Powder Burn (Burn with Sam Blackett #1) (20 page)

“
Lens, Lens!” she spluttered, as soon as she could clear her mouth and nose of enough snow to stop his adrenaline-fueled prattling. She sat up.

He stopped.

“I’ve got the sword,” she said, as he dumped his backpack down and started to undo his snowboard – still attached after the descent, but only by a single strap.

“
Do you think he’ll want it enough to come after it?” They both looked back up to the top of the cliff. There was no sign of Jortse.

“
Let’s not hang around and find out,” she said. “Where’s Pete?” she added, suddenly concerned.

“
Over there.” Lens pointed. “He may be a half-crazed adrenaline junkie, but he called that one beautifully.” He held out his arms and looked down. “Not a scratch.”

“
You all right?” called Pete, starting to struggle towards them. “Let’s get the hell out of here. Everything else all right?”

“
Fine, a couple of friction holes in my bag, but nothing big enough to worry about,” she replied, fastening the sword to the straps on the backpack. “Not sure what state my toothpaste will be in though.” She looked up and smiled. “Incredible, I would never have believed it was possible to survive that jump.”

“
I thought we were going to have to go down that way so I had a pretty good look when I was there before we got caught,” he said, pulling his snowboard off his pack. “Sometimes, you’ve just got to go for it.”

“
Yes, I suppose you do,” she said, looking into his eyes. Then there was a bloodcurdling yell. They all looked up; this time Jortse was on the edge of the cliff.

“
Holy crapola,” said Lens, “maybe he is going to do it.”

They watched in frozen horror as Jortse jumped.

“Let’s go,” said Pete, flipping his board flat on the snow. Jortse glanced off the ice and slid towards them. She shrugged back into her backpack straps as Jortse came to a halt forty yards away. They gained a couple of precious seconds as he scrambled for his scattered wits, then there was an angry yell as he started to move. She glanced up. Pete was tightening his bindings.

“
Go, Lens,” said Pete. “We’re right behind you. Come on, Sam, feet in the same place as before.”

She grabbed hold of him and carefully positioned her feet. If she pulled him over now they were finished. She heard an anguished, desperate yell from behind as Pete flicked the board downhill and they started to slide. She didn’t look back.

Sam was propped against the trunk of a mountain ash, sitting on her pack because the grass was wet and muddy. A light breeze rippled the big leaves, flashing the white undersides and flowers against the otherwise grey foliage. Pete was standing above her, leaning against the same tree for support, staring back up the mountain through the binoculars. She shut her eyes, but immediately she had a vision of the charging guard crashing down in front of her. She opened them again.
Stay in the moment,
she told herself,
at least until you’re safe.

They had lost a lot of altitude in a spectacularly short time – thanks to the snowboards – and after a subsequent struggle through a half
mile of broken rock, they were well below the snow line and into the lower vegetated slopes of the valley. She was still coming to terms with breathing thick, warm air for the first time in weeks, and had stripped down to a thermal shirt. It felt good, rejuvenating, like a second – or maybe third or fourth – wind, although she could have done without the mud.

Lens stumbled up to them. There was a thud as his pack hit the dirt, and then another, as Lens sagged onto it. He looked awful, dark lines under his eyes, harsh against the pale skin that had been protected by the goggles. There were red blotches on his exposed cheeks where the wind and sun had got to them. Patches of beard and deepened lines from squinting made him look old and tired.
Good thing I don’t have a mirror,
she thought. She felt a lot worse than he looked. In contrast, Pete had acquired an even, golden tan and rugged stubble that made him look like a Greek demigod just back from a rough day killing Trojans.

Pete lowered the binoculars.
“I think I might have a couple of those granola bars left,” he said. He started to search the top section of his backpack.

“
Where’s Jortse?” she asked, watching Pete, her mouth already watering.

“
Still coming, he’s not yet at the snow line,” he replied, glancing at his watch. “So he’s more than an hour behind us.”

“
What about Detsen’s men?” she asked.

“
I haven’t seen any of them. I don’t think they jumped, they must have doubled back.”

“
So they could be hours behind.”

“
Yup – here you go, we’re in luck, three left.” He handed out the bars. “All I’ve got now is freeze-dried.” He sat down beside her.

“
I’ve got a bag of trail mix I’ve been hoarding, but it’s right at the bottom of my pack,” she admitted.

Pete looked at her quizzically.

“So I can’t get at it. If I hadn’t put it there, it would be gone by now,” she told him.

Pete smiled briefly, then his expression hardened.
“So Jortse jumping wasn’t part of the plan. What the hell are we going to do with this sword?”

“
I say we hide it here and head for the border,” said Lens, his mouth still full.

“
And then what do we do if he catches us?” asked Pete. “If we’ve hidden it, he’ll try to drag us back here to get it. And he’s not going to give up chasing us when we get to the border. How long are we going to have to keep running? Are you up for that? You look pretty out of it to me, Lens.”

“
We’ll go to the authorities,” said Lens.

“
And tell them what?” retorted Sam. “That you bumped into a guy who declared he was going to start a rebellion in Shibde against the Demagistan army, so you thought it wise to disarm him and report the matter?”

“
If we have the sword they might believe us,” said Pete.

“
They might, and if we take it with us, then we can negotiate if he catches us. And anyway, we all agreed that we have to keep the sword out of his hands, so we can’t leave it for him to find. Hiding it is like the worst of both worlds – we lose control of it, and he won’t stop chasing us because he still thinks we’ve got it.”

“
So who’s to say he’ll let us go even if we gave him the sword?” replied Lens. “Now he knows that we don’t support his little rebellion, he’ll hardly be keen to let us get back to the outside world and have you write it up for the
New York Times
.”

“
Bloody hell,” said Pete, shaking his head. “Whatever, we can’t sit around here all day making our minds up.”

“
Maybe we can slow him up and get him caught by Detsen’s men,” said Sam. “If we can find somewhere to hide, then once he realizes that he’s lost touch with us he’ll have to double back, and with a bit of luck, while he’s screwing around looking for us, they’ll nab him.”

“
Or maybe he’ll find us first,” said Lens.

“
Got a better idea?” said Sam. She waved at the forest. “And there’s got to be somewhere in there that we can hide.”

“
It’s going to be easy to track us in this.” Pete stamped his foot in the mud.

“
The river,” said Lens, after a moment’s silence, “like in all those chase movies, they always head for the river, where there are rocks and water and you don’t leave tracks.”

“
OK, so we head down to the river and then follow it,” said Pete. “We know it goes to the border. We’ll give it till nightfall to find somewhere to hole up, and if we haven’t found anywhere by then ... I guess we make another plan when it happens?”

Sam nodded.
“It’s all we can do.”

Lens sighed, but said nothing.

“OK, saddle up, let’s head out,” said Pete.

“This is it,” said Sam, dropping her pack with a thump that barely made itself heard over the crash of water. She started to pull off the stinking, sweat-soaked shirt. Pete looked at her, more than a little bemused.

“
We don’t have time to wash,” he said, as Lens pulled up beside them.

Sam was already wrestling with a boot.
“I’m not washing. There could be somewhere to hide behind the waterfall.” She hopped to keep her balance as she pointed. They had reached the river forty minutes earlier, after more than an hour of picking their way through a dense forest of silver fir and mountain ash, threaded with tall rhododendrons. Once at the river they had kept to the rocky side-shore wherever possible, even climbing down the cliff beside the waterfall rather than return to the mud. But, although there was no sign of Jortse, no one believed they had lost him.

Now they stood in a small clearing around the plunge pool. Sam tore off a sock and stuffed it into the top of her boot before steadying herself with a hand on Pete’s shoulder to take off the second.
“It’s overhanging, look at the cliff line,” she told them. “There’s a good chance that there’ll be space behind the water. If there is, it’s the perfect place to hide.” She unzipped her trousers.

“
Holy cow!” Lens winced as he tried the temperature of the water with a couple of fingers. He splashed his face nonetheless. “You’re going to check it out and let us know, right?”

“
You poor thing,” she said, as she stuffed the clothes into the top of her pack. Admittedly, she was shivering slightly – but pleased to discover that the sports bra and panties she had on were black by design and not just circumstance. It had been a while since she’d seen her underwear, never mind changed it. It was gross. “Bring that with you if I don’t come back,” she said to Pete, nodding at the pack as she stepped gingerly towards the edge of the crashing screen of water.

Toughened as her feet were by the weeks of hard hiking, they were used to the even pressure that rocks and stones applied through the thick soles of her boots. She flinched a couple of times as she stood on sharp edges. But that was nothing to the gasp of sheer horror as she stuck her arm tentatively into the stream of water. It was straight off a glacier and had the momentum of a
twenty-yard fall. The combination of cold and pressure was instantly numbing, and it was all she could do to stop herself bolting back to safety and ordering Pete to check it out. But she could feel the boys watching every move – nothing for it but to do it.

She took a deep breath, braced hard against the shock and stepped forward. It knocked every last squeak of air straight back out of her. Eyes shut against the torrent, she could see nothing and fumbled forward a couple of tiny half steps, outstretched hands against the cliff, which remained depressingly solid under her frant
ic tapping. She stumbled again, bowed under by the weight of water, needing to breath but doubting there was much air around. On the next step the strength of the water trebled and she felt her panties start to loosen under the pressure. She grabbed frantically and just caught them at her knees.

Staggering under the deluge and the restriction around her legs, she leaned out with her free hand to find support from the cliff. It wasn’t there anymore. She started to fall, stepped out to save herself and cracked her shin against a rock. She cursed and stumbled over the obstruction
, into the darkness, and suddenly she was out of the torrent of water. She stopped. She was in exactly the sort of hidden cave she had hoped to find. Shivering frantically, she pulled her underwear back up where it belonged and waited for her eyes to adjust. When they did, she could see that she had stepped through a big fissure in the rock, and the cave went back some distance. It was gloomy and cold, and she wasn’t doing any more exploring until she had some company. So she waited ... What on earth were they doing? She was freezing.

Finally, a heroic figure burst through the curtain of water
– Pete, bare-chested, dragging a backpack in each hand. He shook like a dog and peered around him.

“
Over here,” she called.

“
Hey, nice job, this is great. He’ll never find us,” he said, dumping the backpacks.

Sam grabbed hers and started to pull out clothes, boots and finally her sarong with trembling hands. Meanwhile, Lens stumbled, thrashing, through the screen of spray. Before he could wipe the water from his face and figure which way was up, Pete had stepped forward to pull him away from the edge and get him safely inside the cave.

“C-c-cold ...” Lens mumbled, as he wiped at his face, then looked around him as his vision cleared. “Whoa ... this is p-p-p-perfect,” he said, adding several seconds later, “Very,
L-l-l-last of the Mohicans
– ‘Stay alive – I w-w-w-will find you.’ And all that.”

“
Yeah, well, let’s hope there isn’t too much of that finding people going on,” said Sam, wrapping the sarong around her so she could peel off her wet, clammy underwear.

“
How can he p-p-p-possibly find us in here?” said Lens.

“
Maybe he’s seen the film as well,” retorted Sam. Pete flipped open the flap on the side-pocket of his backpack and pulled out a flashlight, while Lens started to throw everything from his pack onto the floor in the search for a towel. The light flickered into the back of the cave, which stretched further than the flashlight could reach.

“
Wow,” said Pete.

“
We shouldn’t use the flashlight, in case he sees it,” said Sam.

Pete put his hand over the front of it so there was just a weaker red glow.
“I don’t think it’ll be a problem till the sun goes down, but how’s that?”

“
Good,” she replied. They were shouting over the noise from the waterfall.

Pete walked back into the cave.
“There’s a fairly flat spot back here, and it’s almost dry, the spray’s not reaching it. I reckon, if we spread the tent and the sleeping mats out, we could make this pretty comfortable.”

Sam moved up beside him. It was quiet as well as dry. Weak, dappled blue light rippled across the rock.
“Sounds good to me, I just want to eat and sleep,” she replied.

“
All right, bring the packs up here then, and let’s get some food on.”

It took a few minutes for them to set out the camp and for the two men to change while Sam got the remaining stove going. She elected to stay in the sarong, so she could rinse her clothes. With the water on and heating, she snuggled up in her sleeping bag to get warm again. Pete lay down beside her
, with his backpack as a pillow. Although the water was cold, the warmth of the outside air was infiltrating the cave, sufficient for it to be comfortable once the bracing effects of the shower started to wear off.
Snug as a bug in a rug,
she thought. A wave of euphoria hit her, perhaps it was just the effect of not having to walk, of being warm, clean, of not feeling hounded and chased and frightened. And being with Pete.

“
So, anybody got any ideas on the best way back to civilization once we do get across the border? We must be a long way east of our original crossing point now,” said Pete, checking the water.

“
It’ll never boil if you keep looking at it,” she told him.

He smiled.

“This valley is much bigger than what I remember from the satellite photos,” said Lens, also curled up in his sleeping bag. “It’s kind of weird, actually, but maybe I just remember it wrong.”