“I’d rather not die at all.”
I felt something wet on my neck.
“Hey,” I said. “Don’t, Ashley. I’m working on it.”
“What are you working on?”
“A plan to get us out of here.”
“Oh. Okay. Thanks. I feel much better now.”
We didn’t say anything for a few minutes. Night had fallen and I couldn’t see a thing, not even the top of her head two inches beneath my nose. I could smell her hair, though, and feel her body quivering against mine.
“What did you do with Nueve’s gun?” she asked.
“Put it in my pocket.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said. She sighed with relief. “Good.”
I closed my eyes. I didn’t feel so cold; in fact, I actually felt warm. The cold snow beneath me and against my back felt like a warm blanket, and I began to float off to sleep.
“Talk to me, Alfred,” she said suddenly. “We c-c-can’t fall asleep . . .”
“Okay,” I said, and immediately my mind went blank.
“What’s the plan?”
“Plan?”
“The plan you’re working on.”
“We can’t hike out,” I said. “So we’re flying out.”
“You saw a show about making a glider out of tree branches, deer droppings, and spit?”
“They’ve got one chopper here already and probably more on the way,” I said. “And only one place to land and take off. Can you fly one?”
“What makes you think I can fly one?”
“It’s a key part of my plan.”
“I can’t fly one.”
“It’s also a key flaw in my plan.”
She laughed. It felt good to feel her laugh.
“I keep trying to decide if meeting you was the best thing that happened to me or the worst,” she said.
“Maybe both. Why did you come back to help extract me, Ashley?”
“Because I knew what it felt like,” she said after a pause. “To lose everything. I went into Field Operations right after college, Alfred, and a field operative can’t have a past . . . family . . . friends . . . Medcon took care of it . . . OIPEP ‘kills’ all its field operatives, fakes their deaths . . . Ashley isn’t even my real name. And when I left, I couldn’t go back to my old life. Everybody from it thought I was dead . . . They gave me a new identity after I resigned, a new place to live, but it was like I was nobody. I couldn’t be who I was before and I couldn’t be ‘Ashley’ either. I was totally alone. I was . . . no one.”
“Ash
ley’s not your name?”
“No.”