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“Ow.” Some sort of dense vine slammed into Spencer’s face, rattling his helmet and goggles and making him take a step back.
“You okay?” Bacon effortlessly freed him from the vegetation. “I want to push, but if you need a minute...”
“We can push.” Spencer didn’t want to be around when people came looking for those three.
“Stick close. I’ll slash through the worst of this.” Bacon started back up, a blistering pace over uneven, boggy terrain that switched to rocky some long minutes later.
Spencer was starting to lose his sense of time—maybe they’d run thirty minutes, maybe two hours. Hard to say. His lungs and leg muscles burned. It was still night, though, no glimmer of dawn. His night-vision goggles kept fogging up, which slowed him down more than he liked, and Bacon cursed softly every time he had to slow to fiddle with them.
“Switch,” he demanded as Spencer tried to adjust them yet again. He wrenched off his own goggles and thrust them out at Spencer. “Not sure what the hell’s up with yours, but these are calibrated fine. I’ll put up with foggy or whatever.”
Their situation was entirely too precarious for Spencer to argue with him, so he made the trade without too much more fuss. “Don’t want you to fall, though,” he said as he passed his over.
“I won’t.” Bacon patted his shoulder, a quick, reassuring touch that was gone too soon before they were on the move again. They were climbing now, moving uphill at a clip that punished his quads.
“Shouldn’t we be going down, toward the beach?”
“This isn’t the express route. We’re gonna have a big drop eventually.” Bacon shot him a hard look, impossibly to decipher through the goggles, but it was like he was taking Spencer’s measure, and Spencer found himself straightening, wanting to prove himself worthy.
Some of what he was thinking must have shown, because Bacon let out a heavy sigh, coming to a full stop. “I’m not going to leave you.”
“I know you want to get back to the mission—”
“Don’t you get it, yet?” Bacon shook his head, making his goggles bounce. “You are my mission—keeping you safe and getting us off the island isn’t just a nice bonus. It’s my orders. There’s no question of rejoining the team. I don’t fulfill the mission objective of keeping you in one piece, there might not be another mission for me.”
It hit Spencer then, like the punishing slap of a monster wave against an inexperienced surfer, that Bacon hadn’t shot at those guys to help the team, but to save him. And fuck if that wasn’t a sobering thought. His very presence here was putting Bacon at risk, keeping him from being able to help the team. He was a liability—and he got that now, in a way he hadn’t before, not on the grinder with the young SEALs, not on any of the practice missions. This shit was real, and never had he been more aware that he was a journalist, not a warrior.
“I...I...” he sputtered, not sure what he needed to say. He was an independent, strong, mature man, and he didn’t have much experience with feeling like this.
“No freaking out,” Bacon said firmly. “I’m going to get us out of this jam, I promise.”
“I want to help.” Spencer really wanted to be more than just dead weight for Bacon.
“Keep moving forward. Keep calm. I’m gonna need you to carry your weight when we climb down too—I did something to my finger again, and I’m worried about that part.”
“I’ll help.” Spencer’s back muscles tensed. Bacon seemed so in-charge that knowing that he was worried was jarring, but also vaguely reassuring, like proof that he was human after all. Spencer wished he could see Bacon’s eyes, see more of his expression, hated having to rely so heavily on the night-vision goggles.
“Okay. According to my compass, we’ve got about another thirty minutes, then we’ll start our descent. We need to be on the water before dawn.”
“Lead on.”
They spent long minutes at a blistering pace, pushing forward, him trusting that Bacon’s compass wasn’t going to lead them straight off a cliff—or into enemy territory.
“Fuck.” Bacon pulled up short as the terrain shifted again. Judging by what the night-vision goggles revealed, they were close to the edge of a bluff, a sharp, steep decline for them to navigate. “This part’s going to suck. Go slow as you need. Watch your feet. And don’t worry about me.”
Keeping from sliding was an exercise in futility, and judging by Bacon’s low curses, he was struggling just as much. His breathing came in harsh pants. “We’re almost there.” Bacon’s voice was tight but reassuring. The last part of the climb involved lowering themselves over a boulder to the smaller rocks below.
“How can we keep the pressure off your finger?” Spencer asked. “Want me to lower you down by your good arm?”
