One night, after working on the trap, Ashley woke gasping from a nightmare. Mara was the only one awake. And Ashley looked around, still panting, and saw Mara in the firelight. She reached out and took Mara’s thumb in her hand, and fell back asleep with her hand on Mara’s thumb, and Mara lay frozen, and did not sleep at all, and was not even tired when the others woke.

12

They were almost done with the sticks, a mountain of them, and would soon need string to connect them, to weave them into flexible walls they could plant in the shallow edge of the lake. Mara kept telling Ashley not to worry about the string. That she would take care of it. But it was becoming increasingly obvious that without a solution, and soon, she would have led them both on a multiday wild-goose chase with perhaps some of the only energy they had left. The survivors were starving, light-headed, and the trap seemed like it might save them. If only it worked. Mara could feel her teammates’ expectation. Bullfrog watching from the clearing. Kyle stopping by with pots of nettle stew, beaming, his hands swelled with welts.

Ashley sensed Mara’s stress, but didn’t say anything, just nodded when Mara said she had a plan. Mara wondered what would happen if she couldn’t make one. If Ashley would forgive her. If what they had together, whatever it was, would be lost.

She tried using the string she had already made, but by the time she knotted a dozen sticks together, she ran out. So she tried connecting them with strips of bark, and soft reeds, and even the thin tendril-like roots from a pink-tinged weed that grew at the edge of the clearing, which struck her as unusually fibrous. But the strands were all too short or brittle to tie tightly, or the knots broke in minutes. She could sense Ashley pretending not to see her struggles, and it was that, more than anything, that made Mara turn to her last idea, the desperate plan she had kept in the back of her mind.

The idea was reckless, and she knew it. If it didn’t work, she could be kicked off the show. But if it worked—if she could make it work—then everything would come together at last.

She needed to do it at first light, before the others could interfere—or better yet, the time before light, that first lifting of darkness when shapes swam into view. She’d need every minute she could steal before the crew arrived.

That night Mara barely slept. She was so focused on waking early that she hovered for hours in the space between dreams and the soft, cool floor of the shelter. She heard the mews of a cat, and Kyle mumbling as he flopped to his side. A helicopter lifting and Bullfrog’s snores. It pleased her to hear him snoring, because she suspected that he often faked sleep to avoid talking, and this confirmed her hunch. The small satisfaction rooted her, kept her just this side of sleep.