eyes dropped to his hand. The bandage looked like it hadn't been changed in a week, yellow and red discharge seeping through the taped gauze.

She led him inside to the table. Emmett sat across from her and winced as he extended his hand. She unwrapped the bandage, trying to mask her panic at the wound filled with green pus, the rough edges surrounding the skin now black. She caught a whiff of death.

"It fucking hurts," he hissed.

bent over and plucked her first aid kit from her open bag. "There must be something stuck in it." She tilted his palm toward the light, snapped on her gloves and set to work cleaning the wound. When she'd scooped out enough pus, she carefully extracted a piece of splinter they'd missed.

Emmett groaned. "Seriously?"

"At least we found the problem." opened and dumped a hydrogen peroxide packet across the cut, and Emmett grunted, squeezing his eyes shut. She then swabbed a large glob of antibiotic ointment over the wound before bandaging it again.

"We can rest today," she offered. A bit of rest would be nice for both of them. She rubbed her knee, surprised it wasn't tender. The sprain must not have been as bad as she'd thought.

"I'll be fine." Emmett lowered his bandaged hand and stood from the table. "We need to keep moving."

As packed away her first aid kit and tied her boots, she hoped Emmett wasn't pushing himself beyond his limits for her sake. How he rested his weight against the wall as he waited for her hinted at his exhaustion.

"I'm fine," he said again when he caught her looking. "Let's go."

They left the outpost, but their way forward was proof of Murphy's Law. Their path wasn't so much a maze as it was a wall, every tree, brush, fern, and vine symbiotic with one another, entangled like a nervous system. The canopy covered the understory like a thick layer of skin. And it was so dark in the thicket that equipped her headlamp.

She kept her focus on Emmett's backpack. Despite how terrible he'd looked a few hours ago, he persistently progressed using the sheer brute force of his body. That was, at least, until they encountered a crowded grove of evergreens harder to navigate than a cavern system. The air stank so heavily of vegetative decay that thought she might choke as she took off her pack and sidestepped through.

They finally emerged from the grove, but not from the darkness. Emmett's light flashed across a brook, and he voiced his exhaustion. "We need to stop."

Emmett found a sheltered site between a trio of young spruce, the patch of earth drier than anywhere else. He helped roll out a tarp and anchor another between the trees to stay dry. She took out the lantern and first aid kit. Discharge soaked his bandage, but the wound hadn't worsened since this morning.

"I feel like I'm being punished," he said. "This place, this Shadow, this fucking splinter. All of it is punishment."

wrapped gauze around his hand. "Punishment for what?"

"For what I did to you."

She scoffed in surprise. What did he want from her? Sympathy? For the better part of a decade, she'd trusted him with every cell in her body. The safety she'd felt with him was only an illusion. She'd carried that pain far longer than he would carry this splinter infection.

"If that were the case, then I am also being punished for what you did, which isn't very fair." tucked away her medical supplies. The rain quieted, the surrounding emerald darkness deepening.

"You already know I'm sorry," he said. "I don't know how many times I need to apologize. "

He couldn't be serious. "You want to have this conversation now?"

"I'll keep saying it until you believe me."

"I believe you," she said. "I know you're sorry for stealing the data."

Auditing the database logs last year, had discovered a login stamp from her machine and a full database export at 4:30 a.m. She may have been Dr. Feyrer's favorite, but if he ever found out she'd exported all their glacial emission data from a secure server, he'd kill her. Except she'd never do such a thing.

A few weeks later, she stole Emmett's phone before it locked, and found the truth in an email to his boss.

RE: Emmett Ghosh has shared ‘Untitled.zip'

Brock Belmont [email protected]

Thank you.

A tree groaned in the distance until a branch snapped, but kept her attention on Emmett. "I even believe you would have atoned if I'd let you. That you would have quit COtwo and deleted the data you stole on your way out the door, even though it would have been easier to promise me a fucking planet." She fought to control her rage—her weakness. She couldn't let him write this off as hysterics, not again. "I believe you're sorry for the corporate espionage, Emmett. And I forgive you for that part."

"If you've forgiven me, then why are we like this?" He gestured to the woods, but she knew what he meant. "The reason COtwo wanted the emission data was to see if it merited a grant. I fought for you so they could invest in you. And they did. You got your money, and I've been tortured for a year. So why are you and I still so fucking broken ?"

"Because there were two lies, Emmett. Two wrongs you committed. The lie about the research is the only thing you think you're at fault for, but you're forgetting how you lied about my paranoia. My illness." Her mind returned to the night she confronted him about the database, and everything he said to make her question her own sanity :

Let's rewind a second. You think I went on to your laptop at four in the morning, hacked into a database, and exported everything?

What value does a thirty-year-old glacial emissions dataset even have? Why would I want it?

Dr. Reyes put you on a new med a few weeks ago, right?

Maybe you sleepwalked.

Maybe you're paranoid.

Maybe you're not in remission after all.

She wished the realization crossing his face wasn't so goddamn stark, because it only proved her right. He'd never really understood the gravity of what he'd done. He'd never really known what to apologize for.

"I was sick, and you—" A tangle of grief and fury choked her. Fuck the data. He'd stolen something much more important—her ability to trust others, and herself.

He blinked and looked away. Beneath the mist—or the sweat—a tear trickled down his cheek.

caught her breath, and spoke gently. "I'd die before forgiving you for that lie, Emmett, and I hope it haunts you. I hope it's the first thing you think about when you wake up every morning. Because maybe, if you ever fall in love again, you won't dare to hurt her like you've hurt me."