He broke off, cursing the need for detachment that made his words so cold. But Joey only gazed at the mountain, breathing hard and fast.
“Yes. It fits.” Her voice was strangely calm. “They’d said they were coming up on a large lake. They caught a glimpse of it through the storm just before they lost contact—” Luke heard her swallow. “This is it. I know it.”
She bent down to retrieve her pack and was already moving past Luke as he pulled it on again. Her plunge down the slope toward the tree line was almost reckless, loose stones rolled under her feet and bounced down the rocky ridge with hollow rattles.
Luke pursued and overtook her, setting himself in her path. She skidded to a halt and looked at him, eyes brilliant and skin flushed with emotion.
“It’s so close, Luke,” she breathed. “So close.”
“Not that close.” Luke held her gaze, refusing the response of his heart. “Distances are deceptive here. We’ll go a little farther down, to the lakeshore, and around as far as we can before nightfall. Then we’ll make camp and be fresh in the morning.”
“But—”
“This isn’t a suggestion, Joey. We may have days of searching to do once we reach the foot of the mountain. And even then—”
She lifted her chin. “Do you think I don’t know?” Abruptly she looked beyond him, lips parted. “But until I’m certain…
With every fragment of discipline he possessed, Luke stopped himself from touching her, holding her against the sadness that gathered in her eyes. “You need sleep to think clearly, Joey. If we start now, we can cover a good distance before dusk.”
Her gaze lifted to his, and she nodded slowly. “All right,” she said. “I can wait one more day.”
Luke turned away and started down the slope again before he could betray his thoughts. He heard her following, moving with greater care as they reached the tree line and entered the forest. She was silent, pushing herself without mercy even when he set a slower pace. They rested briefly by the clear waters of the lake and continued along the shore as the afternoon waned.
By nightfall they had reached a point close to the foot of the mountain where the trees marched up the steep incline, obscuring the rocky mass above. They made camp without a word spoken between them; Joey was lost in her own world of memory, and Luke took the respite with bitter gratitude. He waited as she sat staring into the fire, seemingly bent on keeping vigil throughout the night. It was only when she surrendered to exhaustion, retreating at last to the tent, that Luke was free to escape.
He stalked into the night, following his senses and the instinct men called intuition. He loped through the forest to a place where scree had worn away from the mountain and cut a pathway through the trees to the water’s edge, an unbroken sweep from the sheer face towering overhead.
He found what he sought as the moon began its downward path, just before the first eldritch light of false dawn. He wrapped the fragment of metal in his shirt and carried it back to camp cradled in his arms.
Joey woke with the dawn, and Luke was there when she emerged from the tent, her fair hair loose in her eyes.
“I found it,” he told her softly.
Joey stood beside Luke in the early morning stillness, turning the rusted metal over and over in her hands.
“There may be more,” he murmured. “I didn’t make a thorough search.”
She looked up, focusing on his face with difficulty. He was remote, as he had been since they’d left Val Cache, but there was a softening in his eyes. Almost as if he knew what she felt at this moment.
When he had led her here, she had expected—what? A sign to proclaim that she’d reached the end of her search at last? A whisper of lost voices to comfort her and send her, sorrows banished, on her way?
If only I could be sure.
She shivered in the shadow of the mountain and gripped the metal until it almost cut into her fingers. The small rocks that made up the talus slope, worn away from the mountain’s face by time and wind and weather, rolled under her feet. Luke moved away, impossibly silent on the scree, and paused by a jumble of larger boulders wedged among the trunks of close-set pines.