The Soulmate Curse

Perseverance

Zhen gently lowered Finn's sleeping form onto the cave's soft ground. This wasn't ideal. The cold ground would slowly steal her warmth and she'd already gone through a bout of hypothermia. Zhen needed to get them off the ground for the night. The rain had stopped and left behind a barrage of broken branches littered all around the area outside of the cave. If she could find enough of them, they'd make for a good sleeping platform. Zhen pointed the pen light downwards. Her hands were shredded by splintering wood and slight burns. Her leg wound was pounding but the bleeding had stopped. She was also past exhausted. She made a fist, swallowed the pain and fatigue, and went outside the cave to start gathering something for a quick bough bed.

It was going to be shitty work with no real blade except for a dull edged stone and a wounded leg, but they'd probably die in the cold without proper insulation. She didn't have much time. The fire would help, but Finn was probably already losing heat to the ground faster than she was gaining it from the fire. Zhen quickly put on her wet clothes and headed out to get as much material from the fallen floor as she could. She poked edges of bent branches into the cave floor to simulate box springs, then piled a heap of softer leafed branches on top of all that.

She finished the bed by laying some of their wet clothes on it then walked over to wake Finn up and move her over to the bed. As she'd hoped, it wasn't too far from the fire and the warmth still reached them. The heat from the blaze was now bouncing off the cave walls too, making it cosy. Once Finn was settled, Zhen topped up the wood on the fire, undressed again and hang up the rest of their clothes to dry on a few branches. She took a moment to redress her wound using Finn's first aid kit. When that was done, she wrapped herself around Finn as gently as she could, immediately feeling the effects of being off the ground. She let the warmth seep through her cold, tired body before falling asleep.

Zhen heard Finn stir behind her. She had woken up early and had taken the chance to go find a few supplies, including a little bit more firewood, which she was placing on the fire. She turned to face the waking Finn.

"Hey, how are you feeling?" Zhen asked.

"Like I went head to head with a Mack truck," said Finn. She gingerly stretched out on their makeshift bed. "And the truck won."

Zhen got up and gathered Finn's dry clothes. She'd covered Finn in her own dry jacket when she woke up. Relief had flooded her when she woke to find that Finn was still warm in her arms. She lay the other dry clothes next to Finn on the bushcraft bed.

"Let me see," said Zhen.

Finn understood immediately. She lowered Zhen's jacket from her shoulders. The deep purple bruise was stark against her pale skin. It was on the left side of her torso, just under her ribs and beneath the tattoos of the moon phases wrapping around her torso, which always looked like they'd just been inked a few hours ago. It wasn't the first time Zhen wondered about how they stayed so sharply detailed. She gently brushed her callous fingers across the tattoos before going below that and touching the bruise.

"This is from the crash, isn't it?" Zhen asked. Finn nodded. "Why didn't you tell me?"

Finn tried to hold back the flinch as Zhen's fingers brushed over the bruise, but Zhen saw her jaw clench in pain.

"I didn't know," Finn said.

Zhen knew she was being honest. Finn was bleeding internally, but if the bleeding wasn't bad, it took a while for the symptoms to manifest. Still, the bruise was bad news for them. Finn was getting worse.

"How are you feeling?" asked Zhen, carefully helping her up so she could get dressed. "Really?"

"Lightheaded, dizzy," said Finn, slowly putting on her clothes. "And I don't think I can eat. My stomach feels like a washing machine."

"Maybe you can try drinking some water?" said Zhen, hoping she'd say yes. She was already so pale from whatever fluids she'd lost.

Finn shook her head. "Maybe later."

"Okay. Later," said Zhen, putting on her own jacket to shield herself from the morning chill, although the fire was still keeping the cave plenty warm.

"How's your leg?" Finn asked, joining Zhen near the fire.

"It's deep, but I'll survive," she said.

They sat next to the fire for a few minutes. On her early morning walk out of the cave to find more firewood, Zhen had found two quail eggs from a nest underneath a shrub. Finn wasn't eating, but it was still not much in terms of breakfast. The eggs were boiling in Zhen's stainless-steel bottle. She lifted the bottle from the fire using two large twigs and then fetched the two eggs through the bottle's wide mouth brim using two smaller twigs like chopsticks.

Zhen knew she'd need all the energy she could muster for the next few hours of hiking. She was going to get Finn to that village no matter what. Finn wasn't going to die. Not on her watch. Zhen would carry her if she had too. With that last thought, Zhen downed both cooled eggs and washed it down with the warm water they'd boiled in. Hydrated, warm and slightly fed, Zhen started to gather their stuff, packing their mostly dry backpacks before killing the fire.

"The village is only a few hours away," said Finn, shouldering her backpack, looking like she was ready to climb Everest and impatient to do it.

"Exactly," said Zhen, impressed with her tenacity. She smiled. "Race you there?"

Finn laughed then grimaced slightly as she grabbed her side. "I'm going to pass on that for now. Raincheck?"

"Don't think I won't remember."

"Wouldn't dream of it."

They walked for a while. Outside the cave, the world had changed after the storm. Trails were faint, littered by debris. They tried to retrace their steps to their first camp site, but they quickly got lost. Zhen fought that instantaneous stomach churning feeling from the realisation that they were lost in the wilderness with no gear and barely any resources. Not wanting to start panicking, they tried to find the ridge that they'd followed from the plane crash, but everything looked different from the day before. And their attempt to retrace their steps had taken them way deeper into the woods than they could have imagined. After about five hours of slow hiking through rough, bushy terrain, they decided to stop and reassess their situation.