Minutes to Burn

"Yes, Samantha here. Everything all right? Cameron? Cameron?"

Just hearing a familiar voice reduced her to tears again. "Samantha."

"Yes. Are you all right? Cameron, talk to me. Tell me what's going on."

Cameron tilted back her head to prevent more tears from spilling. "It's down to me," she said. "It's just me. And it."

"Everyone's gone? Even your…Even Justin?"

"Yes," Cameron said. Samantha could do nothing to help, and they both knew it, but Cameron didn't want to let her go, because then she'd be alone floating up in a tree in the middle of a forest on this godfor-saken island. Now, she at least had a connection to the world, to another life, to another person she could hear breathing in the darkness. She pressed her forehead again to the rough bark and let it scrape against her cheek. "Are you married?" she asked.

"No. But I have kids."

Cameron was winded, as if after a long run. "You hold on to them. You hold on to everything you can as tight as you can because there's a time… " Her lower lip wavered a few times before she caught it. "Because there's a time you can't anymore."

"I will," Samantha said. "I will."

More silence. Something chirped.

"There's nothing I can say or do that will be useful, and I'm not gonna fake it," Samantha said.

Thank you, Cameron thought. Thank you for knowing and admitting.

"And things are going to get worse, probably, before we can get you out of there," Samantha continued. "But you make me one promise.

When you hit bottom, you keep going. You find that small part of your-self that's unbreakable and grip it until your fingers bleed. It may not seem worth it to keep fighting, not now, but it is and someday-in a month, in a year, in five years-you'll know that again." She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice was filled with intensity. "Don't you give up. Don't you roll over on me."

"Don't worry," Cameron said, her voice edged with a rasp. "I don't know how." Her eyes stayed shut when she blinked, and she let them.

Cameron was in another state of consciousness, though it was not sleep. A swarm of gnats circled her head, and she grew drunk on their whirring. She was trying to fight her way back to alertness, but it was like swimming through mud. Her eyelids felt leaden.

The morning light was finally filtering through the leaves. She had not gotten any true sleep. Her face was swollen, her lips parched and sore. Her contacts felt as if they were glued to her eyeballs; she was amazed she hadn't lost them.

Sorrow struck her from all sides, like a talon closing. She braced her-self against it, closing doors in her mind, containing the damage. She could count her breaths, that much she could do. If she counted her breaths, she'd know she was still alive. Pushing away from the trunk and holding it between her hands, she began to regulate her breathing, focusing on her knuckles. She lost count around 190, so she began again, lis-tening to the breaths rattling through her chest, wiping her mind as clear as a pane of glass.

She fought against the weariness, her lips still moving even as she started taking longer and longer blinks. Her head bowed, then snapped back up. She had been trying not to rest it against the trunk, but finally, she gave in. Her eyelids shut, her forehead pressed to the tree, and sleep washed over her like a salve. If she wasn't aching so much, it would have felt divine.

The rhythm of her counting continued, though the numbers were no longer there. Instead of numbers, there were knocks, even and firm, like a blacksmith's hammer. The knocking pulled her up through the layers of sleep, through grief and fear and hunger, and then she felt the tree bark against her cheek.

She opened her eyes.

The knocking continued, continued from below.

Cameron glanced down and saw the mantid halfway up the tree, pushing the hooks of her front legs into the bark, pulling herself up using her claws. Cameron's mouth opened to yell, but her vocal cords were raw, so her scream came out as a rush of air.

She popped up to a crouch on the branch, glancing around. The trees nearby were much shorter, the closest branches a good twenty feet out and below. She had only about five more steps out before the branch would give under her weight. Even with her strength, she could never make that jump.

The mantid pulled herself toward Cameron, each knock of her hooks against the bark followed by the drag of her body up the trunk. Cameron could hear her breathing, feel the air from her spiracles. About ten inches of the spear protruded from the mantid's cuticle, just above the broken eye-Justin had gotten off the shot. The eye was out, shat-tered through the middle in a run of ooze, and Cameron looked franti-cally for anything to plunge into the other. The twigs were all too small.