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Thin air

Кейн Рэйчел

I let go of the tree and lurched away. My legs didn’t want to move, but I forced them, one step at a time. My arms were wrapped around my breasts to preserve a warmth that I couldn’t find, either within me or without.

My feet were too cold to feel pain, but when I looked back I saw I was leaving smears of blood behind on the fallen leaves. Cuts had already opened on the soles.

I kept moving. It was more of a lurching not-quite-falling than ru

More shouting behind me. Voices, more than one. The hammer of blood in my ears kept me from focusing on the words. Someone did this to me, I thought. Put me out here to die. I didn’t want them to find that they’d failed.

Not that they really had failed, yet.

Up ahead was a tangle of underbrush. My body was already covered with whip scratches and a lacework of blood against cold white skin. I needed a way around… I turned right, holding to a massive tree trunk for support, and clambered up a short rise.

Just as I reached the summit, a shadow appeared at the top of it. I gasped and started to fall backward, but the shadow reached down and grabbed my forearm, pulling me up the rest of the way and then wrapping me in sudden warmth as his arms closed around me.

I fought, startled and scared, but he was a big man, tall, and he managed to pin my arms to my sides in a bear hug. “Jo!” he shouted in my ear. “Joa

He smelled like wood smoke and sweat, leaves and nylon, but he was warm, oh, God, warm as heaven itself, and against my own will I felt myself go limp and stop fighting. For the moment.

“Jo?” He slowly let his arms loosen and pulled back to look down at me. He was taller than I was by half a head, with shaggy-cut brown hair and a long patrician face with big, dark eyes. A three-day growth of beard was coming in heavy on his cheeks and chin. “We’ve been looking for you for days. Are you-” He stopped himself with an impatient shake of his head. “Never mind, stupid question. Obviously you’re not okay or you’d have contacted us. Listen, we’re in trouble. Bad trouble. We need you. Things have gone wrong.”

I realized, with a terrible sinking feeling, that I had no idea who he was. And then the sinking turned to free fall.

He must have known something was wrong, because he frowned at me and passed his hand in front of my eyes. “Jo? Are you listening to me?”

I had no idea who I was.

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ONE

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There were worse things than being naked, freezing, and alone in a forest. For instance, there was being naked, freezing, not alone, and not sure of who the hell you were. And having people depending on you.

That was worse.

Lewis-the man who’d found me, the tall, ragged-looking specimen with the cheekbones-had put my silence down to shock, which was probably not far from the truth. When I just clung to him, shivering in the frigid wind, he finally stripped off his down jacket and draped it over my shoulders. I watched him, shivering and numb, clutching the down coat hard around me. It smelled of dirt and feathers and sweat.

“Say something,” he commanded. I didn’t. I couldn’t. All I could do was shake. What was that in his eyes? Anguish? Fury? Love? Hate? I had no frame of reference for him, or for what he was feeling. “Jo, how’d you get here? Where have you been?”

Jo. I waited for some kind of internal recognition, some circuit to activate. I waited for some confirmation that Jo was my name.

Nothing.

When I kept silent, he finally shook his head and glanced around, then gathered up the backpack he’d dropped on the ground. “Come with me.” I had no reason to, but I was too cold and too weak. Lewis steered me down the gentler slope of the far side of the hill, into a small clearing. Overhead it looked like twilight, everything masked into smooth gray cotton by low-hanging clouds. Virga draped from them, veiling the treetops. “Sit,” he ordered, and I collapsed onto the cold ground in a huddle. I’d lost too much body heat; the coat couldn’t warm me. Lewis turned away and grabbed handfuls of fallen wet wood from the underbrush-good-sized logs, some of them-and began putting together the makings of a fire. Within five minutes he had cleared a space, dug down to the dirt, created a fire pit, and ringed it with rough stones.

It wouldn’t matter. The wood was way too wet to burn.

Lewis settled down next to the nonstarting fire, glanced at me, and extended a hand, palm out, toward the inert pile of soaked wood.

It burst into immediate hot flame.

I jerked backward, startled, blinking in the sudden dazzle of light, and looked at him. He didn’t seem to find anything odd about what had just happened; in fact, he barely paused before he began digging in his pack. He pulled out a rolled-up pair of blue jeans and a denim shirt. Thick thermal socks.

I started to edge away from him as discreetly as possible.

“Foot,” he said, and held out his hand. When I didn’t move, he sighed. “Jo, for God’s sake, unless you want to lose some toes, let me help you.” I slowly extended my bare left foot. His large, long, blissfully hot fingers wrapped around my ankle and propped it on his knee. He frowned disapprovingly at the cuts on my foot. “What the hell happened to you?” It was just a murmur and, by this time, obviously a rhetorical question. He was very intent on the cuts, not my face. “Okay, these are mostly superficial, but it’s going to hurt like hell later if I don’t do something about it. So please hold still.”

I expected him to reach for the first-aid kit I could see in the neatly organized backpack. Instead, he cupped my foot in both hands, and I felt a sudden pulsing warmth go through me, followed by a dull, shearing pain. In a second or two, the pain subsided and faded altogether. My foot felt deliciously warm. Tingling.

He let go and tugged one of the thermal socks on and up to my ankle, sealing in the warmth. I wanted to be grateful, but the truth was, I was scared. I didn’t know this guy, although he claimed to know me, and he could start fires just by snapping his fingers. Not to mention whatever he’d done to my foot, which felt really good now, but clearly wasn’t natural.

“Next,” he said, and held out his hands again. I hesitated, then gave him the right foot. I’d need those cuts sealed up if I had to make a run for it.

Maybe he’s the one. The one who kidnapped you and knocked you over the head and dumped you out here to die. Maybe, but in that case, why was he doing magical first aid? He could have just let me go. I’d have died out here without help.

Wouldn’t I?

When the right foot was healed and thermal-socked, he put the blue jeans and shirt on the ground between us, and looked up into my face.

I waited for some memory to make it past the big black wall. Anything. His name was Lewis; he acted like he knew me; I should know him.