Julia

  I find Géraldine, appropriately enough, at the end of her trail of footprints. There’s not a lot of “town” in Petawawa, but we’re very nearly at the outskirts of it.

  I take the snowshoes off the toboggan I’m dragging behind me and proffer them to her. “Here, put these on.”

  “Can’t,” she retorts. “If I waste a minute putting those on, I’ll lose sight of him.”

  “You’ll lose your feet if we’re out here for any length of time,” I retort, more unkindly than I intend.

  “You’re the expert in cold weather, Miss Vancouver?”

  I sigh. “Listen to me: I will follow him, okay? You put on the snowshoes and follow my trail.”

  She seems to mull this over for a second. Then, she reaches out and grabs them from me.

  “You shoulda taken these ones,” she complains. “You could lose him ploughing around on those tennis rackets.”

  “I didn’t want to rob you.”

  “Leave the toboggan with me too,” she orders. “Dragging that food behind you will just slow you down.”

  I don’t waste time arguing. I drop the rope and set off after Elsevier.

  *

  I shouldn’t be angry with Géraldine. She’s only doing what she can to save her grandson. And I’m sure that I’d do the same if…well…I happened to love anyone as much as she loves Paul. And yet…

  Maybe it’s just that I’m tired, or hungry, or sore. Maybe I had been looking forward to spending a night in a real bed. But…God, she’s so bloody wooden-headed sometimes!

  Elsevier is maybe a hundred metres in front of me and moving rapidly toward a line of trees. Apparently, we’re headed into the forest. That makes sense: the invaders came from the wilderness, so presumably there’s a portal to Faerie in there somewhere. Of course, it could be halfway to Manitoba…

  Why a portal though? Paul had managed to get to True Sorrow from his own bedroom just by painting a picture. Why do we need to walk?

  No time to worry about that now. I stride ahead purposefully, redoubling my efforts to catch up, huffing and puffing the cold air as I go. The ore-spinner is well into the woods now, never slowing. I keep the vivid green of his tailcoat centred in my vision, stark against the white snow and dark tree trunks. Forward, damn it! Forward—

  The mesh of my tennis racket catches on a bramble or twig protruding from the snow, bringing my progress to a halt. I curse beneath my breath and waste a precious few seconds trying to disentangle it before realising the effort is futile—that snowshoes, makeshift or otherwise, will be all but useless here.

  People have the wrong idea about forests; they remember the trees but forget the things that grow between them. And here, in a forest where humans have been actively suppressing wildfires for decades or centuries, the undergrowth is dense. Angrily, I loosen the twine binding my “snowshoes” to my boots, pick the rackets up under my arm, and pray that the snow won’t be too deep, that Elsevier won’t have gotten too far ahead.

  The latter prayer is answered; the former is not. Elsevier, to my relief, is holding position a short distance ahead of me, a hand on his hip and toes tapping impatiently against the surface of the snow. Each step that I take toward him, however, causes me to sink to at least midway down my shins. I stagger forward nonetheless, arms held haplessly out at my sides for balance. “Elsevier—”

  “Some help, dear Julia?” he asks casually, looking down on me; he reaches out a hand.

  I hesitate only an instant before accepting, and at once he hauls me up to his level in a single motion…somehow. The snow remains loose and powdery, and yet I can stand effortlessly on its surface. The shock of it is such that I almost lose my balance, but Elsevier braces me against a fall.

  “Takes some getting used to, I suppose.”

  I nod at him, somewhat surprised at his sudden magnanimity. “Thanks.”

  “No thanks are necessary,” he replies. “It’s nice to help one another every so often, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I…didn’t realize ‘nice’ was in your vocabulary,” I answer, prompting what I strongly suspect to be a deceptively warm chuckle. “Elsevier, what you’re doing—leading Géraldine on like this—it’s cruel even for you.”

  “Yes,” he agrees. “Cruel and stupid and all-around not a good idea. But…” He shrugs theatrically. “It’s what she wants, and the customer, as you humans say, is always right.”

  “But you don’t need to lead us off like this!” I protest. “Give her time to pause, to process what you told her—”

  “Does she seem the type to give up on her grandson?” he asks. “No matter how long I give her?” When I don’t answer, he makes a dismissive gesture. “No sense in wasting time, then. And, in any case, dead out here or dead in True Sorrow is all very much the same in my book. I’m afraid it’s entirely out of my hands.” He gives me a sly look. “Yours, on the other hand…”

  “What about mine—one wonders.”

  “Why—you can bring this whole charade to an end right here and now,” he replies. “You see, my contract with Géraldine, well—”

  Elsevier brings a hand to his forehead and comes away with a cloud of a glowing, plasma-like vapour floating directly above his palm. And in that cloud, I can discern Géraldine’s face with a familiar boathouse behind her on the frozen river—a recording, then.

  “I ain’t agreeing to nothing,” says the Géraldine of a few days ago. “Not unless Julia hasn’t changed her mind about following you.”

  “Don’t you want your grandson back?” asks Elsevier’s voice from “offscreen”.

  “’Course I fucking do,” she replies. “But I think you’re up to some shit with that girl, and I’ve told her what I think, and I’m not fucking helping you without givin’ her the chance to back out.” She shakes her head. “She says ‘yes’? You got yourself a deal. She says ‘no’—”

  “You’ll abandon dear old Paul to his fate?” asks Elsevier, and I suppress an urge to roll my eyes.

  “I’ll find some other way,” replies Géraldine.

  Elsevier—the present Elsevier—closes his fist around the cloud, vanishing it in a puff of smoke. “As you see,” he announces, “my agreement with her is contingent on my agreement with you.”

  “She—was willing to sacrifice that for me,” I say contemplatively. Suddenly, I feel ashamed for being so terse with her.

  “No need to get maudlin about it,” he retorts with a wave of his hand. “The point is that we’re only out here on this idiot sojourn because of my deal with her. And my deal with her is only as good as my deal with you. If we were to, say, mutually suspend our deal…then there would be no need for us to proceed onwards into True Sorrow. Do you take my meaning?”

  I look away from him. “You’d…have me give up my quest.”

  “Only temporarily,” he replies. “And I’d be willing to renegotiate with you on very favourable terms—providing food, for one; I know that that’s an obsession of yours. Finding an alternate route into Faerie would be a bit of a chore, but we’d manage. We’d just need to wait…a little while.”

  I draw in a breath. “One wonders how long.”

  “Oh, just a few days, probably. Just long enough for…” His voice trails off and then he shrugs. “For any possible contract with Géraldine to expire. Once I lead her out into the forest.”

  I glare at him. “For Géraldine to expire, you mean.”

  “Well, there’s always a chance that she’ll give up before then,” he says with what he probably thinks is a placating smile. “So, what do you say? Shall we keep each other alive?”

  In that moment, I feel an overwhelming swell of disgust. “Elsevier, if you seriously expect me to betray my friend—”

  “You’re doing her no favours,” he interrupts. “There’s no happy reunion awaiting her at the end of this road, only despair, madness, and death—one way or another. No need for her to drag us down too.”

  “She’s my friend!” I exclaim. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “The boy is dead and you know it!” he snaps, suddenly losing all composure. “If you’re her friend, then convince her of that! Or take my offer. But I will not die for your cowardice!”

  I feel a heat rise to my cheeks. “Oh, fuck right—”

  Before I can conclude the sentence, I abruptly sink to my knees through the surface of the snow and gasp in the sudden cold.

  “Do try to follow along,” calls Elsevier behind him as he resumes striding briskly into the woods.

  *

  I follow him. I hate myself more with each step, but I follow him.

  What the hell is wrong with me?

  Paul…well, he could be alive. Maybe someone found him, carried him to safety. Elsevier doesn’t know! Maybe Paul’s spent the last month in the lap of luxury. Maybe…

  Every so often, Elsevier casts a mocking glance behind. It would be bad enough if he were checking to see that I was still behind him, but his expression isn’t one of uncertainty. He knows that I will be there. And that’s so much worse.

  But what else can I do?

  Tell Géraldine what I think.

  Yes, that’s the honourable way out, isn’t it? Maybe do it gently, like “Are you sure about Paul?” Give her a chance to make a decision on her own. The right decision.

  Yes, that’s what I must do—what I will do, damn it! Just as soon as she catches up.

  *

  The day wears on. The sun is lost beneath a layer of gauzy white clouds, and Géraldine does not catch up with me. In fact, I have no idea where she is, as I can’t see her during my backwards glances. This probably just means she’s a reasonable way off, still doggedly following my trail. Probably.

  Elsevier maintains the same pace, never seeming to tire. I’d say he’s like a machine, but that would miss the point: machines wear out after prolonged use, and generally need a power source; Elsevier, by contrast…

  It occurs to me that I’ve never seem him eat. The first time Géraldine and I broke for lunch, she offered him some food; he only scoffed and went off on his own. I assumed that he was somehow sustaining himself through magic, but now I find myself wondering whether he even needs to eat. Are the laws of thermodynamics even still in effect?

  They’re certainly in effect for me. I am a machine! I’m fuelled by food and use that energy to perform work, and, like all machines, I’m subject to wear and tear. My muscles ache with each new step, my feet are sore beyond reasoning, and there’s significant chafing between my thighs. And my “fuel tank”, such as it is, runs on empty.

  Once upon a time, I prided myself on my hardiness because I walked home from the University once a week, regardless of weather. But I knew nothing of walking—I discovered that my first day on the river. This very morning, I walked nearly ten kilometres, motivated by finally reaching Géraldine’s house. Now I have walked…I don’t care to speculate how much farther, with next to nothing tiding me over.

  In the hours since our conversation, Elsevier has gone from being a few dozen feet in front of me to a splotch of green in the distance. I can’t maintain his pace; I just can’t. And I hope that he breaks soon, because otherwise I will certainly lose him within an hour or two, with an outside chance of lying dead in the snow.

  I need to eat.

  My mind fills with…fruits and vegetables and hamburgers and bacon and fresh-baked bread and crisp, salty pickles and fried mushrooms and cranberry muffins and…

  Ugh. Surely there must be something edible nearby!

  I suppress the pangs in my stomach long enough to survey my surroundings. Frozen trees. Lovely—beautiful, even. But not edible.

  But they could be.

  What was it Elsevier said? Rearranging atoms was simple magic? Well! The trees have everything I need: carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen…that is all that there is to them, really. You could make all kinds of edible things with that! Of course, I can’t make, say, an apple or a steak, because I don’t know their molecular structures. But…glucose! Biological energy with a nice, simple molecular structure—I’m pretty sure I can still remember it from my chemistry course. I just need to grab a pinecone or something and transform it! Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy!

  I try to judge the distance to Elsevier’s retreating backside—how long until he gets out of sight? I can spare a few minutes, surely.

  I bend and grab a newly fallen pinecone from the snow. I hold it up to my field of vision. Glucose. I think. Become glucose.

  An errant part of my mind wonders what raw glucose even looks like. I imagine something sludgy and silvery in colour, probably sticky and sweet to the taste—

  No. Focus! There is no pinecone, not really. Just atoms…

  I close my eyes, trying to picture a glucose molecule. I imagine the cone as a mass of elements and will them to rearrange. Will them. Will them…

  I open my eyes.

  “Goddamn it!”

  I chuck the pinecone—which remains very much a pinecone—into the bush with as much force as I can muster. “Shit. SHIT!!”

  I bury my face in my hands, as angry at my failure as I am at my reaction to it. I hear a laugh ring out in the forest, and it takes me an instant to realize that it’s coming from me. And why shouldn’t I laugh? Here I am, grown woman—MIT-educated physics PhD for heaven’s sake—pitching a temper tantrum in the middle of a forest because a frigging pinecone won’t turn into food. Goddamn it!

  I take a deep breath, summoning my reserves of calm. “Right.” I sigh, looking up.

  At once, my weary body spares a jolt of adrenaline: Mr. Elsevier is gone.

  *

  My brain insists that I not panic, that Elsevier is behind a tree or something and that I need only give him a few seconds to emerge. But a few seconds pass, and he’s nowhere to be seen.

  Oh no.

  I whirl arou—No. “Whirling” is for panicky morons. I’m in command of my faculties.

  I survey my surroundings in a calm, detached fashion, looking for a green frock coat amongst the forest. And then, only after having methodically completed this inspection without finding my quarry, do I scream at the top of my lungs: “Elsevier!!”

  Snow is a good acoustic absorber; as such, I don’t even hear an echo.

  “Elsevier!” I scream again. “I’m making a complete ass of myself and I know you’ll want to see it!”

  Nothing.

  Despite my best efforts, I feel the beginnings of panic well up inside my chest. I’m alone. Alone and lost, deep in the woods. If the human animal can be said to have primal fears, this must be right up there. But I still have one card to play.

  “Elsevier!” I shout, and then follow it up with the first question to pop into my head: “What do you eat?”

  If he is anywhere nearby, he has to react to that. Which makes it all the more worrisome when he does not.

  My desperation mounting, I try a new angle: “Géraldine!”

  No answer is forthcoming.

  “Anybody!!?”

  My eyes sting with tears, and as soon as I realize it, I’m ashamed. Get a grip, Julia! You’re not some five-year-old losing her parents in a shopping mall. Do the one thing you’re allegedly good at and think!

  I’m lost in the woods. We talked about this in Brownies, for heaven’s sake! What did they say to do?

  Find water; find food; build shelter; build fire. Await rescue. Lichen always grows on the north side of trees, which is probably not terribly relevant.

  Well, I can’t sit tight, can I? Every second I’m here is another second Elsevier gets farther away. And if Géraldine catches up and I need to explain that I lost her only hope of finding her grandson…

  Okay then. Find Elsevier.

  But he could be anywhere—

  No. He’s been walking in the same direction for half an hour. He’s probably still walking that way. Keep going and you’ll find him.

  Just keep going.

  *

  I’d neglected a few considerations in my brilliant analysis.

  The first was that Elsevier was not guaranteed to continue in a straight line. The second was that people suffering from hypothermia, as I almost certainly am, are not notably good at walking in straight lines, anyways. And the third—and probably most critical—was that it’s very, very easy to lose one’s way under white-out conditions.

  The snow is gentle at first—the kind of pretty white flakes one sees in Hollywood movies, which probably constitute a blizzard in Southern California. After a few minutes, it picks up, coming down so hard and fast that my vision loses its sharp edges and everything seems tinted with white.

  And then it picks up again.

  *

  I amble blindly forward, unable to see even two feet in front of my face. The world is white but each step is like wading through tar.

  “Elsevier!!” I howl. “Géraldine!!”

  Either could be forty kilometres away or right next to me; they don’t answer either way.

  The question “What did I do to deserve this?” rises into my mind. I do my best to fight it off. I need space for more useful thoughts. Thoughts like: Foot. In front. Of Foot.

  Keep walking!

  Foot. In Front. Of Foot. In Front. Of Foot. In Front. Of Foot. Of Foot. Of—

  I tumble onto my face.

  There are very real limits to what a human body can endure, regardless of intention. We have all, at least once or twice, fallen asleep despite vowing to stay awake. And yet, when it comes to death, we like to imagine we can tough it out, that sheer determination will be enough to power through a plummeting core temperature and an achingly empty stomach.

  But really, dying must be…just like…

  Falling asleep…

  “NO!”

  I give my head vigorous shake and bring my stinging face into the cold air. Keep moving!

  I wriggle forward on my elbows like a human worm, dragging my body behind me. In this snowfall, I can’t even hope to build a quinzhee, and so my only prayer is…

  What?

  Elsevier is gone. Even if I find him, Géraldine will never find my footprints…assuming she’s still alive. And Paul—

  The quest is over.

  The realization hits me with a dull thud. And I know it should make me feel something, but all of the feelings have gone from me. Even the cold, even the hunger. Everything, in fact, except the balance between two opposed force vectors: the drive to live and the drive to sleep.

  Live, I decide.

  LIVE!

  Forward then. Forward past the ghostly shapes of trees lost in the falling snow, toward that dark thing on the horizon, that—

  Cabin!

  I laugh out loud as I recognize it, its blocky grey silhouette unmistakable even in a blizzard. And why not? Scarcely a month ago, this unforgiving wilderness had been known as “Cottage Country”; people had come here to drink beer, have barbecues, get away from the city. Just imagine if there was even a pack of hotdogs left! Or a single bag of tea—

  I heave myself upwards, trying and failing to get purchase with benumbed feet. I’m saved! If I can just make it another…twenty? Thirty metres?

  I lean against a tree for support, my heart racing. The promise of shelter has granted me a second wind, pushing the clouds of exhaustion, however briefly, from my mind. Let me in! I think as I pull myself toward my salvation, one tree at a time. Let me in, let me be warm and safe and full! Let me sleep and know that I can still wake up in the morning!

  There’s a flight of wooden stairs running up at least twelve feet to the cabin. I fall over myself to climb them, gripping at each fresh step with claw-like fingers. Up. Up. Up, and over the deck and—

  Yes!

  The door is tight shut. I rattle the knob desperately, hoping against hope that it will be unlocked. I’m just about to smash the window when, suddenly, the door flies open and several rough pairs of hands grab me by the parka and drag me inside.

  The hard barrel of a gun is shoved underneath my jawline. “Who are you!?”

  “Ease off, Ritter, she’s human!” comes a female voice.

  “How the hell do you know!?”

  “I’m wearing the damn Kevlar; now put that thing away!”

  I’m relieved to feel the gun pulled away from my face. Presently, my eyes adjust well enough to the relative dark to discern that I’m standing in the midst of about half a dozen people; five men and a woman—soldiers, if their camouflage is anything to go by.

  One of them—a dark-haired white man with a five o’clock shadow—steps forward. “Sorry about that,” he says, extending a hand: “Captain Tim Beaton—Canadian Liberation Front.”