They might fly overhead with a search-and-rescue copter, and they'd see me huddling in my bright pink t-shirt with "Rock on!" emblazoned across the back. They'd land and come get me and take me to the hospital and fix my hand. I'd have to tell them where to find James, under all those rocks. I'd have to tell his family, call his mom, go through my contacts and find Callie O'Malley The Alley Cat and press "call" and listen to her happy voice say "Leah, hi! How was Yosemite?" and then I'd have to tell her that James was—James was—

I started shaking again, violent shivers wracking my body, and whimpered as I fought my body and my brain for control. Water. I needed water. I could pretend this was like Hatchet, and that I could flip to the back of the book to see that in the end I'd make it and someone would find me. I was Brian, alone in the beautiful wilderness, only instead of a hatchet I had carabiners and a camelbak and a pouch full of powdered chalk. When I found a lake I could use the chalk to write "HELP" across a big rock and the carabiners to... something.

Clenching my jaw against the inevitable pain, I started burrowing my way out of the pine needles. The dust made me sneeze, my sore throat hurting from the force of it, but I got out and brushed off some of the needles, looking around me at the unforgiving forest.

It was stark and beautiful. The pines stood at attention, straight and proud, marching back into the distance in their loose ranks. Beneath them, drifts of needles covered the ground, dotted with small green plants and the occasional splash of wildflower color. You could even smell it, the musty mushroom scent of the forest floor layered with the irrepressible sharp scent of pine. Fallen trees slumped across the ground, their long branches forming a catchment for the pine needles that slowly rained from the sky over the years. A chipmunk stood on one of them, making its whistled territorial call: wheek! wheek! wheek!

Water would be downhill, I told myself. That's where water went, so that's where I would go. Even if I didn't make it to a lake, I might make it to a creek. Eventually, downhill would lead to water. I had three days to find some before I died of thirst; surely even in a California summer there would be water within a three-day hike.

I could focus on that. Go downhill. Find water. Survive.