When Wilder jumps, my heart goes straight into my mouth. I mean, it’s been there for most of the past few days anyway, concussion notwithstanding, but I feel the sudden urge to grab his arm, yank him back and say oh my God don’t that’s dangerous.

“Come on!” he says, standing two feet away on the next boulder.

The cold wind curls around my body, trying to find the places where my insulation is lacking. The sun’s outrageously bright, blinding light bouncing off hundreds and thousands of acres of snow, making me squint at Wilder and the rocks and the sky above and the earth below.

I shift my weight. My ankle complains, but I try to ignore it.

It’s two feet. Not even that. It’s nothing.

I grab the straps on my backpack, take a deep breath.

“Imogen, you’ll be fine,” Wilder says, stepping forward and holding out a hand.

Yeah, you pussy, you’ll be fine. Stop overthinking it, stop imagining that your ankle could give out at the worst possible second and you’d stumble into that, probably break a leg when the weight of your—

“Do you need help?” he asks, his voice suddenly gentle, the mockery gone.

That does it.

I take a deep breath and leap over the small crevice, landing on my good ankle several feet away from the crack and ignoring Wilder’s outstretched hand. It could have been twice the size it was and I’d still have made it, for God’s sake.

“See? I knew you’d be fine,” Wilder says, his voice irritatingly smug.

I don’t look at him. I don’t want him to see the tears in my eyes for no reason. I don’t want him to know how much that unnerved me, because even though I know there are perfectly good reasons — I’ve got a concussion, my ankle hurts, food is scarce, it’s cold and we’re probably going to die — for me to be a wimp about this, that doesn’t mean I want him to know.

“Great. Thanks,” I say, my voice flat as I look around, blinking. “Where next? That one?”

“Yup,” he answers, and we take off slowly across the boulder field.

It’s long. It’s hard, and it’s unpleasant, and I lightly wrench my ankle at least once, but we’re getting closer. Every few rocks I look up, back at where we came from, and watching it get farther and farther away makes me feel slightly panicked but mostly good, like what we’re doing is really working to get us somewhere.

We’re almost at the bottom when I realize something’s wrong. So far, I’ve been tiredly just following Wilder, watching where he goes and doing the same, sometimes handing my pack up or down to him if I can’t manage with the thing on, but now he’s just standing on a broad, flat rock, pacing back and forth.

Like a lion in a cage, if the lion were wearing a thick parka, and it sparks a bolt of panic in me because we can’t go back now, we have to get off this rocky part of the mountain somehow and it’s already late afternoon.

We’ll freeze to death if we stay on the rocks, I think. It’ll be windy and cold, we need to get to somewhere that we can find at least some shelter, not to mention a little water, and God knows we can’t keep moving in the dark because we’ll just slip on some ice and then we’ll definitely die—

“There’s a snag,” Wilder’s voice says, low and calm despite the thumping in my chest. “C’mere.”

I swallow and walk over to him, standing in the shadow of the rocks above us. He’s looking across a gap to another boulder, that one at an odd angle, the sides jagged.

“We gotta jump this,” he explains, and I look down.

It’s big. Wide. Too wide, probably four feet and it’s straight down, the bottom dark and forbidding and probably filled with spikes and wolves and spiders and mud.

There’s no way I can climb down it and back up the other side, but no way I can jump it, either. The rock on the opposite side of the gulch is angled up and slippery-looking, like even if I got a foothold there I’d slide right back off of it and into the gulch.

“We can’t jump that,” I say, hoping my voice sounds reasonable and not shaky.

“Sure we can,” Wilder says, adjusting his pack slightly. “If these were just two lines on the ground, you wouldn’t think twice about it.”

“But they’re not,” I say, cinching my own pack tighter in my nervousness. “This is one giant rock and that’s another giant rock, and there’s a seventy-foot drop between them—”

“It’s forty if it’s a foot.”

“—there’s a huge drop between them and that rock looks hard to land on, and my ankle is all fucked up, so I really think that we should head back and find another route down—”

Wilder jumps. Motherfucker makes it look easy, just leaping across this mile-wide gap and landing on the other side, leaning forward and grabbing an outcropping to steady himself before he turns around to look at me, grinning.

“See? It’s fine,” he says.

It’s not fine. Nothing about this is fine, nothing about this is good or normal or even kind of okay because I’m on a bare granite rock in the middle of nowhere with a busted ankle, a concussion, and this person who I absolutely positively completely hate more than anyone else.

Vaguely, in the back of my mind, I know I’m being kind of unreasonable. It’s a big jump, yeah, but I’m not unraveling right now because of that. I’m unraveling because I’m hungry and cold and tired and my stupid ankle hurts and because I childishly want to be at home, in front of a fireplace, or even in an Arctic research station sipping tea and discussing the mating habits of musk oxen.

Anywhere but here. With him.

“I can’t,” I say. “I’m going back, I’m gonna find another way down, that’s just too far and if I fall and get hurt I’ll be really screwed…”

“There’s not another way,” he says. “C’mon, throw me your pack.”

“Of course there’s another way,” I say, my chin jutting out a little. “Maybe three hundred feet back, when we climbed that one rock with the big quartz vein in it there was another way we could have gone—”

“Cliff,” he says.

“No, it wasn’t, there was another rock down there and then we’d have had to—”

“We’d have had to scramble up an incline full of loose rock which only got steeper at the bottom,” he says. “You really think sliding to your death is better than jumping over a little crevice?”

“That’s not little when you’ve got a sprained ankle.”

“Throw me your pack.”

I grip the straps, heart racing, because despite everything deep down in my heart of hearts I don’t want to trust him.

“Imogen,” he says, holding out one hand.

I stare at it.

“If there were a better way down, I swear we’d be taking it,” he says, an impatient edge finally in his voice. “I promise I’m more interested in getting off this boulder field and to shelter before nightfall than torturing—”

“Okay, okay,” I say, yanking the buckle at my chest apart and shrugging it from my shoulders. “Okay. Fine.”

I heave it down, grab it in both hands, and fling it across underhand. Wilder catches it easily, slings it to the ground behind him in one motion, making it look as easy as the jump.

Everything was always easy for him, I think bitterly, out of nowhere. Sports, people, me.

Especially me.

“You coming too?” he asks, tugging at his gloves.

I stand at the edge, looking down. The light is just starting to fade and I swear it’s darker now than it was two minutes ago, though it could just be my imagination.

Don’t think, just jump.

Just jump.

I stand there, frozen, my body refusing to do what I keep telling it to.

Use your good foot to push off of, there’s a nice little ledge-thing right there, maybe if you got a few feet of running start…

I back up, wondering if that’s the best way to make it across the ravine, with a running start.

But if I try that, maybe I’ll hit my bad ankle wrong and then I’ll trip or fall down and then I’ll be really screwed…

I come back to the edge, look down into the darkness.

“It’s not that far, I promise,” Wilder says, standing on the other side, feet braced, one hand out. “Come on, I’ll catch you.”

I shift my weight, calculating. If I jump off my good ankle then I stand a better chance of making it across in the first place, but then I’d land on my bad one and I might really break it this time and then I’d be screwed for the rest of this stupid journey, but if I jump off my bad ankle then I might just go into the pit of despair and then I’d never—

“Imogen,” Wilder says, but I barely hear him over the noise in my own head.

—make it out, and that’s definitely worse but at least it wouldn’t prolong my suffering, right? Better to just die instantly and be eaten by wolves than to limp through the wilderness for another day or two, making Wilder drag me—

“C’mon, Squeaks,” Wilder says, and my head snaps up.

He’s grinning. The fucking asshole is grinning at me, like he knows I won’t make it and he’s ten seconds away from not having to haul me for miles and miles through the snow. He’s grinning like he gets to call me whatever the fuck he wants because he thinks it’s funny, like even out here he’s above me somehow, like he can ruin my life however he wants—

I leap.

I don’t think about which foot I’m jumping off of and I don’t think about the wolves and spikes below, I just think about how there’s no way I’m letting Wilder be the only one to survive this and before I know it I’m on the other side, his strong arm around my back holding me steady as my ankle tries to buckle underneath me.

I grab onto a waist-high outcropping, catch my breath.

“Told you,” he says.

“Fuck you,” I say, standing on my good ankle, my sprained one held off the ground.

He just laughs. Laughs.

“Even here?” I ask.

Now that I’m on this side, nerves shot, I’m near tears, forcing myself to hold them back because I’ll do almost anything not to cry in front of him.

“You can’t go without reminding me of that dumb fucking nickname even now when we’re stuck out in the middle of God knows where?”

He puts a hand on my shoulder and I shove it off, furious.

“I moved a thousand miles to escape you,” I say between clenched teeth. “The least you can do right now is pretend we’re strangers.”

“You got across, didn’t you?” he asks softly, hoisting a pack onto his back.

“That’s not the point,” I growl, testing out my ankle, facing away from him. “The point is that I want you to go one single day without bringing that shit up, because you probably don’t know this, but I arranged my entire life around getting away from you and now I’m gonna have to start that over.”

I hear the snap of a buckle closing behind me, and I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to force myself not to cry.

You’re tired and hungry and et cetera, et cetera, I tell myself. Plus, it’s probably below zero here in the shade, if you cry the tears might just freeze to your face and think about how miserable that would be.

“You gonna start getting away again right now?” Wilder asks, something sharp in his voice.

I bite my lip, test my weight on my ankle, don’t turn around to look at him.

“Or were you gonna wait until I caught you when you jumped? Maybe you were gonna wait until we got down off this mountain, then you were gonna pretend like we’re strangers who’ve never met?”

“You’re the reason we’re here,” I say quietly, staring off into the distance.

There’s a slight scraping noise, and I turn to see that he’s picked up my pack as well, slung it over one shoulder. His eyes are blazing, the wind beating a few strands of hair around his face, underneath his hat.

“I’m the reason we’re alive,” he says. “Anytime you want to say thanks for that, just let me know. Otherwise we gotta get moving before sunset.”

Wilder turns and starts walking. We’re still stepping from boulder to boulder but from here, the steps get smaller and smaller until the rocks give way to a wide, flat snowy patch, the snow halfway up our calves.

I jam my hands into my pockets, feeling furious and guilty all at once. I’m not wrong and I know it, but then again, neither is Wilder, who’s up ahead of me carrying eighty pounds of our gear while I follow along behind him carrying nothing.

Don’t think, I tell myself, despite the fact that trying not to think has literally never worked for me. Just get through this, get to the tree line, find some shelter from the wind and eat your disgusting MRE and make it through the night.

I follow behind Wilder, stepping in his footsteps when I can, and we don’t say anything to each other for a long, long time but I keep thinking. I think about mistakes I made ten years ago, I think about mistakes I made today.

I think about arctic foxes and musk oxen, telephoto lenses and permafrost. I think about dropping the folder of pictures in front of security at the Solaris airport and how that seems like nothing now.

And I think about what I told Wilder to get him to take me on this plane flight: that I’d get him fifteen thousand dollars in compensation.

That fifteen thousand feels a lot worse right now.