“Why did you shoot me?” she asked.
“If I tried to shoot Nueve, he’d shoot you. If I didn’t shoot, we were both shot. He thought those were the only two options: shoot him—not shoot him. So instead I shot you. He thought I’d zig, so I zagged.”
“You zagged?”
“Well, it worked, didn’t it?”
She didn’t answer. She blew into her hands. Her fingers were bright red. No gloves, no parkas, and a night that promised temperatures well below freezing. My zagging might just kill us yet.
I started to unlace one of my boots.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I saw this on a show,” I said. “You take a stick, make a bow from your shoelace, and use it to spin the wood until the friction makes a fire. We’ve got to make a fire, Ashley.”
“Or we could just make a huge sign in the snow that says, ‘Here we are!’ ” she said.
“Maybe you’d rather die of hypothermia,” I said.
She stood up and walked deeper into the trees. I started after her and tripped on my loose shoelace, falling facefirst into the snow. When I looked up, I saw her kneeling, digging like a dog after a bone, snow flying everywhere.
I laced up my boot and went over to her.
“What are you doing?”
“Digging a snow cave. It would go faster if you helped.”
I knelt beside her and together we hollowed out a space wide and deep enough for both of us to crawl inside. She ordered a halt every few minutes—not to rest, but to keep ourselves from sweating. You sweat in these temperatures and your sweat freezes and then you’re an ice sculpture. Her every gesture and every word, even the word “faster” or “deeper,” had an undercurrent of anger to it. I wondered why she was angry at me—or if she was just angry at the situation. Of course, I did put a bullet into her, but she was a former field operative and had to understand the zigzag theory. The important thing to understand about girls is you can’t understand them. Girls are complicated. You can understand the complication, but not the girl.
After half an hour, teeth chattering, muscles singing with fatigue, we crawled inside our makeshift cave—more a trench or shaft than a cave, barely wide enough for both of us. We lay on our sides facing each other, and Ashley of the blond hair and perfect skin and eyes the color of a winter sky wrapped her arms around me and pulled me close.
“We have to conserve our . . . our b-b-b-body heat . . .” she stammered.
So I folded her into my arms. Her face pressed against my neck; I could feel her warm breath on my cold skin.
“I didn’t know,” she said after a few minutes. “What Nueve was planning.”
“I figured that,” I said. “Hard to believe anyone would willingly let herself be sliced open like that. The big question is, did Abby Smith know?”
“No. In the conference room, after you left with Mingus, she gave Nueve a direct order you were to be given nonintrusive tests only until she got back from headquarters.”
“So she’s not in on the lobotomy.”
“Lobotomy?”
“That’s what I figured. Nueve’s gone solo-loco and it’s better to apologize later than ask for permission first. He had the fix in from the beginning.”
Her arms tightened around me. “I’m cold. I’m s-s-s-o cold.”
I rubbed my hands up and down her back. “It’s gonna be okay,” I said. “I’ve been through worse than this and I’m not dead yet. I’ve got Nueve’s box . . .”
“Not the only one,” she said. “If he doesn’t have a backup for it in camp, they’ll chopper one in tomorrow.”
“What’s its range? Do you know?”
“N-n-not sure . . . maybe a mile, two . . . Doesn’t matter . . . can’t hike out—they’ll find us eventually, if we don’t die of exposure first.”
“Well,” I said, trying to think of a bright side. “I’d rather die that way than their way.”