To her surprise, Tony didn’t make fun of her. Instead, he followed her finger and then planted himself firmly in front of her, his arm extended as if to shield her. From what, she was afraid to ask.

‘Does any of this look familiar to you?’ Tony whispered in a low, hushed voice.

‘No. Why?’

A strange look crossed his face, and she poked his side. ‘Tony, why?’ Her voice pitched high in fear.

‘We’re just a short distance from where I first spotted you and Emerson.’

The crackers he’d forced her to eat not long ago swelled in her stomach, and she breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth the way he’d ordered her to do the first time she almost hurled on him – right after she tripped over a half-gnawed carcass of a cow. When she was fairly sure she wasn’t going to humiliate herself, she latched her fingers into the straps of Tony’s knapsack. ‘I’m ready when you are,’ she said with more bravado than she truly felt. Aunt Grace’s most consistent advice rang through her head: If all else fails, fake it ‘til you make it.

Five minutes later, she practically tripped over her best friend’s feet sticking out from between two juniper bushes. It wasn’t even her foot that snagged Addis’s attention; it was the way the pink glitter toenail polish, now cracked and caked with dirt and blood glistened in the short shaft of sunlight trickling between the branches of the aspen trees.

Barely swallowing her scream, she jerked Tony to a stop. The fingers of one hand bit into her palm to hold back the terror of finding her friend dead while the other waved up and down in the direction of Emerson’s feet.

Tony whirled around, took one look at her wide-eyed expression, and followed her finger to the discovery. Tossing his knapsack to the ground, he growled out his order, ‘Stay. Put.’ Then he grabbed hold of several branches, breaking them off before finally dropping to his knees and crawling inside the bushes with Em.

Two lifetimes later, he edged back out cradling Emerson in his arms. Her face was ashen, her hair was a tangled mop of twigs and leaves, and Addis would swear her lips were blue.

‘She’s alive, Addis, but she needs help. Now. I need the first aid kit. Get my bag.’ When she didn’t move, his voice shifted to a no-nonsense, militaristic tone. ‘Do it now,’ he demanded.