“Don’t ever fucking touch me.”
“And I said—”
“I don’t care what you said!” he snarled. “If there’s someone out there looking for us, we need to signal them!” He pointed downward. “She said she heard a helicopter! Which means—”
“She said she thinks she heard a helicopter,” Boone corrected. “But up there on the roof? It could’ve been the wind.”
Shane looked unconvinced. He was still pulling on his jacket.
“Don’t go out there,” Boone warned. “It’s too dangerous.”
“Fuck off.”
“I’m serious,” Boone reiterated. “There no way a helicopter is flying through this. No way she heard what she thinks she did.”
He looked at me almost apologetically, but I brushed it off. I wasn’t sure what I’d heard, to be honest. I only knew I’d been stupid to ever step off the chimney.
“This could be our only chance at getting seen for a while,” said Shane. “Possibly ever.”
But Boone only shook his head. “We should stay here. We just got the fire going.”
“We?” Shane laughed. “WE?”
“When you get yourself into trouble out there,” said Boone, “we won’t come looking for you.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Jeremy from the other side of me. Now he was reaching for his own coat. “If he’s going out there, he’s not going alone.”
I struggled to sit up. Everything was going all wrong! None of this made any sense!
“W—Wait…”
The shivering that had overtaken my body was only intermittent now. My skin wasn’t wet anymore, and I was finally getting the feeling back in my extremities. “Hang on a minute.”
The guys looked at me again, and I was suddenly very aware of my state of undress. I was still wearing my shredded ski pants. But from the waist up, only my bra.
“You shouldn’t go out there,” I told Shane. My eyes were pleading now. “It’s not safe.”
“Nothing’s safe,” he grunted. “And if you actually heard a helicopter—”
“I don’t know if I did,” I said quickly.
“But you think it sounded like one?”
I paused for a few awkward seconds. I almost even lied.
“Yes,” I admitted.
He looked at Jeremy, who returned a crisp nod. “Then we’re going.”
They stomped off in the direction of the hole I’d just been carried through. I wanted to stop them, to call out to them, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good.
“The wind’s slowing down,” Shane sneered back at Boone. “Come check for yourself. It’s blowing half as hard as it was an hour ago, and I can see twice as far.”
“It’s just a break between fronts,” said Boone. “The real storm is rolling in behind it.”
Jeremy laughed. “Now you’re just making shit up.”
“I wish I were,” said Boone. “But I’m not. Did you catch the weather the day of the avalanche? Storms all week. A small one, followed by a—”