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Voices.
Whitley froze at the mouth of her tent, one hand on the zipper pull, listening so hard her ears rang with the effort.
This wasn’t hearing things like she sometimes did when the whisper of the wind tangled into some unknown language.
It wasn’t just one voice either but several, carrying in faint, broken bursts across the ridge. They definitely belonged to men.
Worse, the cadence—clipped and low—sounded military.
Her stomach dropped straight through the nylon floor of her tent, and her head spun.
She hadn’t heard another human voice in months, and a small, starved part of her had ached for it. Now that part shut up fast.
She didn’t need this kind of contact. Not if the humans finding her were the wrong ones.
Panic flooded in. What if it was Lance?
The thought hit her like ice water poured down the back of her shirt. Lance had resources and people.
Lance had spent weeks proving he didn’t believe in giving up, and the clipped chatter of the men moving on this mountain sounded too familiar.
She fixed her gaze on the tree across the clearing, heart drumming against her ribs. But she wasn’t seeing the familiar pattern of its bark. She was lost in the memory of something she was never supposed to see.
What she’d witnessed shattered her whole life in a single night. And Lance had made it very, very clear by everything he’d done since that he wouldn’t stop looking until he found her and made sure she never told anyone what she knew.
She had to move.
The thought set her in motion like nothing else could.
After two months of moving camp, muscle memory took over and she remembered again why she lived like every day might be the day she had to run again.
She scrambled out of the tent and yanked her sleeping bag free. She rolled it tight, sweat breaking out all over her body and her fingers shaking as she cinched the straps. Her cookware went into the bottom of her pack, nested inside itself to save space, but the loud clink of the metal stopped her heart.
The tent…
She stared at the red tent that was a damn beacon in this rugged landscape. The color would catch a man’s eyes from a mile off if the light hit right.
Why did she choose red?
Because this particular tent was rated for low temperatures.
Now she questioned if being warm was better than being dead.
She had to leave the tent.
She left it standing, staked into the ground, and hoped whoever found it would waste time searching it instead of searching for her. She calculated how fast she could walk and where she would hide next as she tore down the rest of camp. She tossed a balled-up pair of socks into her pack. She took more care with her water filter, wrapping it in a shirt to protect the plastic housing from cracking.
She stuffed what little was left of her food into the outer pocket where she could reach it while moving along the trail. Every motion checked off another box on the mental list she’d made for this exact moment—when she had no choice but to put her escape plan into action.
Now, she was almost glad she was an overthinker and was prepared.
She grabbed her knife next, sheathed at her hip where it always lived, and checked that her fire starter kit hadn’t shifted loose in the side pocket. Losing that would be its own kind of disaster—she’d spent an entire miserable week learning to coax a flame out of flint and steel before she’d found the kit where she dropped it near the trees, and she wasn’t eager to relearn that lesson with shaking hands in the dark.
In her rush, she snagged the zipper on the fabric and drew her bottom lip between her teeth as she worked it free without screaming in frustration.
When she got it, she let out a puff of air—no more than a breath that fogged the cool air—and threw the pack over her shoulders, wincing as the weight hit her spine.
