He lowered the water and his head shot up off the rock in the same swift movement. The forceful but inarticulate sound of protest he made caused her to jump. The lighter went out.
“Yes, I know. No fire,” she snapped, glaring at him. She was shivering and exhausted and scared and her patience was fraying. Normally the temperature on Attu in November never sank below thirty-two degrees, but they were well under that already, while the thermometer continued to drop. “Only, without a fire we’re probably going to freeze to death. So whatever you’re worried about is going to have to take a backseat to living through the night.”
The look he gave her was hard with suspicion. She returned it with interest. His left leg moved restlessly, sliding up and bending at the knee as though he sought to make himself more comfortable. She wondered whether he’d hurt himself with his sudden movement. He grimaced, and his head sank back against the rock, as if holding it up any longer required too much effort. He lifted the water bottle again and drank. His eyes continued to gleam at her over it, but she took his lack of verbal response as tacit acceptance that she would build her fire, so she began constructing the relevant pieces.
“The people you’re with—you know them?”
There was no mistaking the mistrust in his voice.
“They’re college professors. Academics,” she replied with a noticeable lack of patience. In a way, though, she was almost glad of the distraction he presented. The knot in her stomach as she flicked the Bic on again, then touched the lighter to the cotton and watched tiny fingers of orange flame spring to life and begin to grow, was exactly what she’d expected, but that didn’t make it any easier to bear. Instead of getting caught up in horrific memories, it was far better that she concentrate on dealing with him.
“You know them?” he persisted.
Actually, she knew Arvid and Ray and Mary Dunleavy from UCLA and Jorge Tomasini from Princeton and Andrew Clark from Wash U. They’d attended several conferences together, and she and Arvid and Ray had collaborated on a grant proposal to fund a study of oil-eating microbes that was still pending. The others she’d met when they had arrived on Attu.
“Not all of them.” Tearing handfuls of dry tundra from a patch near her knees, she quickly added that to the growing fire. “But the ones I don’t know, I know of. I know who they are, their résumés.”
“Résumés.”
The skepticism in that made her frown.
He said it as if he thought the résumés might be bogus. As if he thought she and her fellow scientists might be bogus.
As if he suspected them of something.
“Who are you?” she demanded testily. “And who on earth do you think we are?”
He didn’t answer, and as they exchanged measuring looks, dozens of horrifying possibilities for who he was chased one another through her mind. Could he be a drug smuggler? A spy? A terrorist? A fugitive? A—
Stop it, she ordered herself, and shot him a killing look. “Just so we’re clear, whatever it is that’s going on here, whatever’s up with you, I don’t care. It’s nothing to do with me, and it’s nothing to do with my colleagues or what we’re doing here. And for the record, I’m damned tired of being menaced by a man whose life I’m doing my best to save.”
“Menaced?” The rasp in his voice made her think of a rusty file scraping across metal. He’d finished with the water. The empty bottle was on the ground beside him, and his hand had disappeared back beneath the Mylar. His eyes narrowed at her. “I haven’t menaced you.”
“Whatever you want to call it. The point is, I want it to stop. Right now. Or you can start saving your own ass.” She gave him a level look and, when he didn’t reply, got on with what needed to be done. Without any more fuel than was available within the small protected area, the fire wouldn’t last long, but she hoped that it would last long enough to at least heat the rocks that she’d been scooping up as they were speaking and that were now piled around the edges of the flames. She followed that by also positioning the collapsible metal pan, in which she eventually meant to place the rocks, near the blaze. A fire in a tent was an invitation to disaster, and she personally, along with an equally abiding fear of flying, had an abiding fear of being trapped in a fire. But heated rocks were a different thing. Used properly, in an enclosed space such as a tent, they equaled a primitive furnace. And while the fire was burning, its heat could do some additional good: it made the bitter cold in its general vicinity a few degrees less bitter.