The frozen canal bed was a tangle of wild blackberry briars and black mud that pulled at boot heels like wet suction cups.
Every fifteen yards, the improvised pine pallet caught on exposed willow roots. Mara and Peter Stone hauled on the front rope handles, their gloved palms raw and numb, while Gideon took the rear cross-brace, his shoulders hunched against the freezing wind. On the rough slats, Ada Bell lay wrapped in three layers of blood-soaked wool, her breath whistling through the plastic chest seal with a wet, bubbling rasp that grew shallower with every hundred paces.
Luis knelt by the litter as they cleared a drainage culvert at 5:32 AM. His fingers pressed into Ada’s neck, searching for the carotid pulse beneath skin that felt like cold paraffin.
“Her pressure is bottoming out,” Luis said, his breath coming in white, ragged gasps. He looked at Mara, his eyes dark with desperate calculation. “We’re making barely a mile an hour. Candlewake is a mile and a quarter through the timber. If all seventeen of us stay together at this pace, nobody crosses the cattle guard before six-thirty.”
Mara wiped freezing sweat from her brow with the back of her sleeve. “We don’t leave her, Luis.”
