Free Thin Air by Rachel Caine Page B

starting to wonder about that myself. She looked so helpless, so fragile, that I couldn’t just leave her there. Not like some little match girl in the snow.
    I looked around for Lewis, but he was a no-show, the fickle bastard. I could have used his ruthless practicality right now. Granted, he probably would have filled the poor kid full of bullet holes, but at least then she wouldn’t have been my problem.
    No sign of him. No sign of David, either. Just me, Cherise, and the falling snow.
    â€œHold on,” I said. I might have sounded angry, but the truth was that I was scared. My heart was pounding hard, and I wished to hell that I knew the rules of this world, which didn’t seem to be the world I expected. Or knew. Or had known. Or maybe I was just going crazy; that would explain a lot.
    I shook that idea off and focused back on Cherise. “Can you get up?” I asked her. She nodded, or at least that was what I took the convulsive jerk of her head to be, and tried. She managed to get to her hands and knees, but seemed stuck at that point, trembling like some poor wounded bird. I stood up, reached down for her, then hesitated. If this was a trap…
    Then you’ll at least die with good intentions.
    I sucked down a deep, cold breath, grabbed Cherise under her arm, and hauled her upright. It didn’t take much effort, as small as she was. The fuzzy pink sweater rode up, revealing a tattoo on the small of her back. Some kind of little gray alien dude waving hello. That implied a sense of humor. Maybe she wasn’t a bad kid, after all.
    And maybe you’re crazy , part of my brain reminded me. I didn’t like that part. I wished to hell it would shut up.
    I half dragged Cherise through the snow to the tent. She seemed barely capable of staying on her feet, even with me taking most of her weight, and I was glad I hadn’t hesitated about it too much longer. She was hardly breathing.
    Getting her through the narrow tent opening was an engineering problem, but I managed, and soon I had her settled, wrapped in two thermal blankets, with heat packs warming her core temperature. In the light of the battery-powered lantern, Cherise looked ghostly, like the living dead. Which, I thought, might not be far from the case.
    She didn’t say anything for a long time, and I didn’t, either. I couldn’t think what questions to ask, and obviously she wasn’t compos mentis enough to be coming up with conversation on her own. When she finally did speak, it wasn’t anything I expected her to say.
    She asked, “Where’s Imara? I thought she’d be with you.”
    Imara. I suddenly felt short of breath and I wished David were here. No, I didn’t wish that, because I didn’t want to think about what he’d be feeling at the sound of that name. This was all hard. It was hard not knowing, but it seemed to get worse the more I found out. Maybe ignorance really was bliss.
    Cherise was shaking again, but I figured that was good; shaking meant her body was trying to warm itself, which meant she was coming out of shutdown mode. “Imara? Is she okay?”
    I remembered the agony in David’s eyes, and again I just knew there was something there it would be better if I never had to face. “Where’s Kevin?” I asked instead, because I figured that if he’d recovered from whatever crazy spell he’d been under, he was in the same boat as Cherise…freezing to death out there.
    Cherise seemed to try to remember. One second. Two. Two and a half, and then I saw comprehension flood her expression. Then get driven out by fear. “I…I don’t know,” she said. Her voice was high-pitched with sudden panic. “Jo, we were in the forest. He was showing me…showing me how he did the fire stuff, and it was really cool, you know. He was proud of himself, and he was saying we could help people….”
    I nodded. Not that I really