She woke before he did.
This was technically inaccurate, because Paul had already been awake once that morning, and what she woke before was his second sleep, not his first. Paul had taken his first sleep at three-fifteen, in the careful sequence of a man who had judged the country settled enough to allow a sleep cycle, and he had slept the ninety-minute sleep of a man whose body had been trained to sleep on demand and to wake on demand, and he had woken at four-forty-five and had fed the fire and had checked the country and had lain down again at five-oh-five and had slept again, and he was still asleep when Iris’s eyes opened at five-forty.
She did not, in the opening of her eyes, move.
She lay on the pine boughs at the back of the lean-to under the mylar with her right shoulder against Paul’s left arm and her left forearm tucked against her ribs and the low ache of the steri-strips across the wound, and she understood, in the first bright second of the opening, that she had been against Paul’s left arm for longer than she could account for.
She had not, when she had gone to sleep, been against Paul’s left arm.
She had gone to sleep on the pine boughs with about eighteen inches of clearance between her right shoulder and the edge of the lean-to.
Paul had been at the fire.
She had been against the pine boughs and the mylar.
The eighteen inches were no longer eighteen inches.
She worked out, in the careful interior way she worked things out, that she had moved across the eighteen inches at some hour of the night, or that Paul had moved across them and lain down beside her at some point after his first sleep, or that they had both moved partially across the eighteen inches in the unconscious way bodies moved on cold mountain ground toward heat, and that she was now, at five-forty on a Sunday morning on the second day of a survival, against the left arm of Paul Bert Fox-Kenner with his left shoulder six inches from her right cheek.
She did not move.
She watched him breathe.