Carl wasn’t giving an impossible assignment. He was arranging another fatal accident. Alex walked calmly toward the tree.
He pulled off one mitten and laid his bare hand against the frozen bark. He could feel the hidden vibration of the trunk in the icy wind. In his mind, a map of force vectors came together at once.
The center of gravity was badly shifted, and the lean angle was critical. If he cut it the standard way, the butt would kill him seconds after the final blow. “What are you waiting for?” Carl barked, stepping closer with the pry bar in his hand.
“Drop it, or I’ll throw you over the edge myself.” Alex slowly circled the tree. He did not make the usual face cut on the side of the fall.
Instead, he began chopping from the side. To an ordinary logger, it looked completely wrong. “What in the world are you doing?” Carl snapped, moving in close to watch the student make what looked like a stupid mistake.
“You’ll pinch the saw.” Alex said nothing. He worked methodically, like a machine, because his calculation was exact.
He was deliberately creating torsional stress inside the trunk. When only about an inch of heartwood remained, Alex threw down the ax and, with every bit of strength he had left, dove into the deep snow behind a boulder. Carl, not expecting that sudden move, stood there exposed.
The sound that followed was like a cannon shot. The twisted inner fibers of the wood snapped with a crack, but the trunk did not kick backward the way the crew boss expected. Because of the off-center cut, the tree spun hard around its axis.
The massive butt end, weighing close to a thousand pounds, whipped through the air in a brutal arc. It passed right where Alex’s head had been a second earlier and missed Carl’s face by less than two feet. The larch thundered into the ravine, dragging a sheet of snow down with it and shaking the frozen ground.
Carl stood white as the snow around him. Sharp splinters from the shattered trunk had sliced his cheek open, and dark blood now ran down across his old scar. If he had taken one more step forward, his head would have been gone.
Alex climbed slowly out of the drift, brushed himself off, and picked up his ax. He was breathing hard, his glasses fogged over, but his voice stayed level. “Centrifugal force, boss. You always have to account for the direction of displacement.”
Carl wiped the blood from his cheek. The mockery was gone from his eyes for good. In its place was rage—cold, deliberate rage, the kind an animal feels when it suddenly realizes it has been cornered.
The student hadn’t just survived. In front of everyone, he had turned his own execution into a demonstration. And that was something Carl would never forgive.
“You’re lucky, physics boy,” he said through clenched teeth. “But this forest is big, and there are a lot of trees in it. Evening is still a long way off.”
The crew went back to work in silence. But now every sound in the winter woods felt like a warning. Alex understood perfectly well.
He had already used his best card. Physics wasn’t going to hand him many more gifts like that. And the enraged crew boss would not rely on accidents again.
The next attempt would be direct. And it could come from anyone, at any moment. Even the man working right beside him.
The short winter day at the logging site faded like a candle guttering in the wind. The sun, barely visible above the ridgeline, sank into a blue-gray haze, and the temperature dropped fast. If it had been 44 below during the day, by evening it was pushing 53 below.
In physics, that might be called a critical transition point. For an exhausted man in a torn prison coat, it meant death by exposure was no longer a possibility. It was a timetable. Lunch had been brief.
A wooden sled had been dragged to the fire with metal containers full of watery cabbage stew and fish heads. It was the only fuel available to keep a little life going in starved bodies. Carl the Cannibal personally handled the ladle.
He worked it like a scepter, deciding who would live through the night and who would fold up in the snow. When Alex reached the front of the line, Carl didn’t even dip the ladle. He just looked through him and dumped the hot slop straight into the snow.
“Break the timber, lose your supper,” he said loudly enough for everyone to hear. “Safety first, physics boy. Wouldn’t want you choking in the cold.” The inmates kept quiet, gulping down their meager portions.
No one would dare share food with a man the boss had publicly marked for death. Alex stood there, looking at the steaming gray stain in the snow. His trained mind, built for equations, gave him a dry and terrible calculation.
Without calories, in that kind of heat loss, his body would burn through its glycogen reserves in three hours. On the five-mile march back through deep snow, hypoglycemic collapse would be almost certain. He would simply go down and not get back up.
And men who fell in the column were shot where they lay. No one carried dead weight. This wasn’t punishment anymore. It was murder disguised as natural selection.
Alex stepped away from the fire without a word. He didn’t beg and he didn’t ask anyone for help. He just sat down on a frozen log, closed his eyes, and began deliberately slowing his breathing…
