Route 262

~15~

We've barely seen them for more than a couple seconds when Sydney takes off running. I stand there for a second, shocked, before I take off after her. It's relatively hard: she does track.

It's still dark out in the forest, and I'm amazed she hasn't tripped yet; there seem to be trees in every direction, and she constantly seems to be about to crash into one, but she's nimble. The tracks dart this way and that, and she grips her phone flashlight following them, a bobbing light in the woods.

I'm following her as quickly as I can, but I realize after a it that I'm losing her - she's getting too far ahead. I'm about to give up, when I see her fall and slip down onto the ground, onto her side. 

She goes down so quickly, it's almost as if she disappeared. Her phone has bounced out of her hand and into the snow - I wince a little bit. When I get to her, she doesn't look like she's been hurt at all - but then she's covering her face with her hands.

"I just - I hate this," she says, taking her hands away after a moment, her eyes squeezed shut tightly.

"The woods?"

"The woods, the crash, this entire search - everything. I don't get it. I don't get how he could've done something like this."

I'm about to respond with the fact that I don't understand it either, but she keeps going.

"It's just like - we've spent all this time searching for him, and we're losing sleep, and worrying about him, and we're trying all these different things and - what's he thinking right now? What's he even worrying about? Does he even care about us half as much as we care about him? Because part of me feels like he doesn't."

And now she lets her eyes relax, and she's crying again, and I don't know what to do, because this is completely valid; I have no idea what James is thinking, what was even going through his head when he started this weird journey, but clearly it wasn't us.

"Do you want to turn back?" I ask her, a weird feeling in my stomach. "I mean - we could, you know. Try doing this again some other time when we're both more... stable."

She shrugs. "It just feels hopeless."

She takes a deep breath. "But we've also already done all this crazy shit, and we're already out here, so we're gonna do five more minutes. Five more minutes, and then I'm done. We're turning back." 

I nod. She gets to her feet, and we head off following the footprints again.

Four minutes later, we're in front of a cave.