Those Who Wish Me Dead

14

The message came for him in the dead hours. Predawn, when the night sounds had dulled but the gray light of day hadn’t yet broken.

He knew the GPS chime was bad before he opened his eyes. Middle-of-the-night phone calls scared you with possibilities. Middle-of-the-night distress calls didn’t even tease you with possibilities; they promised you the truth.

He sat up, bumping against the plastic and showering himself with drops of the condensation that had gathered on it overnight, and fumbled in his pack for the GPS.

It told him no details. Just that Allison had issued a distress call. When the SOS went out, it was shared with Ethan’s device as well as with the emergency responders. There were two ways to call for help on the GPS-send a message with some details, or send one with none. The whole point of the advanced unit was that it let you add those details.

Allison hadn’t.

He sat there looking at the GPS and tried not to imagine the scenarios in which this could happen. His breathing was slow and steady and he was on the ground, still half wrapped in his sleeping bag, and yet it felt as if he were no longer connected to the earth, as if he were drifting away from it fast, as he stared at the glowing screen that told him his wife was calling for help.

From their home.

“No,” he told the device reasonably. “No.”

The device didn’t change its mind. The screen went black in his hand and he was alone in the darkness. Through the milky-white plastic, the night woods looked like something from another world. He pushed the plastic back and rose from his shelter and stood in the cold air and tried to think of what could be done. If he ran all out and left the boys behind, he could reach town in perhaps four hours. Perhaps.

He clicked the GPS messenger back on. Sent a one-word text.

ALLISON?

There was no response.

Her message would have gone to the International Emergency Response Coordination Center. An underground bunker in Texas, just north of Houston. Staffed every minute of every day, operating on an independent and backed-up electrical grid. Painstakingly designed never to fail a call.

He sent the next message to them.

RECEIVED DISTRESS SIGNAL. WHAT IS RESPONSE STATUS?

Above him in a beautiful night sky an unseen satellite inhaled his Montana message and exhaled it toward Texas. The satellite would check for a response in sixty seconds.

It felt like a very long time.

Scattered around him on the hillside were the other shelters. He could hear one boy rolling over and another snoring. If anyone was awake and aware of him, he was silent. Ethan stared at their shelters as if he did not recognize them or even understand their purpose. Everything in the world was foreign right now.

The chime again. He looked back down at the GPS unit.

LOCAL AUTHORITIES ADVISED AND EN ROUTE.

The closest local authority was going to come from Yellowstone. They’d pass through Silver Gate and Cooke City and reach his driveway. Fifteen minutes, at least. Maybe twenty. By the standards of those in the Texas bunker, that was swift. No ship would be lost at sea, no climber would be stranded on an icy peak. A fast response.

So very fast.

He could measure the seconds in heartbeats.

The wind rose and the plastic shelters rustled all around him and he began to stare at them again. He did not like the way he was looking at them. Did not like anything of this night or of this world. The messenger unit in his hand was silent. Heartbeat, heartbeat. Local authorities en route. Allison not answering. Heartbeat, heartbeat.

He turned his face to the wind and then he stood motionless and waited. Above him the clouds had pulled away to the northeast and the moon was bright and the stars glittered and a satellite circled amid them, looking down on his world and ready to destroy it. Catch a signal, sling it back. Break him in a single message.

The wind kept blowing and the moon kept shining. Time passed slow enough for him to become well acquainted with it. To make friends with the minutes. He urged them to hurry by, but they winked at him and lingered.

Finally, a chime. The GPS claimed that only nineteen minutes had passed. He could not agree with that assessment. All that impatience, all that desperate need, but when the device finally chimed, he no longer wanted to see the message. The waiting was suddenly not so bad.

He took his eyes off the moon with an effort and looked back at the display.

HOUSE FIRE REPORTED. FIRST RESPONDERS ARE ON SCENE. SEARCHING FOR SURVIVORS. WE WILL ADVISE IMMEDIATELY WHEN NOTIFIED. WHAT IS YOUR CONDITION?

Ethan dropped the GPS into the rocks and then, a few seconds later, fell onto his knees beside it.

Searching for survivors.

He knew already what they did not. He knew in his heart how it had come to pass and why and he knew that it all belonged to him. All belonged to one choice.

I’ll keep him safe, he had said. And he had. The boy was safe, but back at Ethan’s home they were searching for survivors.

“Which one of you is it?” Ethan said. His voice was as unfamiliar as all the rest of his world had become. The words came slowly but loudly.

There were a few shifting sounds as some boys woke. Others, deep sleepers, remained still. Ethan lifted his flashlight and clicked it on and began to pan over the shelters. He saw reflected eyes diffused through plastic, saw hands raised to block the light.

“Who is it?” he said, and this time it was a shout. “Get out here! Damn you, get out here! I need to know which one of you it is!”

Two of them obeyed. Marco and Drew, heads poking out of shelters, fear on their faces. The others stayed inside. As if the plastic could protect them. Ethan stumbled to his feet and grabbed the nearest shelter, took the plastic in his fists and tore it away, and there was Jeff, cowering, hands held up to protect himself. The posture of helpless fear.

The sight of him broke Ethan. He took a drunken man’s weaving steps backward, still holding the plastic balled in one hand, the flashlight in the other.

“Guys,” he said, his voice strangled. “Guys, I’m going to need you to get up. My wife is…there’s been some trouble at my house.”

They were all staring at him. Nobody answered. He realized for the first time that Raymond held a piece of wood in his hands like a bat.

“My house is on fire,” Ethan said stupidly. “My house is…it was burning. It burned.”

He dropped the tent he’d just ripped from over Jeff’s head. Breathed and looked at the moon and said, “Stop.” Very soft. Talked to himself now as he walked away from the boys to find the satellite messenger where he’d left it in the rocks. Whispered to himself.

“Be what you tell them to be,” he said. “You need to do that now.”

It felt like a stranger’s advice. He was detached from reality and needed to return to it fast. His whole life spent telling people how to deal with disaster, how to survive. What was the first priority? Positive mental attitude? Sure, that was the one. Okay, he could do that. She might be alive. There you go. How positive. How fucking positive.

“Get your head together,” he whispered, and his mind whispered back, Anticipation, Ethan. Preparation, Ethan. The first rules, and you ignored them. You are prepared for people to come after the boy, but you did not anticipate how they might do that.

He spoke louder then, as if he were teaching, and addressed the boys. “We need to…we need to do this right. Okay? We’re going to do this right. Bad start. Sorry about that start. But now let’s…let’s think. First things, guys, what are the first things? Respond. I need to respond.”

None of them spoke. He found the GPS and picked it up and wiped the dirt from it. What is your condition? they had asked him from the bunker in Texas. He wondered how to share that in 160 characters.

He sensed the boys were gathering behind him. Forming a tight knot. Good for them. That was the idea. They were supposed to learn to come together out here. Now he’d helped them do it. So, good for him too. Look at him go. Still teaching. His house was on fire and his wife was missing, but damn it, just look at him go.

His hand was shaking as he typed a response message.

IN MOUNTAINS ONLY ADULT WITH GROUP OF TEENS. PLEASE ADVISE THAT I AM RETURNING TO PILOT CREEK TRAIL AND SUPPORT IS REQUESTED.

He looked away, back up into the night sky, and then typed a second message.

PLEASE ADVISE ON SURVIVOR.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay, now we go.” He turned to face them. “I’m sorry. But we have to start hiking. My wife…I need to get back.”

Marco finally broke the silence. “It’s okay, man. We’ll walk fast.”

Ethan wanted to cry. He laughed instead. Maybe it was a laugh. Maybe it was a sob.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’m going to need to walk fast.”

15

Connor Reynolds was dead and Jace Wilson had risen from his grave.

The fearless boy, the bad-attitude boy, was gone and all that remained was Jace Wilson, afraid and alone, and he knew that he would not last long.

They had come for him. They had found him.

He knew that he was going to die when he woke to Ethan Serbin’s wounded shout, more of a howl than a scream, demanding to know the identity of the boy responsible for unnamed crimes. Everyone was confused except for Jace.

They had come for Jace, and they had burned Ethan’s house to the ground. Jace’s mind wasn’t on himself as they all gathered behind Ethan and began to stumble down the dark trail, headlamps bobbing and weaving. It was on Mrs. Serbin. Allison, that was her first name. Beautiful and kind and strong. A rancher’s daughter who still hired cowboys.

She was dead now. Ethan might not know that, but Jace knew. He had seen the two men in the quarry and he had heard more about them in the days following as his parents tried to find the perfect way to hide him, before they’d decided on this place in the mountains. He knew that those men did not leave any survivors. He had been determined to be the first.

Any hope of that was gone now.

The group walked maybe half a mile down the trail in silence before Jace allowed himself to consider what was waiting ahead of them. He pictured their faces and heard their voices, the strange calm they spoke with as they talked of things so violent. They were here. They’d come for him.

I wish they were dead, he thought as the first hot tear leaked from the corner of his eye. I wish they’d been with the one I saw in the water, I wish they were dead.

And they wished he was.

The reality of that was still hard for him to process. He understood it, always had-he was a witness and therefore he was a threat-but the idea of someone wanting to kill him was so bizarre that at times it didn’t seem real. They wish me dead. They honestly wish me dead.

He was beginning to cry harder now and slowed his pace so that the others would not hear him. It was hard walking here even in the daylight, and in the darkness the narrow beam of the headlamp required all of your attention, so nobody saw him fall back.

He reached up and wiped the tears away from his eyes with his right hand and watched the group pull away from him and thought of the men who would be waiting somewhere in the darkness, and then he made his decision: he needed to be alone when they found him.

He’d hated some of the boys at the start. But as he looked at them walking ahead now, he felt sad for them, felt like he needed to apologize, catch up to them and shout that this was his fault and they needed to let him go off on his own because he was the one they wanted, the only one, and once they had him, they would leave the others alone.

Ethan wouldn’t accept that, though. Jace knew that, despite the anger he’d heard in the man’s voice. He would say a lot of silly things to Jace if he heard the truth, and Ethan would believe them all. Survivor mentality, all of that. He would talk of plans and backup plans and escape routes and fail-safes, and he would think that one of these would work, somehow.

That was because Ethan had never seen them or heard them.

Jace stopped wiping at his tears and lifted his hand to his forehead and clicked off the headlamp. He thought that the vanishing beam of light might stop them, that someone might notice the darkness had grown a little deeper. Instead, they carried on along the trail as if his light had never been a part of theirs at all.

Jace sat down on the trail as the lights pulled away from him and he waited for what would come out of the darkness.

They walked down the mountain in silence except for the sounds of hard breathing as the boys fought to match Ethan’s pace. He wanted to break from them and run. Once glaciers had carved the mountain on which he stood, and he understood now how time had felt in that world.

“We good?” he said a few times. “Everybody good?”

They muttered and mumbled and continued to struggle along the trail. He knew he needed to stop and give them a break but the idea of standing still was too terrible.

If they could reach the Pilot Creek trail, there was the chance that ATVs could be brought up to help them. The trail was closed to motorized vehicles but maybe the police would make an exception. Maybe not, though. You had to protect your wilderness. Those who entered it were supposed to be aware of the risks.

They’d gone just over a mile when the GPS chimed again. The boys stopped without being told. Watched him and waited. He saw a few stepping back, probably remembering the outburst that had woken them. Fearing him. He freed the GPS from the carabiner that held it to his pack and read the message.

POLICE EN ROUTE TO PILOT CREEK TRAILHEAD. ONE SURVIVOR FOUND. MEDICAL CARE ADMINISTERED ON SCENE, AMBULANCE EN ROUTE.

Ethan said one word to the boys: “Alive.” He meant to explain it in more detail, but he could not. They seemed to understand. He typed a response.

WE ARE ALSO EN ROUTE. SURVIVOR STABLE?

He could have called her his wife. Could have called her by name. There was no need for the formal protocol, but it felt safer, as if it removed him from reality just enough to allow him to walk around the edges, aware of it but never looking it in the eye.

The message disappeared and he had to wait for an answer. He looked up at the boys, blinked at them. Headlamps glaring at him like a circle of interrogators.

“I’m sorry, guys. This is…this is the real deal. What we’re doing here. Middle of the night, walking in the dark, an emergency. A leader who is…who is struggling. You’re doing great. You’re doing great. Survivors, each and every one of you. None of the dying kind here.”

A chime.

SURVIVOR STABLE. TRANSPORTED TO BILLINGS HOSPITAL. UNDERSTAND ADDITIONAL POLICE ARE ALSO ON SCENE.

They were still confused in Houston, but at least they knew a little. Maybe more than he did. Enough to understand it was not an electrical fire or a gas leak. Now they were the ones hinting around the edges of reality. Not sure what they could tell him. It occurred to him then, for the first time, that he was next in line. An obvious thought that had simply not mattered until he knew Allison was alive. All of this violence at his home had its reason. The reason traveled with him.

“We’re going to walk down and meet the police,” he said. He was looking around at all those white beams. Counting them. Two, four, six. He blinked and counted again. Two, four, six. His own made seven.

“Everyone turn your light on, please.”

The beams turned and looked at one another. No additional light went on.

“Names,” he said. “Guys? I can’t see you all in the dark.”

Marco, Raymond, Drew, Jeff, Ty, Bryce.

“Where is Connor?” Ethan said.

Only the night wind answered, whistling through the pines.

“When was the last time anyone saw Connor?”

A beat of silence, and then Bryce said, “He was packing up right next to me, and he was walking in the back. I didn’t hear him say a word. He was right there. Right with me.”

Well, Ethan thought, that answers that.

The killers had come for Connor, and Connor was gone.

16

The dream that night was as it always was, a dance between vivid memory and something spectral and mythic. Around Hannah there was only the smoke at first, and somewhere inside it the hiss of distant hoses, like snakes, and then the smoke parted and there was the canyon that separated her from the children. In reality it hadn’t been so deep, maybe fifty feet below the ridge on which she’d been standing, but in the dream, the ridge always took on the feel of a balance beam and the canyon stretched on endlessly beneath it, a bottomless pool of black. As she crossed the ridge, the hissing of the water rose, the snakes becoming creatures that could roar, and then inside the smoke were ripples of red and orange heat, and still she walked, crossing that expanse of blackness.

When she saw the children in the dream, they were silent, and somehow that was worse. In reality they’d been screaming, they had shrieked for her help, and it had been terrible; at the time she could not have imagined anything worse. Then came the first dream, their silent eyes on her through the smoke and the flames, and that was a far more powerful pain, always. Scream for me, she wanted to tell them, scream as though you believe I will get there.

But in the dream they already knew she would not.

The dream children vanished, lost to blackness filled with hundreds of minuscule red dots, tiny embers that floated toward her on a blanket of heat. She woke at the same point she always woke-when the heat seemed to become real. It built in the back of her mind, came on and on, and then suddenly the whisper was a scream and she knew that it was too hot, that she was going to die, that the flesh was actually beginning to melt from her, peel away in long charred strips from her bones.

She gave voice to the screams that the children could not and then she was awake. The heat was gone, those blazing lead blankets whipped away, and she was aware of how cold it was in the cab of the tower. Her breath fogged as she took rapid, hysterical gasps, stumbling to her feet. She always had to move, had to run, that was the first instinct. If you could run, run.

The night it happened, she could not run. Or did not. Others had. She’d looked up the side of the mountain, saw the litter of deadfall, massive downed pines the whole way. It was breccia rock up high, loose and prone to sliding. Behind them, the fire caught a southwestern wind and howled; she would remember that sound until the day she died-it howled. Inside the flames, spectacular, horrifying things were happening-eddying colors, deep red to pale yellow, as the fire fought itself, adjusting for position, seeking fuel and oxygen, which was all that it needed for life once someone provided the spark. It had been given the spark, and then the wind gave it the oxygen and the dried-out forest gave it the fuel, and the only thing capable of stopping the monster’s growth was Hannah’s crew.

There was a choice, waiting there in the drainage, in an area they never should have approached: Break protocol and run, or hold protocol and deploy shelters. It was evident to everyone by then that the fire was gaining speed and was not going to be stopped. They all fell silent for a few seconds, recognizing what they had done, the way they’d trapped themselves, and she believed that more than a few of them also remembered the way it had happened, the way Nick had decided they would not descend into the gulch and Hannah had convinced him otherwise. There was a family down there, and they were trapped, and Hannah had believed they could be saved. Nick hadn’t. She’d won the debate, and they’d descended into the gulch, and then the wind shifted into their faces.

A quarter mile away, on the other side of a too-shallow creek, the family of campers looked at them and screamed. And Hannah screamed back, telling them to get into the water, get under the water. Knowing all the while that there wasn’t enough water to save them.

Her crew scattered then. A unit so tight they usually moved as one, but panic was a devastating thing, and it was upon them now. Nick was shouting at them to deploy fire shelters; some were shouting back that they had to run; one guy was telling them all to dump everything, every bit of gear, and sprint for the creek. Another one, Brandon, simply sat down. That was all. He just sat down and watched the fire burn toward him.

Hannah watched them make their choices and then disappear. Someone grabbed her shoulder and tried to tug her up the mountainside. She’d shaken him off, still staring at the family they’d come down here to help, this foolish family who’d camped in the basin, who’d pitched their tents inside the monster’s open fist. The screaming children seemed to be addressing her personally. Why? Because she was a woman? Because they saw something different in her eyes? Or because she was the only one dumb enough to just stand there and stare?

It had been Nick’s voice that finally registered with her. “Hannah, damn you, deploy or die! Deploy or die!”

The shouted words were nothing but surreal whispers in the midst of the fire’s roar. The heat registered next, a staggering wave of it, and she had the sense that the wind had picked up again, and she knew that was bad. She looked up the slope and saw the backs of those who’d elected to run and then Nick shouted at her again and finally he’d deployed his own fire shelter and shoved her into it. The shelter popped up like some tinfoil joke tent. The heat was all around her and oppressive then-a deep breath found nothing; the oxygen had been scalded out of the air. She crawled inside as the first tongues of flame advanced through the drainage like a scout party. The rules were simple: You got inside, you sealed yourself off, and then you waited, waited, waited. When the roar of the fire was past, that did not mean that the fire itself was. You could step out thinking you were safe and still be scorched.

She was facing southwest, into the wind, as she brought the flap of the fire shelter down around her. The last thing she saw, other than the living wall of fire marching toward her, was the boy. He was the only one left. The girl and her parents had ducked into the tent, evidently imitating the procedures of the firefighters on the other side of the creek. There was only one problem-their tent wasn’t fireproof. The family had pressed it beneath a ledge of stone, hoping to somehow duck the fire, but the boy fought off his parents and stayed outside, terrified of waiting for the flames. He wanted to run, wanted to get into the water.

She watched him splash into the creek, running just ahead of the fifteen-hundred-degree orange-and-red cascade behind him. That was the last thing she saw before Nick sealed her in. She was grateful for that. Grateful that he’d still been running. He made the creek too. Got under the water.

Boiled in it.

She didn’t know that until the board of inquiry’s investigation.

Hannah had stayed in the shelter for forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes of the most intense heat she’d ever felt, surrounded by human screams and fire roars. The blaze tried to kill her, it tried its very best, chewing tiny holes through the fireproof shelter material. She’d watched them develop, a hundred glowing dots, like a sky of bloodred stars.

They’d been trained to wait for release from the shelters by the crew boss. By Nick. She didn’t know then that the crew boss was dead.

“My God,” she said in her fire tower now, and she started to cry again. How long did a thing like that chase you? How long would memories like that keep their hands tight around your throat? When would they decide it was time to let you go?

She laid her head down on the Osborne, the copper bezel cool against her skin.

The man Jace hated most was Ethan Serbin.

Forget about the two coming after him, and his parents, who’d brought him here and promised he’d be safe, and the police, who’d agreed to the plan. The one Jace absolutely despised once his tears stopped was Ethan.

Because Ethan’s voice wouldn’t go away.

All those silly rules and mantras and instructions, falling on his ears day and night since he’d arrived in Montana, wouldn’t stop even though their source was no longer around. The lessons lingered behind like floodwaters. He wanted them gone. He was tired and he was scared and he was alone. It was quitting time.

There is no such thing as quitting time. Remember that, boys. You rest, you sleep, you pout, you cry. You’re allowed to get mad, allowed to get sad. But you’re not allowed to quit. When you feel like it, remember that you are allowed to stop, but not to quit. So give yourself that much. Stop. Just stop. And then, remember what STOP is to a survivor-sit, think, observe, plan. Spelled out for you, right there at the moment of your highest frustration, is all you need to do to start saving your life.

Jace didn’t want to do any of those things, but the problem was the waiting. He didn’t know how far off his killers were, how long he’d have to sit here before they found him.

It might be a long time.

He was doing the things he needed to without even intending to do them-he had sat; and he was of course thinking, he couldn’t avoid that, not once the tears were done; and without meaning to, when a light went on in the darkness, he found himself observing.

It grabbed his attention because it didn’t belong. There was another human presence on the mountain. Someone with electricity. Distant, but not so far away as to be unreachable. He stared in confusion, trying to comprehend how it had come to exist, and then he remembered the lunch break and the landmarks Ethan had used to help them orient themselves to their position on the map. You had to pick things that were unique, features that didn’t blend in with the rest of the scenery, and then you triangulated your position using the map and the compass. Pilot Peak was one unique point, and Amphitheater was another, but for the third, they had not used a mountain. They’d used a fire tower.

Jace observed the light and began to see possibilities he hadn’t noticed before, possibilities he hadn’t even wanted. There had seemed to be two choices-hike down with the others to the death that was waiting for him, or stay back alone in the mountains and wait for death to come to him.

The light beckoned, though. It told him there were other ways this might end.

You’ve got to observe the world you’re in to understand what parts of it may save you. At first, it may all seem hostile. The whole environment may seem like an enemy. But it isn’t. There are things hiding in it waiting to save you, and it’s your job to see them.

The fire tower was within reach. What it contained, he didn’t know. Maybe somebody with a gun. Maybe a phone or a radio, a way to call a helicopter in and get him off the mountain before anyone even knew he was missing.

Despite himself, Jace was beginning to plan.

But in his mind he saw his pursuers again, heard those detached voices, so empty and so in control, and he knew in his heart that he shouldn’t have been allowed to get away even once from men like those. They didn’t leave witnesses behind. Even the police had said that, had told it to his mother, to his father, had scared them so badly that they agreed to send their only son into the wilderness to hide. He’d escaped once and no one could escape them twice, certainly not a boy, a child.

But I made fire. I’m different now. They don’t know it, but I do.

It was a small thing, a silly thing, and he knew that, but still the memory gave him the faintest touch of strength, and he thought of the hiking he’d done and the fire tower that beckoned and he wanted to surprise them all. Not just the evil pair behind him. Surprise them all. The police, his parents, Ethan Serbin, the world.

Nobody got away from those two. But Jace already had once. He’d been lucky that time. They hadn’t been certain he was there, and the clock was ticking for them. But he hadn’t known they were coming then either. He’d been unprepared. He’d been weak.

He was prepared now, and he was stronger. There was no need to pretend to be Connor Reynolds anymore, but while Jace Wilson had once been the secret within Connor Reynolds, now it was reversed. Connor and the things he had learned in these days in the mountains were the secret within Jace Wilson.

And the two evil men coming for him weren’t prepared for that. They were expecting to find the same boy they’d left behind once, the boy who’d hid, and waited, and cried.

A boy who looked just like the one on the trail now.

“We don’t have quitting time,” Jace said aloud. These were the first words he had spoken since he’d been awakened by Ethan’s shout. His voice sounded small in the darkness, but at least it was there. It reminded him of his own existence, in a strange way. He wasn’t dead yet. His body still worked. It could speak.

And it could walk.

17

Allison could feel hands on her, and the hands hurt, but then they hurt less, and she knew that a drug had been in the mix. At first she was on the ground, and then they moved her with care, guiding her out of the wreckage that had once been her home. She heard them complimenting her on her hiding place. She’d done a good job with that, it seemed. Common sense, she thought. She’d just wanted to get to water. In the end she hadn’t even turned it on, hadn’t been able to, but the shower floor was a good place to curl up. She was low for the smoke, and the tile in the room was unappetizing to the flames. They had moved on in search of fuels more to their liking and then they had been interrupted before they had a chance to return to her.

That perfect bathroom, the granite-tiled room and its porcelain tub with a mountain view, the finishing touch of their golden home together, had saved her. She hadn’t gotten any water, but there was plenty in there now-a hose jetted streams of it through the shattered window, steam rising in angry response.

Out in the yard, the paramedics worked on her some more, and no one was asking questions yet, they were just trying to fix her. The questions were coming, though. She knew that and she knew that she had to give the right answers.

When they brought the backboard out, she was terrified. It was something you didn’t belong on unless you were hurt very bad, or dying. She tried to pull away from it and she told them that she could stand and they held her down and told her that she could not.

“Tango’s been standing for three months,” she told them. The logic seemed sound to her, but it didn’t alter their decision. She was lifted and lowered onto the backboard and then they were carrying her out through a dizzying whirl of colored lights and toward an ambulance. One of the paramedics was asking her how the pain was, and she started to tell them that it was bad, but then stopped. No more drugs. Not yet.

“Need to talk to my husband,” she said. Speaking allowed long needles of pain to enter her face through her lips and slide all the way up into her brain.

“We’ll find your husband. He’ll be here soon. Just rest.”

Most of her wanted to accept that. It would be good to see Ethan, and she wanted to rest, she wanted to do the things they kept instructing her to do-rest, relax, be still. That all sounded excellent. It was a little too soon for it, though.

“He has a GPS messenger,” she said; she was in the back of the ambulance now, though the ambulance wasn’t moving, and the paramedics seemed to be working hard to ignore her, but thank God there was a police officer present, one she knew, one Ethan had worked with on rescues before. His name was well known to her but she couldn’t think of it. That was embarrassing, but she hoped he would understand. She gave up on finding his name and settled for direct eye contact instead.

“Please,” she said. “I need to get him a message. You know how. The GPS can-”

“I’ll get him the message, Allison. You just tell me what to say. I’ll get it to him.”

He kept looking away. She wondered what he saw. What she looked like to his eyes.

“You t-tell him…” Now she stuttered, because it was critical to get the wording right. That was imperative. To find a way to make Ethan understand without allowing the rest of the world to understand. A secret code. Husband-and-wife. Why hadn’t they ever developed a code? It seemed like something they should have done. Buy groceries, do laundry, create code.

“You need to get this right,” she told the police officer. “Just as I say.”

He seemed concerned now, but he nodded. One of the paramedics was asking him to step back, trying to close the door, but he held up a hand and told them to wait.

“You tell him that Allison says she is fine, but that JB’s friends are coming to see him.”

“We’ll tell him you’re fine. He’ll be here soon. You’ll see him very-”

“No.” She tried to shout and the pain that brought on was excruciating, but she tunneled through it. “You need to say it right. Tell me how you will say it.”

They were all staring at her now, even the paramedics. The officer whose name she could not remember said, “Allison is fine but JB’s friends are coming to see him.”

“Two. Say two of JB’s friends.” It was important to be detailed. She knew that. The more details he had, the more prepared he would be.

The officer said that he would. He was receding from her but she couldn’t feel the ambulance moving and the door was still open. That was fascinating. How was that happening? Oh, he was stepping back. Funny how fast the drugs worked. Very disorienting. Very good drugs. She told the paramedics that. She thought they would like to know how good these things were. They were busy, though; they always seemed to be busy.

The door closed and the ambulance shifted beneath her and then they really were moving, bumping down the driveway. She could see the men with the pale blue eyes again and she could see her husband’s face and she wished that she’d been able to send the message herself. The officer had better get it right. There were two of them, and they were evil. Maybe she should have used that word in the message. Maybe she should have been clearer. She had said that two friends were coming, but that was so far from the truth.

Evil was coming.

This time the dream was different, gentler in its layers but more evil in its content. This time the boy was coming for Hannah. He was walking right toward her, wearing a headlamp, marching to her tower, and she was terrified of him and whatever message he carried.

You’ve lost your mind, she thought, staring out the window as the boy with the lamp reached the base of the tower steps and began to come up them, the steel rattling against his feet.

He couldn’t be real. A boy just like the one who haunted her, walking out of the night woods, out of the mountains, all alone and bound for her as if he’d been marching toward her all this time?

The terrible thing stopped after ten steps, though. Held tightly to the rail, looked up at her tower and then back down. Came up another few steps in a rush, moving awkwardly with the weight of an outsize pack on his back, then stopped again and put both hands on the step in front of him. Holding on to it as if for balance.

Hannah was still developing her theory of ghosts and she didn’t understand much about them, but one thing she was sure of: they weren’t afraid of heights.

She rose from the bunk and walked to the door, and down below the boy began his surreal ascent from the blackness again, the white beam of light guiding him toward her. She opened the door, stepped out into the night, and shouted, “Stop!”

He nearly fell off the tower. Stumbled into the rail, gave a little cry, and slipped sideways; the pack caught him and kept him from sliding down the steps.

Ghosts were not scared of the living. Nightmares didn’t tremble at the sound of your voice.

“Are you okay?” she called.

He didn’t answer, and she started down the steps. He watched her come, the headlamp shining directly into her eyes.

“Please turn that light off.”

He reached up and fumbled with it and clicked something and then the light shifted from harsh white to an eerie crimson glow. A setting designed to protect your night vision. She walked down until she could see him.

He bore no resemblance to the boy from her memories. He was older and taller, with dark hair instead of blond. His face was covered with dirt and scratches and sweat, and he was breathing hard. He’d been walking for a while.

“Where did you come from?”

“I’m…I got lost. Heading back to camp.”

“You’re camping?”

He nodded. She was close enough now to see that there were streaks on his face where tears had cleared the dirt.

“You’re with your parents?”

“No. I mean…not anymore. Not now.”

It was a strange answer, and his eyes made it even stranger. Flicking around like there were options all about and he needed to find the right one. For a yes-or-no answer? Hannah looked at him and tried to see what she was missing. There was something. He was dressed for camping, yes, and he had the pack and the headlamp, all the proper equipment, but…

The pack. Why was he still wearing it if he’d gotten lost on his way back to camp?

“How long ago did you wander off?”

“I don’t know. Couple hours.”

That put him strapping a full pack on after midnight. A pretty serious bathroom run.

“What’s your name?” she said.

Again the flicker of the eyes. “Connor.”

“Your parents are out there somewhere, but you don’t know how to find your way back?”

“Yeah. I need to get in touch with them.”

“I’d say so.”

“You have a phone up there?” he asked.

“A radio. We’ll call for help. Come on up. We’ll get it straightened out.”

He got to his feet slowly. Holding to the railing as if he fully expected the stairs to collapse beneath him and leave him dangling from it. She turned and led the way up to the cab. The moon was descending, and in the eastern sky there were the first perceptible lightening shades of dawn. She’d been awake until well past midnight listening to the reports from the fire line. They’d failed to contain the flames before dark and had called for a second hotshot crew to help. In the morning, she expected there would be discussion of a helitack unit. For a brief time, there had been added excitement when reports of a second flare-up a few miles away came in, but that turned out to be a house fire, quickly extinguished. Now it was just the one blaze out there in the night. The wind that had picked up at dusk had blown steadily all through the night and showed no sign of wanting to lie down in front of the oncoming day.

Poor kid, she thought. Whatever he wasn’t telling her-and there was something-he needed to get the hell out of these mountains and back to his family. She wondered if he had run away from them. That would explain the full pack and the hesitant answers. It was none of her business. All she had to do was make sure he got to safety. A more active role than she’d expected to have this summer.

She reached the top of the cab and turned on the overhead lights and waited while he made his way up. She’d been going slow but he still had fallen well behind. Even when the lights went on in the cab, he didn’t look up from his boots. Step, step, pause. Step, step, pause. Never glancing up or to the sides.

“Here we are,” she said. “My little kingdom. Where did you come from? Do you know the name of the campsite, or a landmark? I’ll need to offer instructions to find your family.”

Again, that strange expression overtook him. As if he didn’t have an answer ready and needed time to consider before offering one. It wasn’t a deceptive look, just uncertain.

“Who do you call on the radio?” he said.

“People who can help.”

“Right. But…who, exactly? Police?”

“Are you worried about the police?”

“No,” the boy said.

“Do you need the police?”

“It’s just…I’m curious. I need to know, that’s all.”

“What do you need to know?”

“Who exactly answers the radio?”

“Dispatch for firefighters. But from there, they’ll call whoever you need.”

He frowned. “Firefighters.”

“Yes.”

“Who can hear what they say?”

“Pardon?”

“Is it just…is it two-way communication?”

“Two-way communication?” she echoed. “I’m not sure that I follow.”

“Can other people hear what you say? Like, is it just you and another person, the way it would be on a phone? Or can other people listen? On other radios?”

“Hon,” she said, “you need to tell me what the real problem is here. Okay?”

He didn’t answer.

“Where did you really come from?” she said.

He let his eyes drift away from hers. They settled on the Osborne. He wandered over to it and stared at the map, silent, then leaned down, investigating it.

Autistic, maybe, she thought. Or-what’s that other condition? When a kid is really smart but you ask him a normal question and he ignores it? Whatever that condition is, this kid has it.

“If you don’t remember, that’s okay. I’ll just need to explain what-”

“I’d say we were right…there.” He had his index finger on the topographic map. She was too intrigued by him now to just repeat the question, so instead she went to his side and looked at where he was pointing.

“That’s nine thousand feet there,” he said. “And we were one ridge down, in this area that flattened out, and we had the slope at our back. You can see that? The way the line bends, it shows you that there’s a flat area there. It’s not as steep as what’s around it, you see?”

He looked up at her, curious to know if she understood.

“Yeah,” she said. “I can see it.”

“Well, that’s where we were camped. We’re working on orienteering, and I saw the smoke and figured out where we were…and then…then, later, when you put the light on, I saw this place. That was probably an hour ago? You’d be surprised how well the light carries, with this thing being so tall. But once I saw it, I remembered what it was. Or what it probably was. When you turned it off, I got kind of worried that I’d imagined it. I mean, it got so dark so fast, it was like it was never there. But I had the angle right, I mean the bearing, it’s called a bearing, and so I just…I just kept walking.”

He was beginning to ramble now, and his hands had started to shake. For the first time, he looked troubled. More than troubled. He looked terrified.

“Walking away from what?” Hannah said. “What has you so scared?”

“I don’t know. Listen, I need you to do me a favor.”

Here we go, she thought. Here’s where it gets interesting.

“Call for help,” she said. “Yeah, I’m on it.”

“No. No, please don’t do that. If you could just…give me a little while to think.”

“To think?”

“I just need to…need to stop. Just for a few minutes, okay? I need to just…figure some things out. But I’ve got to think.”

“We need to get you out of here to someone who can help you. Let’s do that, and then you can think. You shouldn’t be up here. I can’t just let you stay up here.”

“Then I’ll leave. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come here. It seemed like the right thing but now…I’m afraid I made a mistake. I’m going to leave.”

“Don’t.”

“I should. Forget about it. Just forget I was here. There’s no need to make a big scene out of it, calling the police or whatever. I don’t think that would be good.”

His voice was shaking.

She said, “Connor? It’s my job to let people know what’s happening up here. If I don’t report this, I could get fired.”

“Please,” he said. He seemed on the verge of tears, and she didn’t understand a bit of it, knew only that she needed to get somebody up here to deal with him. An underage kid wandering the backcountry alone at night? That was something you called in immediately.

“Let’s all think on it,” she said. “I’m just going to let my bosses know you’re here. That way, if they have a good idea, they can share it, and if your parents have gotten ahold of people already, if they’re looking for you, then everyone can relax.” She moved toward the radio. “Think about how scared they’re going to be. This could do a lot to make them feel better.”

“Please,” he said again, but she wasn’t going to listen, and she kept her back to him as she reached for the mike.

“I’ll just report your position, that’s all. You don’t need to worry.” She keyed the mike but got only as far as “This is Lynx Lookout” before he smashed the hatchet down on the desk, severing the cord between the microphone and the radio.

She screamed and whirled away, tripping on the chair and falling to her hands and knees. Turned back and stared at him as he took more careful smashes with the hatchet she kept near the woodpile for splitting kindling. He was using the back of it now, trying to crush the front of the radio. And having success. He was sobbing while he did it.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Really, I am. But I don’t know if we can do that. I don’t know if that’s a good idea. If they already made it this far, then somebody is listening. Somebody is telling them things that were supposed to be secret.”

18

The smoke that Connor had located correctly on the map was still visible above the mountains when Ethan reached the Pilot Creek trailhead with six exhausted boys in tow and one missing in the wilderness behind them. It had been a forest fire, just as he’d feared. It seemed to be growing. He stared at it with detachment, this thing that once would have occupied so much of his attention, and then he turned to look back at those who were waiting for them.

Three police cars-two SUVs and one pickup truck from the park. Six people in uniform milling around. One for every boy Ethan had brought back out of the mountains.

He’d had some time to think about it, several hours of walking down through the darkness while behind him Connor walked in the opposite direction. If he walked at all.

In a different situation, Ethan would have cared deeply about that. He wondered what was more selfish, putting the anonymous boy ahead of Allison, or Allison ahead of the boy. There was the responsibility to a child in need, and then there was the responsibility to your wife. Picking one over the other was never the noble choice, not that he could see. So you tried to care for them all, but in the end you couldn’t do that. You made choices.

He had made the wrong choice.

Only you can handle this, Jamie had suggested, and his answer had been Of course, you are right.

The boys fell gasping onto the ground, some of them not even unfastening their packs first. He looked at them and felt the weight of failure, a weight he had not known before.

He knew several of the officers on scene. While most tended to the boys, passing out water bottles and asking questions, a police sergeant named Roy Futvoye took Ethan aside. They sat beneath the open tailgate of his Suburban and Roy told him that the house was destroyed and Allison was in the hospital in Billings.

“She said there were two of them. She seemed…a little vague with what they were after.”

Yes, she would have. Secrecy, Ethan had said. Trust no one, Ethan had said. I’ll keep him safe, Ethan had said.

“What did they do to her?” His voice was low and he couldn’t look Roy in the eye.

“Far less than they might have. If she hadn’t started that fire, who knows.”

Ethan looked up. “Allison started the fire?”

Roy nodded. “Used a can of bear spray on the woodstove. It ran them off, but…but she paid a price too. She’s got some burns. And one of those guys”-now it was Roy who didn’t meet Ethan’s eyes-“one of them busted up her mouth pretty well.”

“Did he, though,” Ethan said. His own mouth went dry.

“She’s okay,” Roy said. “She’ll be all right. But I need to talk to you. If there’s a reason these men are here-”

“There’s always a reason,” Ethan said. His mind was already gone from the conversation. He was back at the cabin, envisioning a man busting up her mouth pretty well.

“Serbin? I’m going to need you to focus for me here. If you’ve got any information on these men, I need it. The sheriff is dead and it might be connected. The action I take is-”

“Claude is dead?”

“You see that smoke?”

“Yeah.”

“That fire’s still going, and Claude was at the start of it. We found his body up there. He’d been timbering. Now, you know Claude. And I know Claude. You tell me-does he start a fire in the middle of the afternoon while he’s felling trees?”

“Unlikely.”

Any job that arrives with a blizzard, he’d said to Jamie Bennett that night. And laughed.

He turned and stared at the faces of the fatigued, confused boys who knew nothing. Marco was watching him with concern. Marco, who’d be going back to his shitstorm of a home life now. All of them would be.

“She’s safe,” Ethan said to Roy. “She’s okay. Hurt, but okay.”

“That’s right. You can see her. She’s had better days, to be sure, but you’re not going to lose her, Ethan. You didn’t, and you won’t.”

He nodded. Still looking around him. Taking in the faces, the questioning stares, the hard smoking mountains beyond.

“I’ll come back to find the boy,” he told Roy.

“The boy?”

And so Ethan told him what he’d hoped he’d never have to say in his life: he’d lost a child on the mountain.

“We’ll get him, Ethan. Don’t worry about that.”

“I’ve made a promise,” he said. “Made a lot of them. I’ll see to his safety. Whether you find him first or not, you don’t do a thing before you check with me, understand? Not a thing.”

Roy tilted his head and glanced away. “You got anything I should know about this kid?”

Ethan said, “I need to head to the hospital now. I need to see her. But I’ll be back.” He repeated it again, louder, and this time he was looking at the boys. “I’ll be back, guys.”

They all looked at him, and some of them nodded, while others already seemed to accept what he didn’t-he would never see them again.

The Blackwell brothers watched through rifle scopes as the group emerged at the trailhead, watched with fingers on triggers. They were in the woods opposite the road, a higher elevation, a fine vantage point. It had not been hard to find the boys. The police activity ensured that.

“If you take the shot,” Jack Blackwell said, “you better make sure it’s good.”

“I’m aware of the stakes.”

“I’m reminding us both. One clean shot, and then it’s all about speed. We better move fast when it’s done.”

“We will.”

“They don’t know who he is yet,” Jack said. The left side of his face was badly burned. High red blisters forming.

“You don’t think?”

“Not much interest being shown in the boys. More in Serbin. And these are all local police. I don’t see a fed of any sort, do you?”

“No.”

“So then they do not know the value of young Jace.”

Together, lying prone in sniper stances with twenty feet separating them, they watched the boys take shape. Adjusted scopes for clearer looks at faces. Six boys. Six fatigued faces.

“I don’t see him.”

“Neither do I.”

“They’re acting as if that’s all. Nobody else coming.”

“They moved him already, then. Got a step ahead.”

“No. Too fast for that.”

“Then he was never here to begin with.”

“You heard the Serbin woman. She knew why we were here.”

They watched for a long time. Two uniformed police and a man in an orange vest and camouflage distributed radios, checked them, and then walked away from the boys and up to the trailhead. Disappeared into the woods.

“What are they going back for?” Patrick said.

“I’m wondering the same thing.” Jack looked away from the scope and met his brother’s eyes. “Interesting.”

“Indeed. One missing, you think? Young Jace is very smart. Very resourceful.”

“And maybe very alone in the woods.”

“Maybe.”

“If they find him first, it’s trouble.”

“We find him first, it’s easy.”

“That is what we were promised from the beginning. So far, nothing has been easy.”

“So it goes with some quests, brother. We must earn our reward today.”

“How I treasure your bits of wisdom. Let me never say otherwise.”

“I appreciate that.”

“Serbin’s leaving.”

Jack turned back to the scope. One of the police SUVs was pulling away. Serbin riding out. The six boys and the rest of the police remained behind.

“She’s alive,” his brother said. “I told you.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do. You watched him. You think that was the reaction of a man whose wife was dead? Pretty calm. And in a pretty big hurry now. Going to see her.”

“We need the kid.”

“Need them both now.”

Jack sighed and lowered the rifle. “I suppose it’s good that there’s two of us.”

“It always has been. Who do you want?”

“If she’s alive, she’s in a hospital. Figure I’ll blend in pretty well in an ER right now, don’t you think?”

“So I’m into the woods, then.”

“You’re better at that than me.”

“Yes.”

“And I won’t be long.”

“We’ll see. It’s been longer than I wanted already.”

“Sometimes that’s the way of the world, brother. I prefer speed as much as you do. I just understand patience a bit more.”

“The men who went in after the boy know more than we do about his location.”

“I’d imagine.”

“So I follow. And if I see him, I take the shot.”

“If you see him, you make the shot. Taking it isn’t worth much.”

“Have you seen me miss?”

“No.”

“There you go, then. How do you intend to get me back out of the mountains?”

Jack Blackwell’s only response was a smile.

19

He wanted to cry again but didn’t have the tears left, or maybe the energy. The woman was scared of him, and he felt bad about that, but he wasn’t doing anything scary anymore. He didn’t even have the hatchet; it was right there on the floor.

“Pick it up,” he said.

“What?”

He waved at the hatchet. “Go ahead and take it. Use it on me if you want.”

“I’m not going to use a hatchet on you,” the woman said. “And you’re not going to use it on me. Are you?”

Jace shook his head.

“Then put it back where it belongs,” she said.

He was surprised that she was encouraging him to touch it again. When he looked up, she seemed firm about it, though. Her arms were crossed over her chest in a protective fashion but she wasn’t trying to run.

“Put it back, Connor,” she said.

That tone of voice sounded so much like his mother’s. His mother wasn’t a yelling type. She was used to being in charge-in her job she had to be calm and in charge, she told him that all the time, calm and in charge, calm and in charge. So when she got mad at him, she kept up the same attitude. Just like this woman now. She didn’t look very much like his mother, though. She was shorter and younger and thinner. Too thin. Like she had an eating disorder.

“Connor,” she said again, and this time he listened. He picked up the hatchet by its handle and returned it to the woodpile. She never moved, never even tensed up. When he’d set it down, she said, “Let’s talk. Hon? We need to be honest with each other. It’s just the two of us now. You made damn sure of that.”

“I had to,” he said. “I know you don’t believe that, but it’s true.”

“Tell me why.”

He didn’t say anything.

“It’s the least you can do,” she said. “You walked in here and destroyed my radio, and I’m in serious trouble now, do you understand that? There’s a fire burning out there, and people are counting on me to help, and I can’t.”

“It was for you,” he said. “Not just me. It’s to keep you safe.”

“Tell me why,” she repeated.

He was exhausted, physically and mentally, but he knew he couldn’t tell her. They’d hammered that into his brain long before he arrived in Montana. No one can know…

But what was the point of keeping it a secret now? The men from the quarry were already here. Telling someone the truth wasn’t going to make it any worse.

“Hon,” she said, “this isn’t fair to me. I can see that you’re scared, and I believe that there’s a reason. I know there must be a reason. But if somebody is going to hurt you or something, and you’re with me, then I deserve to know. Don’t you see that?”

“You have no idea,” he blurted.

“Go on.”

“I can’t.”

“You have to. Damn it, I deserve to know what’s out there!” She waved her hand at the world around them, which was just beginning to brighten. It probably looked darker down on the ground, but when you were up here in the tower, reaching into the sky, the light came early.

“They’re coming to kill me,” he said.

She stared at him. Started to say something and then stopped, took a breath, and finally said, “Who?”

“I don’t know their names. But there are two of them. They’ve come a long way.”

He could see that she was trying to decide whether to believe him. Wondering if he was some sort of crazy kid who’d imagined a wild story. Why wouldn’t she think that? The truth was harder to believe.

“You think I’m making it up.”

“No,” she said, and maybe she wasn’t lying. “Who’s coming? And why? Tell me why.”

“I can’t.”

“If I’m in danger because you’re here, I at least need to understand it.”

She was right, and he felt bad refusing to tell her the truth. If they were close-and he knew they were, they had to be-then she was in danger too. It wasn’t just him.

“I think they killed his wife,” he whispered. “Or hurt her really bad. Burned his house down, all because of me.”

“Hang on,” the woman said. “Hang on. A house fire? I heard a house-fire call earlier tonight. You were there?”

For the first time, it was clear that she was absolutely willing to believe him. Or at least to listen. The fire had convinced her. Fire had that kind of power.

“I wasn’t there,” he said. “But…I’m not supposed to tell anybody anything. I’m not supposed to trust anyone. They made me promise that.”

“Connor, you can trust me. And I need to know.”

He looked away and said, “I saw a murder. They brought me up here to hide me. I guess they didn’t do a very good job.”

She looked at the door and for a minute he thought she was going to walk out of it, just leave him here and not look back. He wouldn’t have blamed her. Instead, she took a deep breath and said, “Where did you see a murder?”

“Indiana. I’m supposed to be a witness. People thought I was safe here, but…but I think they found me.”

“Who are they? Not their names, but…”

She didn’t know how to phrase the question, but he knew how to answer it.

“They’re evil,” he said. “That’s all they are. They were dressed like police, but the people they killed were police. They kill people for money, and it doesn’t even…it doesn’t even stress them out. I watched them do it. They were relaxed the whole time. People don’t matter to them.”

He told her all of it. All the important stuff. The plan his parents had agreed to, the way he was supposed to pretend to be a bad kid, the way he was supposed to fit in with the group and hide in the wilderness and there would be no cell phones to trace or cameras to spot him; he would be off the grid, that was the whole point. He told her about Ethan and the way he’d woken them all in the night and how they’d been walking back down the Pilot Creek trail when he turned off his headlamp and let them go on. When he was finished, he added, “I’m sorry it had to be you.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry you had to be here. I don’t want anyone getting hurt because of me.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “Nobody will get hurt. We’ll figure it out.”

It seemed like she was trying to convince herself, not him, and that was fine, because Jace didn’t believe it.

“We can see them coming,” she said. “If they’re really out there, and they head up here, we can see them coming for a long ways.”

He looked at the windows and nodded. “I guess we’ll know when they get here, at least.”

“You’re sure they’re coming?” she said.

“I’m sure.”

“How long did it take you to get here?”

“A little more than an hour.”

“So they could be here any minute.”

“I don’t know. They weren’t with us. If they were, I’d be dead by now.”

“I think we should leave,” she said. “If we can get back to the road, then we can-”

“It’s a long walk to the road.”

“Yes, it is. Seven miles. But we can do it. We’ll be fine.”

“You can stay here,” Jace told her. “I’ll run for it. You don’t need to try to make it with me. Or I can stay and you can run.”

She said, “Let’s stick together. Whatever we decide, let’s both do the same thing.”

He nodded. He didn’t want to see her get hurt because of him, but he didn’t want to be alone either. “What’s your name?” he said.

“Hannah. Hannah Faber.”

“I’m sorry, Hannah. I really am. But they’re very good. They found me even when I was off the grid. If you had said anything on the radio, I know they would have been here. They would have heard it, somehow. They hear it all.”

“Well,” she said, bending to pick up a broken fragment of the face of the radio, “that doesn’t seem to be a problem anymore, does it?”

“No.”

“Okay. You’ve taken care of one problem. But now we need to figure out how to take care of the rest. Any ideas?”

He was silent for a minute, and then he said, “I had an escape route.”

“Pardon?”

“We all did. Ethan makes us plot one before we set out. This time it was going into Cooke City. But not using the trail. If we’re going to leave, we probably shouldn’t use the trail. That’s what they’ll take to find me.”

“Fantastic,” Hannah Faber told him. “Just you and me and the wilderness? No, let’s wait here. Nobody knows where you are. You’ve seen to that, thanks to your work on the radio. But eventually, they’re going to notice that I’m off the air. And when they do, they’ll send help.”

“So we just wait?”

“Right. We wait it out where we can see people coming a long time before they get here. That’s the best thing about this place.” She was pacing and nodding to herself the way you did when you were trying to talk yourself into being brave. Jace recognized the behavior. He’d done it on the quarry ledges.

“We can just wait here, like it’s a fortress,” she said. “It’ll be like the Alamo.”

“Everybody died at the Alamo,” Jace said.

She stood with her back to the window and looked at him as the world of shadows gave way to daylight behind her.

“Probably because they had no damn radio,” she said.

20

Allison’s face was all but hidden from him. Bandages covered the skin he’d touched with his lips countless times. Only her closed eyes were visible, and her mouth, dark with swelling and laced with black stitches. Hand and forearm wrapped in heavy gauze. Ethan touched her unbandaged hand and said her name, soft as a prayer. Her eyes opened and found his.

“Baby,” she said. The word came clumsily from her broken mouth.

“I’m here.”

“I did the best I could,” she said. “Maybe not so good. But the best I could.”

What was left of her hair had been cut down to jagged clumps by the nurses. The rest had burned away. He used to run his hands through it before she slept, or when she was sick, or anytime a comforting gesture seemed in order. One was in order now but he knew better than to touch.

“You did amazing,” he said, and his words came out clumsily too. That was no good. One of them should be able to speak. “I’m so sorry. It’s on me. They came because of-”

“No,” she said. “They came because of her.”

“I made a mistake. Should never have agreed to it.”

“She made the mistake. You were just part of it.”

He wasn’t ready to blame Jamie Bennett just yet. He couldn’t say that he was ready to forgive her either. She rushes, and she makes mistakes, Allison had said. Not wrong, that assessment. Not wrong at all. The one hundred percent guarantee that the men would not get to her witness, her promise that if they even moved toward Montana, she’d know about it? So much for that. Ethan hadn’t heard a word. He wondered for the first time if she was still alive.

“Do the police know about her?” he asked.

“Not yet. I was…struggling. Thoughts not clear. Everything was on fire.”

“I know.”

“What about Tango? I was thinking…” She started to cry then, tears leaking down only to be absorbed immediately by the bandages. “I was thinking that Tango couldn’t even try to run. The way we’ve got him standing, he couldn’t even try to-”

“The horse is fine.”

“You’re sure?”

He nodded.

“The house?”

He didn’t answer. Just held her hand and looked into her eyes. He hadn’t seen it yet, but he’d been told. The Ritz was destroyed. Their promised land, built together, their little triumph in the world, reduced to cold ashes and dripping water.

“Why’d she have to pick you?” Allison said.

“Don’t blame her. Blame me. She asked; she didn’t order. I should have said no. I should have done a lot of things different. But I’ll make right what I can, Allison. I’ll get the boy and-”

“Wait. Wait. What do you mean, you’ll get him? Where is he?”

Smart woman, his wife. Beat her, burn her, sedate her. Then slip up and hope she didn’t catch it. Good luck with that.

“He’s missing,” he said. He made himself continue to look into her eyes when he said that. It wasn’t easy.

“What?”

“Ran off in the night. When we were hiking down.”

“Which one was he?”

“Connor. I suppose I could be wrong. But I doubt it. The boys knew that…that someone had arrived, and trouble was here, and he was the one who ran.”

She looked away from him and down to the heavy wrapping around her wounded hand. All for nothing, she was surely thinking. All she’d gone through, and still the boy was gone. Ethan had promised to protect them both and had failed to protect either.

“Where do you think he went?”

To hide, Ethan thought, to run and hide because he was afraid of not only them, but me. He has no friends left in this world, or at least that is how he feels now. But he said, “Maybe the escape route. He seemed to pay a lot of attention to those. He was the best one with the maps. With land navigation. Maybe the best with everything. So when he left us on the trail, he might have doubled back and tried to come down the other side of Republic.”

And into the fire, he thought. He had no idea how much of it had burned. Maybe they’d gotten it under control by now. But with the way the wind was blowing…he had his doubts.

“What do they look like?” he said. “The men who came for him?”

“There are two of them.” She was speaking with an effort, and her words slurred. Lips pulling on the stitches. “Pale. Light hair. They speak strangely…not accents, just the way they say things. Like they’re alone in the world. Like it was built for the two of them and they’re lords over it. You’ll know what I mean if you ever hear them talking to each other.” She started to cry harder. “I hope you don’t hear them.”

“I won’t,” Ethan said. He was making himself watch her stitched lips move. Somebody busted up her mouth pretty well. Yes, somebody had. The hand he didn’t have on hers was opening and closing beside his leg, each fist tighter than the last.

“They don’t like to let you see them both at the same time,” she said. Her eyes were closed now. “It’s hard. They’re very dangerous. They smell like blood.”

He wondered about the drugs now, wondered if she even knew what she was saying. He wiped a hand over his mouth. Looked back at the closed door. When he spoke again, his voice was soft. He meant to tell her that he would ensure that a good group was handling it. He meant to tell her that he’d never leave her bedside. Not until they left together. Lord, how he meant to tell her those things.

“I’m going back to find him,” he said.

“No. No, E.”

She lifted her head off the pillow and stared at him. Thin plastic tubes dangling from one arm.

“Relax,” he said. “Please. Lie back down and-”

“Don’t leave me.”

“I won’t just yet. I’m right here. But he’s missing, Allison, and-”

“I don’t care!”

He was silent as she cried and then she said, “You know I don’t mean that.”

“I know. But Allison…we can’t let it all be for nothing. Can’t let them pass through you and get what they came for. I can’t allow that. We can’t.”

“No. Stay. I’ll be selfish now. I’m allowed to be selfish now, don’t you think?”

“It’s not selfish.” There was no choice to be made. She’d asked him to stay. “I’ll be right here. I promise.”

“Thank you. I love you.”

“I love you so much. And I’ll be right here.”

He held her hand until she slept, and then he shifted and held his own head in his hands. She was right. There was nothing left for him to do. Someone else would find the boy. Someone who could help him. Ethan wasn’t needed.

He got to his feet, watching her to be certain that she was asleep and would not hear him go, and then he let himself out of the room and went down the hallway and asked for a phone. He made two calls. The first was to Roy Futvoye. Ethan asked if the police had found the boy yet. They had not. He hung up and called the number Jamie Bennett had given him for just such a situation. Straight to voice mail. That was the design. Messages only.

For a moment he was speechless. How did you go about explaining all of this? Finally he said, “They’re here.” He thought that would be enough, almost. Let her figure out the rest. But he added, “The boy is gone. He’s missing. I’m in the hospital in Billings with my life…I, I mean my wife. Everything is gone to hell.” He stuttered to a stop then, thought about saying more, offering explanations (excuses?), but didn’t. Hung up the phone.

He went into the men’s room, urinated, and then went to the sink and looked in the mirror. He thought he should look as devastated as he felt. He didn’t, though. He looked just like the old Ethan. Steady. Maybe that was impressive. Maybe it was sad.

He washed his hands and then turned the water cold and splashed it over his face. The door opened beside him and he was aware of boots that entered the room but did not go to the urinals or to the stalls or to the sink. Whoever it was just stood there. Ethan looked in the mirror with his face still dripping and saw a man in jeans and a black shirt and a black jacket and Ethan’s own Stetson, the gift he’d refused to wear. Pale blond hair beneath it, down to the shirt collar. The man’s eyes were a chilled blue and the left side of his face was a scarlet swath of blisters that glistened with some sort of salve.

Ethan didn’t move. The water kept dripping off his face and the man kept staring and for a time nobody spoke.

“Shall we ride, Ethan?” the burned man said at last. He reached inside his jacket and Ethan was unsurprised to see the gun. Ethan’s own weapons were in his truck in the parking lot.

“She wasn’t part of it,” he said.

The burned man gave an elaborate sigh. “Of course not. You weren’t part of it. I wasn’t part of it. Once the world existed without any of us, and someday soon it will again, but today, Ethan? Today we’re all spinning along together. We’re all part of it.”

Like it was built for the two of them and they’re lords over it, Allison had said, and Ethan thought of that and then, for the first time, thought of the second man.

“What are you here to do?” he said.

“I’d like to enlist your aid.” The man had read Ethan’s thoughts well, and he added, “I assume there are some ways to do that that are more convincing than others. I don’t suppose, for example, I’d get far by offering you money today. But your wife on the third floor, room three-seventy-three? Perhaps an offer concerning her would be more compelling. What do you say?”

“I’ll kill you for what you did to her. Both of you.”

The burned man smiled. “You know all the lines, Ethan. Very good. But I don’t have the time or the inclination to hear you say them all. You mention ‘both of you,’ so you know there are two of us. That’s going to be important for you to remember. Now, you and I are going to ride together for a time. It will be just us, understand? So the one you’re wondering about, where do you think he will be? This is what you do, to my understanding. An expert in lost-person behavior, I believe. So let’s consider the lost person in this scenario. Where do you expect you will find him?”

“Close to my wife.” The words were a bloodletting.

The burned man reached up and tipped his hat. Ethan’s hat. Then he opened the bathroom door and gestured with his gun. “After you.”

They walked out of the bathroom and down the hallway that smelled of disinfectant and then down a stairwell and out a side door into the daylight. It was warm now. Warm and windy.

“Go to the black truck,” the man said. They were walking close together, and when Ethan felt cold metal on his hand, he expected it was a jab with the gun. It was a set of car keys. He took them, then unlocked the doors. It was a Ford F-150, just like his. Different color, different trim, but the same motor under the hood.

“You’ll drive.”

Ethan got behind the wheel and started the engine. Everything in the truck was similar to Ethan’s, except the window tint on this one was very dark. And it smelled faintly of smoke and blood. He thought of the things he could do. Driving was control, after all. He could run them right through the glass doors and into the hospital. Could take them up onto the highway and off the side, bounce them down the mountain to their deaths together. The driver had total control.

“She’ll be just fine,” the burned man said, “for exactly forty-eight hours. After that, I’m afraid it’s an altogether different situation. Now, do you think you can find the boy in that amount of time?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’ve nothing to worry about.”

“What if they’ve found him already? Then I’ve got plenty to worry about.”

“I didn’t say you had to be the first to find him, Ethan. I just said you need to find him.”

And so he drove away, riding with the burned man, and behind him the hospital faded in the rearview mirror, and in it his wife slept secure in Ethan’s promise that he’d be there when she woke.

21

It was just past noon when they sighted the first group of searchers. Jace had tried to sleep, but he didn’t like having his eyes closed. It was as if he thought they might appear without a sound, and he’d open his eyes to find them standing in the door, Hannah Faber already dead, the rest of it just a matter of time…

Then Hannah said, “Connor, the police are coming,” and he stood up from the narrow cot to join her at the window.

There were four men walking up the hill, just as Jace had a few hours earlier. Two of them were in uniform.

“Can I look?” he said. He wasn’t going to be convinced they were police until he saw their faces. He’d seen the men dress like police before.

“Sure,” Hannah said, passing him the binoculars.

For a moment all he saw was sky and peaks, and when he lowered the glasses he dropped them too far and was looking at the tall grass that lined the slope below the tower. Finally he found the men and held his breath as he took in their faces.

Strangers.

Every one of them.

“Okay,” he said to Hannah, still staring through the binoculars. “Okay, I think they’re all safe. I don’t know them, at least, and that’s good. They’re not the two I saw.”

“Good. Let’s go down to meet them, then.”

“All right.”

He paused for just a few more seconds because he was curious to see if Ethan was with them. They’d tracked him over rough country so easily that he thought Ethan might have been their guide. He lifted the binoculars up so he could see over their heads and beyond, and he saw that they were not alone.

There was another man behind them, and it wasn’t Ethan, and he wasn’t moving with the group. He was trailing them.

Jace’s mouth went dry and he reached up with his index finger and fumbled with the knob that changed the focus. Hannah was still talking when the zoom clarified.

It was one of them. The one who looked like a soldier. The one who’d cut the throat of the man with the bag over his head. He wore jeans and a jacket and a baseball cap and he carried a rifle. He was a good distance behind the group of searchers. They had no idea he was there.

“Come on,” Hannah said, her hand light on his arm. “Let’s go down and-”

“He’s watching them.” His voice trembled, but he didn’t lower the glasses.

“What? Who is?”

“I can see only one of them. Maybe they didn’t come together. I thought they’d both be here. But it’s him. It’s definitely him.”

He lowered the binoculars because his hands had begun to shake. “He’s not far from us.”

He could tell that she didn’t believe him. Or didn’t want to. But she said, “Let me look.”

He handed over the binoculars. “Look behind them.”

Her silence told him that she saw the fifth man too. She stayed where she was for a long time and watched him and then she said, “You’re sure it’s him.”

“I’m sure.”

“Connor, they’re going to come up here. Those men are going to come up here.” Now her voice was showing the first signs of panic. Beginning to sound more like his own.

“I know it. I told you this was how it would happen. You can’t get away from them. Nobody can.” He took three steps back from the window, the farthest he could retreat in the last place he had to run, and then he sat down on the floor.

Hannah said, “Connor? We’re going to figure this out. He won’t get to you.”

He didn’t even look up when he answered. “They’ll get to me. They won’t stop, and there’s two of them. They’ll get to me in the end.”

“Let’s get moving,” Hannah said. “Let’s go, kid, we’ve got to go.”

He watched her blankly as she moved around him and grabbed the hatchet. She looked at his pack, went to it, and opened it and began to rifle through. “Do you have anything in there? Any kind of…weapon? A knife, at least?”

“I wasn’t allowed to. I was supposed to be a bad kid, remember?”

“Listen, we know the men are not on the trail to Cooke City. So we can make it back down to Cooke City and we can-”

He shook his head. “It’s better for everyone else to just let them get me. You can leave. I’d like you to tell my mom and dad what happened. Please find a way to tell them that I didn’t-”

“Shut up!” she screamed. “And damn it, get up!”

She tried to tug him to his feet. He fought free of her and scrambled back until he was sitting beside her cot.

“You can go. I’m not going to.”

They were interrupted by a voice then. Faint and echoing. The trace of a shout. Hannah turned from him and grabbed the binoculars again.

“They’re close, aren’t they?” Jace said.

“Yes.” She was silent for a moment, then said, “I’m going to go down and talk to them.”

“And say what? He’ll kill them too. Then you, and then me. He’ll kill us all.”

“No, he won’t. He’s just following them, Connor. He’s following them because he hopes they will find you. And that’s not going to happen. Because I’m going to tell them you’re already on the trail to Cooke City.”

“What?”

“They’re going to believe me,” she said. “I’ve got no reason to lie. I think they’ve probably followed a few trails before. I think they know that you came this way. So what I tell them is going to matter. If I pretend I didn’t see you, they might be suspicious. But if I tell them that I did, I can get them moving fast. I’ll say, You know, I did see him, and I thought it was strange that he was alone.”

She was trying to convince herself that this was a good plan, but Jace was picturing the rifle in the man’s hands. Picturing the way it would happen, wondering if you heard the shot or just felt it. Or did you feel anything at all? He supposed that depended on where you were shot.

“You think it hurts much?” he said.

“What?”

“Getting shot. Or will I even feel it?”

She turned back to him. “You won’t feel it.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“You won’t feel it, because it’s not happening.”

He lowered his head again. She didn’t know. She hadn’t seen them, she hadn’t run from them, hadn’t changed her name and gone to hide in the mountains only to look through binoculars and see one of them after all this time and over all these miles. She was like his mother-she believed there was a way to fix it all. But the only way to fix it all was to go back in time.

“I’m going to go down and get them,” she said. “When I do, you get under the cot, all right? Hang the blankets down a bit. Enough so nobody can see you.”

“They’ll see the radio,” he said. “That will get their attention pretty fast.”

“Right. Damn it.” She looked at the radio, took a breath, and said, “I’ll go to them, then, and I will keep them from coming up here. Connor, you stay right where you are. I’m going out there and you better not let me down. When I come back, I’ll be alone, and they’ll be gone.”

Then she walked outside and closed the door behind her.

Ethan drove out of the hospital and then out of Billings, took 90 and went west through the flat farm country where the railroads ran parallel to the highway. Neither of them spoke. He left 90 and got on 212 and headed southwest, away from the train tracks that had brought civilization to this place and toward the mountains that had fought it. Ethan was thinking of the way Allison’s lips had looked with those stitches. Torn so badly the doctors had to literally sew her flesh back together, all because of a man’s fist. Likely the man beside him. Ethan could smell him and he could see him and he could reach out and touch him, but he still could not stop him. It was the most impotent feeling of his life. He was willing to pay the price for killing this man. Willing to die in the truck beside him if it meant he had protected the right people.

Only the second man prevented this. Allison had said that she hoped Ethan wouldn’t ever hear the two of them talking to each other. Now he wished desperately that he might.

They passed two police cars as they entered Red Lodge, but neither stopped. The burned man regarded them with casual interest. On the other side of Red Lodge, the road began to climb; the big truck’s engine growled louder now. Onto 212 again, headed into Wyoming, over the Beartooth Pass, and then curling back into Montana. The mountainsides fell off beside them on the left, long, stunning falls, and climbed just as steeply on the right.

“I am curious about one point,” the burned man said. “It’s of no consequence, so you may lie about it if you wish, but I hope that you won’t.”

Ethan drove and waited. On the switchbacks above them, a motor home was lumbering down. He drifted as far right as the road allowed, hugging the corner, tight against the mountain.

“Did you leave the boy behind because you knew who he was?”

“No. I wasn’t told which one he was.”

“Which one. So you were told that he would be present, but you were not given his identity? Not even the false identity?”

“That’s right.”

“So you were operating without concern over his identity until last night, when you received word of the events at your home.”

The events at his home. Ethan gripped the steering wheel harder and nodded.

“This was from your wife? The signal she issued?”

“Initially.”

“She is brave and she is smart. Better than I’d expected, certainly. I mean, look at my face.” He lifted a fingertip to his blistered flesh and grimaced. “She ruined it. And you haven’t even seen my side. There’s still birdshot inside of me. No, your wife is not so bad.”

“Fuck you,” Ethan said.

The burned man nodded. “Of course. Now, if you’ll continue to indulge me, I’m curious about the situation that awaits us. You now know which boy it is, but you did not last night. This means that you discovered the reality of him when he ran away. Am I correct?”

Ethan squeezed the steering wheel and imagined it was the son of a bitch’s throat. He was glad the mountain road was so demanding. It forced his eyes to stay ahead, forced his hands to remain on the wheel.

“You’re correct,” he said.

“And when did you notice his absence?” Every question so formal, like they were in a courtroom.

“Middle of the night. When we were hiking down.”

“So you can’t show me exactly where you lost him?”

“I can get you to the point last seen.”

“The point last seen?”

“It’s how you start,” Ethan said. “When someone is lost. You go to the point last seen, and then you think. You try to think as that person would have when he was there.”

“Marvelous. I’m glad we have an expert along. It’s a tremendous bit of good luck. To the point last seen, then. There we’ll see how good you really are.”

On up the mountain they went.

22

Hannah stood alone on the deck of the tower as the searchers came toward it. About twenty-four hours had passed since the first smoke sighting. There was much more of it now, and she stood on the balcony and stared through her binoculars at it. Tried to act like she was doing her job. She looked through the glasses one last time as the searchers reached the plateau. The shadow man followed, as was the way with shadows. Already Hannah was developing a fear of him. Maybe not one that matched Connor’s, but it was there, and it was growing. She had four men on the way, two of them armed, and there was only the one behind. Common sense said to tell them about him. Common sense said tell the truth, give up the boy, trust the system that was in place here. Follow your protocol. The last time she’d broken protocol, people had died.

You get another chance.

Maybe she couldn’t look at it like that. Maybe that was the worst thing, the most dangerous thing for the boy. She should just play her role, turn him over to them. What was his pursuer going to do then? If she took all of these men up to the tower and told them the truth and gave them the boy? One man wasn’t going to risk taking on four. Even an assassin wasn’t going to risk taking a shot in these circumstances. He’d never make it back out of the mountains.

You think it hurts much? the boy had asked. Getting shot? He had truly wanted to know. It was probably the most important question he’d ever asked.

“Hello! Hello up there!”

The searchers were shouting for her now. It was time. Two choices, two options, right hand or left, heads or tails. Ask them for help and trust that nobody was going to shoot. Or send them on and trust that she could get the boy to a safer situation. Send them on and let the shadow man trail behind and fade out of sight. All she had to do to make that happen was go down and answer some questions. Hang in there for five minutes.

She held the railing as she went down, leg muscles liquid, like after the dreams, her heart hammering so hard, it seemed dangerous. Maybe she’d die before she reached them. Could your heart burst from fear? She thought it had to be possible. She’d read once that some doctors theorized that people who died from heart attacks in the night had literally fallen victims to their nightmares. It was something she’d been unable to purge from her mind once her dreams started.

No dream here, though. The boy in the tower behind her was very real.

Second chance. The kind almost nobody gets. You came back here for a reason, didn’t you? Stay on your damn feet, then. Stand your ground. You don’t get to run.

She knew she was going to lie by the time she was at the bottom of the stairs. She was going to lie to someone, that much was required now, and it was either these men or the boy hiding under her cot. She had promised him she would send them away. She could imagine lying to these men, but not to him.

The searchers covered the ground to meet her fast. They were on an open plateau rimmed by tall trees and rocks, and somewhere in them the shadow man with the rifle hid. They were certainly within range. A finger squeeze away from death.

“Don’t see many visitors,” she said. “And you guys look like business. Everything okay?”

“Oh, we’ve had better days.”

“I heard,” she said.

“Oh yeah?”

“I was the one who called it in.”

They exchanged puzzled glances. “Pardon?” a second officer said. He was a younger guy, complexion and cheekbones that hinted at Native American blood. “What did you call in?”

“The fire.” She waved her hand to the smoke. “I understand there was a victim.”

This was unplanned, but she was proud of it. She was demonstrating her knowledge and eagerness to help.

“We’re not here for the fire,” the one who looked like an Indian said. “We’re looking for a missing boy.”

“Haven’t heard about that.”

“They were supposed to put out a call to you.”

Shit. Of course they were. How could she have failed to anticipate that?

“Really? Must have hit my bathroom run. Toilet’s down here, not up in the tower. That would have been, what, midmorning?”

The bigger one nodded. “Kid ran off from a group that was camping out here. They’re, you know, problem kids.”

“Yeah?” She turned from them, stared to the west so the wind blew hard in her face. “Would he have been carrying a pack?”

“That’s right. You speak with him?”

“No. But I watched him go by, and I thought it was strange. Kid that age hiking alone.”

“You could tell how old he was from up in the tower?” This came from the Native American with the skeptical stare.

“My eyes aren’t that good. But these?” She tapped the binoculars that dangled around her neck. “These are pretty good. He was wearing a big green pack, an army-surplus-looking thing?”

“That’d be our boy,” the big one said. “He came right through here?”

She nodded. “Looked up at the tower, and I thought he might try to climb it. Some people do, you know. But he just hung a right, caught the trail, and went on along.”

“When you say he caught the trail, you mean-”

“Right there.” She pointed to the place where the trail led away from the plateau. “It goes on toward Cooke City. Been a few hours, at least,” she said, thinking that she wanted them to hurry. Thinking that if her heart beat any harder, it would blow apart.

“Yeah?”

“At least,” she repeated. She was watching the skeptical man. He had moved to the point where the trail met the plateau and was on his knees, studying the ground. This was not good. A man who believed the ground could tell him more than an eyewitness was not good for her plan at all.

“What do you see, Luke?” the bigger man called.

“I got three clear prints, and none of them are his.”

“You sure? Dry as it is?”

“Not so dry that he walks on air. The dust here holds a clear track, and his isn’t one of them.”

“That’s because he didn’t walk there,” Hannah said.

“Thought you said he caught the trail?” the one named Luke said, still kneeling.

“He did. Climbed up right there”-pointing was a small salvation, because it forced them all to turn their eyes away from her-“and then started back down the way he’d come. Not far, just a few steps. Kind of looking around. Then he walked across the side of the hill there, cut through those trees-you see those pines? Cut through those and he was on the trail. I think the trail surprised him. It wasn’t like he knew it would be there. But once he found it, he was gone.”

Not a bad liar, Hannah, you are not bad at this at all, a damn fine dishonest woman when you need to be. Put that on the Match.com profile that all your friends want you to create-Hannah Faber, single white female, killed last boyfriend, excels at lying, please call!

“Hell, it has to be the right kid.” These were the first words from a guy who looked tired and impatient and thus was Hannah’s favorite of the men.

“Good luck,” Hannah said. “I’ll have to get going.”

“Places to be?” This was from the skeptical man, Luke, who was returning to the group. A fine question too-she stayed in the tower day and night, and she was rushing them along? “You seem in a bigger hurry than we are.”

“Remember when I said my toilet was down here?” she asked, and then gave him a nasty smile. “Ah, you’ve got it now! Good work! So, yes, I have places to be too.”

“Go ahead,” the bigger cop said. “Sorry about that.”

“No problem. Good luck with the search.”

“Pretty good view from that tower. Might be worth going up and having a look around, see if we can get a visual on him,” Luke said, and Hannah wanted to kill him.

“You can’t see him,” she said. “I watched him for as long as I could. He took the trail and booked on out toward Cooke City.”

“You watched him that long?”

“That tower might look really exciting to you, but it can get a bit boring, believe it or not. I watch everybody.” She began moving away from them as she said it. “I’m sorry, but I’ve really got to go to the bathroom. You want to hang here, I’ll be back in just a minute.”

“We need to get moving,” the big cop said. “Appreciate the help, though.”

“You bet,” she said over her shoulder. “Good luck, guys.”

She reached the outhouse and fumbled with the door; the latch was uncooperative and she was panicking and so when she finally got it open, she nearly fell in her hurry to get inside. It should look real enough to them-somebody who had to go. They were probably laughing at her, but that was fine. So long as they believed it, and they left.

She sat on the closed seat of the toilet and held her head in her hands until her breathing steadied and the dizziness was past. She could hear their voices but not as loud. They were moving on. She hadn’t been impressive, but she’d been functional.

And now she was alone with a boy who was pursued by killers.

When she opened the door she was ready to see the man with the rifle, but the plateau was empty again. She crossed to the tower and went up the steps and opened the door of the cab.

“Connor? It’s just me.”

The words carried more weight than they should have. I did not lie to you. I made you a promise and I have kept it and you are still safe and I am part of that.

“They’re gone? Really?” He poked his head out from under the cot.

“Really. Stay down while I wait to see that the other one passes by too.” She turned from him and added, “Once we know he’s gone, that he’s still following them, we need to head out, in the opposite direction. We need to get out of here.”

“Why?”

“Because I lied to them, and they bought it, but it won’t take long for them to figure it out. Somebody will come back. When they do, you need to be gone. Now, give me a minute.”

She opened the door and walked out onto the balcony again. Leaned her forearms on the rail. If she was being watched now, it was important for her to look relaxed. To look as if she had all the time in the world. She forced herself to stay there for a while so it wouldn’t seem like she was checking on anything in particular. She counted the seconds as a child would: one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three. When she got to three hundred, she straightened, stretched, and lifted the binoculars. Started by facing the smoke. She’d meant that as a ruse for the shadow with the rifle, but the smoke caught her attention and held it; it had grown substantially in the time she’d been occupied with the search party. They needed a break from the wind down there. The blow-dryer, Nick had called this sort of wind. You added a blow-dryer to a red-flag day, and you had serious trouble.

At length she turned from the smoke and found the men soon enough, maybe a half mile away. They were trusting her tip, following the trail out. The tracker, Luke, was going to be screwed now, because there were enough hikers here that following boot prints was not an easy task. In the backcountry, he’d have had better luck.

It took her much longer to find their shadow. He’d moved off the trail and climbed up to where an overgrown ridgeline ran parallel to it but elevated, some eighty feet above. Following that would slow him down but it would also allow him to see everything a little faster. While she watched him, he turned back toward the tower, and he swung the rifle with him. For an instant her stomach tightened and her bowels knotted and she was certain he was going to shoot.

He didn’t. He was using the scope in the same way she was using the binoculars. Checking his surroundings, nothing more. He pivoted in a full circle and then continued on. The search party would hike down the trail and he would follow, and so she and Connor could not walk that way. Eventually, it would become apparent that a mistake had been made, and the shadow would return, and when that happened, she and Connor could not be here either. She needed to get him to help, but she’d just blocked her one path to safety by sending his pursuer on the only trail back to town. She had studied the map and stared through the binoculars for hours each day, and she knew well what waited for them off the trail. Treacherous climbs, impassable canyons, swift rivers, remnants of the glaciers. It would be slow going for Hannah and the boy, and they would leave a trail, and they would be caught.

To the west, the smoke met the angled sun and she thought of what was happening down there. Dozens of men and women at work in the woods, radios at their belts, helicopters awaiting a call. The model of emergency response was in action down there, in a place where no one would think to search, because no one would ever walk toward a forest fire.

Unless they understood a forest fire.

A panic run was a fatal run, that much she understood far too well, had learned from far too many aspects of her life, and so she stared at the wilderness through her binoculars and she tried to think of a way out other than the one she saw.

Still, her eyes returned time and again to the smoke.

They could reach the fire by dawn and they would not encounter the man with the rifle, who was walking in the opposite direction, and once at the fire, help would be easy to find. Radios would abound, trucks would be brought in, helicopters might settle down and drop a sling for them if they required it.

Can you make it there? she asked herself, and the ghost of the girl she had been answered, Of course, it’s not so bad a hike at all. Then the voice of the woman she was now said, It’s not about the miles. It’s about returning. Can you make it there?

Neither voice had an answer to that one.

23

Between Red Lodge and Cooke City, Ethan began to count. It had started as a simple exercise, a fight against the adrenaline and rage and fear. It had started as simple numbers. One to a hundred, then in reverse. When that grew old, he counted the cars they passed, and then, because there weren’t enough of them, he counted the switchbacks. Later, higher up the mountain, he chose something else.

He began to count the men and women he had trained in the art of survival. Started with the ones from the most recent days, the private work, and went back in time. Back to the Air Force, to the jungles and the deserts and the tundras where they’d dropped him off for a week or ten days or a month. There were about thirty in each group, and he trained four groups a year, and he’d trained for fifteen years. That was eighteen hundred for the military alone. Add in the civilians, and he believed it was close to twenty-five hundred. Perhaps, all told, it knocked on the door of three thousand.

Three thousand people he had taught how to be survivors. For some of them, it had worked. He knew that. A pilot downed in the Pacific; a soldier separated from his unit in Afghanistan; a hunting guide who’d broken his leg in a fall. Ethan had received letters and phone calls. Not to mention commendations and awards.

Three thousand sets of instructions.

Not one test for himself.

Not a real one, at least. He’d trained, and trained, and trained. With the best in the world, for a lifetime, he had trained, but he had never been tested. The finest fighter never to see the ring.

Only he was no fighter. It was the old conversation with his father again: a Marine’s son who’d joined the Air Force, that had been the first offense, but his dad had been able to shake it off, reckoning that the world had entered a new age of combat and in the future all scores would be settled with missiles and drones, sad as that seemed to make him. Then Ethan had become a survival instructor, and that was even more of a personal affront to his father somehow, more disappointing in some perverse way that came from his father having measured his own worth based on his ability to kill.

You just teach them what to do if they’re out there alone? he’d asked. From over here? How will you know if it works?

How it had pained him, the idea that his son would always be over here. There was no war at the time, but that didn’t matter to Rod Serbin-there might be, there would be, and when it came, his son would be on the sidelines, by choice. Whether or not he saved any lives didn’t seem to matter. He wouldn’t take any lives, and that was the measure. It bothered him, but not Ethan. Not until today. Now he drove, and he planned, and he wondered.

Could he do it? Would he?

When they returned to town, the smoke from the fire was high and clear and Ethan was surprised to see how much it had grown since the morning. Then again, there wasn’t much of the world the same since the morning.

“Where do you believe the boy is now?” the burned man asked into the quiet.

“I have no idea. It’s been more than twelve hours. If he kept moving, he could have covered some ground. Or he could have been located already.”

“We’re going to need to know that. The problem is simple: if they already have him, then we’re going into the woods for nothing, and I’m wasting hours that I can’t afford to waste. Rather, I’m wasting hours you can’t afford to waste. I’m sorry, Ethan, to have forgotten the joint nature of our venture. So you have to check. Your job is to find him, regardless of whether he’s hiding under a rock or in a hotel room with three marshals outside the door. It could have gone either way by now.”

“Then I’ll need to make a call.”

“That’s fine.”

“We’ll have to stop,” Ethan said. “This isn’t cell-phone country. You lose signal in Red Lodge and don’t get it back up here.”

“So we’ll stop. You’ll check. It should take no more than a phone call. I’ll be right here with you. Say the wrong word and you’ve chosen the outcome more surely than I have. Something you need to remember-she’ll go first. I’ll see to it.”

“You’ve made that clear. We’ll stop at my house. We’ll also start from there.”

“Allison set that on fire, so it’s probably not ideal.”

“Don’t say her name again, you son of a bitch. Don’t say it.”

“You prefer ‘Mrs. Serbin’? I thought we were past needless formalities.”

Ethan focused on peaks, still snowcapped, in the distance. Formidable rock faces that were friends. If he could remain calm, he would soon be surrounded by them.

“I’ll stop in town and make a call,” he said. “You want to walk in with me and shoot me down if I say the wrong thing, you can. You want to stay in the truck, keep that burned face of yours away from questions, you can do that too.”

“You’re very gracious, Ethan. But I’m well aware of my options. I trust you to go in alone. You’ll have your chances to cause trouble for me, but you’ll remember the way your wife looked in the hospital today. You’ll remember that, and remember who’s at her bedside.” He paused, shrugged, and said, “Or you’ll let her die. I’ve been wrong about a man’s character before. Perhaps I will be again.”

Ethan parked in front of the Cooke City General Store. It had stood there since 1886 and Ethan imagined that over that many years many an evil man had surely passed by it but doubted any like the one who rode at his side.

“I’ll walk down to the right,” he said. “To Miner’s Saloon. I can use a phone there and nobody will be listening. There’s a phone on the far end of the bar. The right-hand side. I’m going to walk to it and make a call. You’ll probably be able to watch me through the window. Nobody will see you, not with this tint.”

“You have my trust, Ethan.”

“Am I on a clock?”

“By all means, take your time.”

His tone was light, mocking. That was fine. Stay cocky, stay fearless, and Ethan would piss on his corpse.

Ethan walked down the sidewalk to Miner’s and pulled open the door without so much as glancing back at the truck.

“Ethan, man, didn’t expect to see you in here! I heard about…the fire.” This was from the bartender. Ethan figured the man had stopped himself from saying Allison’s name because he didn’t know what might have happened. Ethan looked up and nodded and said, “She’s fine. I’ve just got to make a call. Sorry.”

“Of course.”

He called Roy Futvoye. Said that he was back in town and wanted to know if the searchers had had any success.

“I’m afraid not. They spoke to someone who thought she’d seen him, one of the fire lookouts, but they haven’t found him yet.”

“Where are they?”

“Coming down toward the Soda Butte now.”

The Soda Butte was the stream that ran on the south side of town, parallel to the Montana-Wyoming line. That meant they’d made a loop of it, expecting that Connor had broken free and then tried to get back to civilization. It would have made sense to them, because they probably figured he wanted help or at least wanted to get back to familiar terrain. They did not understand his fears yet, and that was good. Another advantage. Ethan did not expect to find Connor on a highway, or even a trail. Not so soon. He had food, he had water, and he had terror. He would have searched for a good place to hide.

“No sign of him beyond that tip?”

“None. But that one sounded valid. She gave a good description, and the timeline was right. Maybe he dropped his pack and picked up the pace, got out to the road faster than we thought he would.”

“Maybe,” Ethan said. “So your team is going to come out for the night?”

“They’re out. We’ll send a fresh group. Luke Bowden stayed back.”

“What?”

“You know Luke, he doesn’t like it when he loses a trail. Damned bloodhound. I guess he wasn’t happy with the way they lost the kid’s prints at the fire lookout. He decided to backtrack and see what he could find.”

“Get him out of there,” Ethan said. His tone changed enough that the bartender glanced his way.

“Why?”

Because Luke might actually find the kid, Ethan was thinking, but he said, “Because people shouldn’t run searches solo, Roy. You know that.”

“He’s just back-trailing. Nothing’s going to happen to Luke-”

“Things can happen to anybody,” Ethan said, and it came out too close to a snarl. He swallowed and said, “There’s something wrong with this kid, you realize that. Don’t let anybody go wandering around alone.”

Especially somebody who may beat me to him. Especially somebody with a radio.

“I’ll advise him,” Roy said, but his voice had changed now as well. “Ethan, you okay? You know something more than you’re telling me?”

“I know I’m shaken up, Roy. It’s been that kind of day. Listen, I’ve got to go. I’ll check back in soon. Thanks.”

Ethan hung up. He looked at a man sitting at the bar eating a steak and considered the knife he was using. It would be nice to have a knife. But the burned man wouldn’t miss that. Ethan thanked the bartender and walked outside into that warm wind. Knowing he had to hurry now. His own clock was speeding up, and the burned man didn’t even know it yet.

When Ethan opened the door, the burned man looked at him casually, the pistol in his hand.

“Send for the National Guard?”

“You’ll know soon enough.”

“I have the patience for my own wit. Not yours.” His voice was dark and he tilted his head so that some of the burns fell into shadow and said, “What’s the word?”

“No luck yet. If we’re lucky, we’ll catch him coming up to the road. If we aren’t, then we’ll have to go back to the place where I lost him, and I’ll have to start tracking.”

“You don’t think we’ll be lucky, though.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s too afraid of you to stay on a trail.”

“Thinking like the lost person. Good for you. And an accurate assessment, I believe. His approach in the past has been to hide and then run.”

“And you couldn’t get him yourself. You should have called me then.”

The burned man looked at him and smiled.

“Starting to appreciate my wit?” Ethan said.

“No. I was just thinking of how your wife looked with her hair on fire.”

24

The woman named Hannah had saved him, at least temporarily, and that was great, but it didn’t mean he could let her rush him. And she was rushing him now. Telling Jace to get up and get moving, telling him to leave the pack behind because they’d move faster without the extra weight, telling him that if they went fast enough, they’d both be riding out of the mountains on a helicopter by the end of the night.

“Slow down,” he said. “We need to slow down.”

“Hon, that is exactly what we cannot do. It is time to hurry. I know you’re tired, but-”

“We have a goal,” Jace said, “but we do not have a plan.”

It was funny; if an adult had said this to Hannah, it would have made perfect sense to her, but those same words coming from a kid apparently meant there was something wrong with the kid. Hannah stared at him as if he’d just told her that he wanted to ride out of the mountains on a unicorn.

“It’s what Ethan says.”

“Ethan, your survival instructor?”

“Yes. The one I was with until last night.”

“That’s terrific, Connor. That’s great. But I’m pretty sure if Ethan were here right now, he’d tell you that we need to hurry.”

“That’s the exact opposite of what he would say. Panic kills. You rush and you make mistakes. You’re trying to rush me.”

She laughed. The exasperated, I-am-done-listening-to-you sound his mother made during arguments. “I’m trying to rush you, yes. You arrived at my door with a killer behind you, and now I would like to hurry the hell out of here.”

“Two killers,” Jace said. “We haven’t seen the other one.”

That had been bothering him for some time. He knew very little of these men, but somehow he was surprised to discover that they were willing to separate. It had felt to him as if they came together, a matched set.

“Connor,” Hannah said, “we can talk and walk. Please. The only mistake right now would be staying here any longer.”

“Ask my dad-he takes pain pills every day because of somebody who rushed. You’re already making one mistake.” He tapped on the glass of the Osborne and said, “Aren’t we going to want a map?”

This time, the look she gave him was more considered. She even made an odd little smile, as if someone had told a joke, and she stopped arguing with him.

“All right,” she said. “We’ll take a map. That’s a pretty good idea. I will admit not thinking about that was a mistake. Do you see any others?”

She seemed to be asking him seriously, and that gave him a sense of strength he hadn’t felt in a while. Not quite the same as when he’d built the fire, but close. A reminder that he was capable of more than he imagined.

He looked around the tower and tried to see it the way Ethan Serbin would. It was hard; he was sure he was missing things. The map had been obvious, but although he wanted to bring his entire pack, he had to admit she had a point about the walking speed.

“Map, water, some protein bars,” he said, speaking slowly, thinking of what they must have and what they could leave behind. “I’ll bring the plastic and the parachute cord for shelters. And the fire steel.”

“We’re going to need to be on the move, not building shelters.”

“That’s what everyone says a few hours before they realize they need a shelter.”

She gave the little smile again, nodded, and said, “All right. I’ve got water, and some lightweight food. I’ve got a knife and a multi-tool. You’ve got the map, the compass, and the rest of what you want?”

He nodded.

“Then are you ready? Or is there something else?” Her eyes were drifting to the windows that faced east, the direction she’d sent them. She was worried that they would return soon, and he wondered how convincing she had been in the conversation.

“Just let me think a minute.”

“That’s your favorite approach, isn’t it, Connor? You are one patient guy. A thinking man, and a patient one.” The frustration was clear in her voice, but he ignored it. She had helped him and now he had to help her. Think like Ethan. Think like a survivor. Just think.

“Okay,” Hannah said after he’d been silent for maybe thirty seconds. “Looks like you’re all thought out. Let’s move.”

“Leave the light on.”

“What?” She turned back to him with a confused look because it was a brilliantly bright afternoon, and you wanted, if anything, more shade in the glass-walled room right now. Unless you were thinking like a survivor.

“The light’s very bright at night,” Jace said. “Trust me, you can see it from a long way off.”

“We’re going to be very far away by the time it-”

“They may not be,” he interrupted, and she fell silent. “If anyone thinks you lied, they’ll be even more sure of it if the tower goes dark, right? You’re already off the radio, but at least people believe you’re still here. If it’s dark tonight, they might wonder.”

She nodded slowly and said, “Okay, kid. Keep going. You’re earning it.”

He knelt beside his pack and unzipped it, removed the map, the compass, and the parachute cord, and then stopped and said, “Shit.”

“What?”

“I don’t have the plastic. We walked away with the shelters still up.” He looked at her and said, “Do you have anything that would work? Some ponchos, maybe? Something that could be used as an emergency shelter?”

Her expression changed then for reasons he didn’t understand. Her eyes went sad.

“What’s the problem?” he asked.

“Nothing. Nothing at all. And, yes, I’ve got a shelter. That’s exactly what it is. An emergency fire shelter. It would probably be a good idea to bring it along, I suppose. But I want you to promise me something. You need to listen and not argue, all right?”

Jace nodded.

“I will not get in that thing,” Hannah said. “I will let you get in it if you need to, but I will not, and you had better not try to make me. You promise?”

“Okay.”

She rubbed a hand over her face and said, “What else?”

He thought they had it all. He emptied his pack of the nonessentials and put them under the cot and then added the fire shelter. It didn’t weigh much. Looked like tinfoil.

“This is supposed to keep you from burning?”

“Yes, it is,” she said, and then added, “and yes, it does.”

He looked up at her and she turned away immediately.

“Were you ever in one?”

“Connor-just pack the damn thing.”

He did as instructed, then stood and put the pack on. It was much lighter than it had been since it held a lot less stuff, but he was still glad to have it. He felt better, more prepared, and how someone felt had a direct impact on what he did. His survivor mentality was coming back. It would be good to be moving again and even better to know that the man who had come to kill him was moving in the opposite direction.

“I think I’m ready,” he said.

“Good. Let’s get to it, then.”

He stepped out and hesitated-the height of the thing surprised him even though he’d been looking out the windows a lot of the time. Then he got moving, one foot in front of the other, keeping his eyes on his boots.

When he stopped short, Hannah Faber almost ran into him.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“What’s your shoe size?”

“Pardon?”

“What is it?”

“A ten, Connor. Yes, I have big feet. And I’d like to get them moving.”

“Do you have any other shoes?”

“Connor, that’s useless weight. We are not going to need two pairs of shoes.”

He turned around, holding the rail with one hand, and looked at her feet. They were big for a woman. He put his own foot beside it. Almost the same.

“Do you have any other shoes?” he repeated.

“Connor! We’re not going to-”

“The search party tracked me here fast,” he said. “I’m pretty sure they know my boot prints by now. It would be nice if they didn’t see them leading away from your tower.”

She was giving him the stare that he was beginning to regard as normal. Then she turned around and walked back up the steps and into the cabin without a word. He followed her in. She went to the foot of the cot and came back with a pair of boots.

“Perfect,” he said. “Let me see if they fit.”

She was looking at them funny, as if she didn’t want them to be used. When she spoke again, she was still staring at the boots and not him.

“I’ll wear these,” she said, setting them down by the bed. “You try the ones I have on.”

“Why?”

“Don’t worry about it.” She began to unlace her boots. They were more like hiking shoes, really. The boots by the bed, though, were serious work boots. He ran his index finger over the glossy black leather. Sturdy stuff. The laces went all the way from the tongue of the boot to the toe.

“What are those laces made of?”

“Kevlar.”

“You’re serious? Like, the bulletproof stuff?”

“Yes.”

“Those look pretty tough,” he said.

“They sure as hell are, kid. Now, try these on.”

He got his own boots off and slipped his feet into hers. A little snug, but not bad at all.

“They work. You really do have big feet.”

“It gives me certain advantages, Connor. I won’t blow over even in a strong wind.” She put on the new boots slowly, as if there were something wrong with them. By the time she had the laces tied, her eyes were closed.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine. Just haven’t laced up in a while.” She opened her eyes and said, “Now that we’ve gone to this extreme, make sure to hide your old boots. None of this will be much help if they walk in and find your boots right there on the floor.”

Good point. He was disappointed in himself; that was an obvious problem, and he had missed it. He picked up the boots and looked around the room and saw no great option. Looked again, taking slower inventory, and then crossed to the woodstove and opened the door. Cold ashes inside. He put the boots down in them and closed the door.

“Very good,” Hannah said. “Very smart.”

They left the tower for real then, making sure the light was still on to greet the darkness when it came, and at the bottom of the tower, they turned west and crossed the plateau, and Jace’s feet left no trace of the boy who had come this way in the morning.

25

Allison woke in the afternoon to a sea of muddled regrets. Should have brought the shotgun onto the porch, should have been firmer with her concerns over Jamie Bennett, should have allowed Ethan to go after the boy, should have gone with him into the mountains, should have…

And then awake, fully awake.

And alone.

The hospital room was dim but not dark. Ethan’s chair empty. That was fine. He’d left for some reason, and he would return. She had been asleep for a long time.

The minutes passed and he did not return and at length she grew uneasy alone there in the room and pressed the call button above the bed. A nurse arrived within seconds, asking if she was in pain.

“A little, sure, but I’m…I’m fine. I was wondering where my husband is?”

“No idea, Mrs. Serbin. He left some time ago.”

“What do you mean, left?”

“I’m not sure. How’s the pain? On a one-to-ten scale, if you could estimate what the-”

“He’s not been here?”

The nurse gave her an uncomfortable look. “I really couldn’t say. He didn’t consult with me when he left. But I haven’t seen him. Would you like to call him?”

“Yes. But I won’t get him. Could you get me the phone? I want to call the police.”

Allison looked at Ethan’s chair. You promised. You held my hand and looked me in the eye and you promised. Then the nurse was back, a phone in hand. She dialed for Allison, then handed the phone over and left the room. Very polite lady, this nurse.

Allison asked for Roy Futvoye. The person who answered the phone was disinclined to connect her, so she said, “You tell him this is Allison Serbin calling from the hospital and that I’d like to talk to him about the fire and the men who attacked me.”

Funny how effective a few buzzwords could be. It didn’t take them long to patch her through to Futvoye after that.

“Allison, how are you?”

“Been better.” Wrong thing to say-the b’s pulled at her wounded lips in a painful way. She hated the sound of her voice. So damaged.

“I know. Listen, we’ll get them. I promise you we will.”

If she heard the word promise again, she was going to scream. She said, “Roy, where is my husband?”

Pause. “He didn’t tell you?”

“What didn’t he tell me?”

“Um…well, I’m not sure what all has been going on with him, you know, but my last understanding-”

“Where is he?” These words came firmer, crisper.

“In the mountains. I just spoke with him. He’s gone to find the boy who ran away.”

“You just spoke with him?”

“Within the past hour. Is there a message you want me to get to him?”

“No,” she said. “No, that’s fine.”

“Are you feeling up to a little more talk, Allison? I’d sure love to ask a few questions about what happened last night. About those two. You know that your memory is going to be a big help to us. Really critical.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m a little off right now. Let me think about that.”

She hung up without giving him time to respond. Sat and looked at Ethan’s chair.

You gave your word, Ethan. Why did you pick the boy again?

She closed her eyes and breathed and after a few minutes she realized she’d begun to cry. She opened her eyes and wiped at them with her good hand and when they were dry and she was steady, she pressed the call button again. Same nurse, same swift appearance.

“Yes? Everything all right?”

“I’d like to see a mirror.”

The hesitation on the nurse’s face told her as much as the mirror would, but Allison held her eyes and eventually the woman nodded and left and came back with a round makeup mirror.

“They’ll get it fixed so well, so fast,” she said. “You have no idea what they can do these days with burns.”

Allison took the mirror and looked into it and closed her eyes almost immediately. After a few seconds she looked again and this time she didn’t look away.

Most of the worst was hidden, anyhow. Bandages covered that. Her hair was the real shock-not much left of it, and what was there had been hacked away, probably by the paramedics. Her lips were lined with stitches and there was some sort of film over a split in her chin, like dried superglue. Her eyebrows were gone but a line of blisters showed where each one had been. She studied herself for a long time, and then she said, “You know I was almost Miss Montana?”

“You’ll look better than that when they’re done,” the nurse said.

Allison nodded. “Sure. My husband used to joke about that, though. Call me that, sometimes.” She tilted the mirror, saw the nearly bald area on the left side of her head. “He probably won’t make that joke again. And now I’ll miss him saying it, isn’t that funny?”

The nurse looked at her and said, “Are you feeling okay, Mrs. Serbin? Maybe less painkiller? Or maybe more? On a scale of one to ten, could you tell me-”

“Nine,” she said. “I was a nine.”

The nurse nodded, pleased to be back on track. “You were. And now?”

“Well, there are steps,” Allison said. “At twenty, I was a nine. And then at thirty, probably still an eight. I mean, time ain’t your friend. Then I hit forty, and then I hit last night, or rather last night hit me, and now…well, we are going to have to wait for those bandages to come off. But for the moment, let’s call it a two.”

The nurse said, “Mrs. Serbin, you need to stop worrying about this. Surgeons you haven’t even met yet are going to do amazing things.”

She looked in the mirror and smiled and watched the glue tighten and the stitches tug. The bandages that hid the rest of her were white as glaciers under a winter sun. She thought they could be called beautiful; at least, they could if you’d ever appreciated a glacier under a winter sun.

“You pretend it’s not there when you’ve got it,” she said, “but I wonder if you’re allowed to miss it when it’s gone. I was beautiful once.”

The nurse was silent. Just looked at Allison and waited. Allison handed over the mirror and the nurse took it and left, but the images it had offered remained. Allison tried to push them away and then she looked at Ethan’s empty chair and she knew why Ethan had gone. Maybe it wasn’t about the boy at all. Maybe it was about her.

He thought he could get them.

He didn’t understand who they were, though. What they were. She could see them again and, worse, hear them, those calm voices in a beautiful, still night. Could smell the old smoke and the old blood. Then the fresh versions that had followed.

She prayed for her husband then, prayed that he would not meet them, would not hear them, would not smell them. It felt too late, though. She’d slept too long, and he’d made his choice too early.

26

As he pulled the truck up to the Pilot Creek trailhead, Ethan felt relief. They were coming home. Out of the burned man’s terrible truck and into Ethan’s lovely mountains, which could also be very terrible, especially to those who failed to respect them.

“We’ll start here,” Ethan said. “And we’ll need to walk fast.”

The burned man gazed out the window without interest. They were surrounded by high peaks and steep slopes but Ethan was sure the man saw no threat there because he had no intention of getting into a situation where he might fall off a peak. But he would, Ethan believed, allow himself to get into a situation where he climbed toward one.

What Ethan needed was a slope that rose on them abruptly, and for a short length. One that they could walk along until suddenly they needed to make a short scramble to the top. Enough to force the holstering of the gun and demand the total attention of the hands.

Republic Peak offered that opportunity. It was a long, leg-burning hike, but a hike all the same; you could keep your hands free. Until you reached ten thousand feet. There it leveled out to a wide plateau that overlooked a glacier to the west and the drainage of Republic Creek to the north. The country to the south was blocked by the peak itself, but it wasn’t a terrible climb to the top, and for that reason Ethan often used it as a summit for the amateurs he brought into the mountains. No ropes required, no technical experience or gear. Anyone in decent physical condition could make it to the top of Republic Peak-but you couldn’t just walk to it. It required a little hands-and-knees work; you had to pick your way among the rocks. At the summit, there was an extraordinary view of the surrounding countryside. There was also, as was common in these mountains, a stack of stones marking the summit, a small pyramid of rocks left by triumphant hikers who wanted to acknowledge their journey to the top of the world, or as close to it as they’d yet been. Ethan’s boys had added to it over the years. Heavy, rounded stones and flat, jagged chunks. Killing rocks, in the right hands.

But can I beat Luke? How fast is my clock ticking now?

He was sweating even though they hadn’t yet started up the trail. It was all out there waiting for him, he could take care of the man easily if he was left alone, but he might not be left alone. He hadn’t counted on the wild card, Luke. He hoped Roy had actually radioed Luke and told him to get the hell out of the mountains.

Then you’ll meet him coming back down. And then…

“Ethan? What’s our plan? You seem distracted. What’s on your mind? Is it Allison? Ah, such a sweet thing, true love. But let’s not let it disrupt our focus.”

“We’re going to have to get high, and do it fast,” he told the burned man as they left the truck. “He’ll have a light going as soon as it gets dark. If he’s on the move, it will be his headlamp or a flashlight. If he’s in one place, it will be a fire.”

“If he’s hiding, as you believe, why would he have a light?”

“Because I spent the past several days scaring him. In order to get the kids to take things seriously, I share some war stories. Trust me, none of them are comfortable up here at night. Not at first. And if he’s moving, which he may be, then a light is simply required. He’ll have to see where he’s going. I watched this boy start a fire. He’s good at it, and he likes it. I’m sure he’ll want one going. The fire will give him a sense of strength, of security. You’d be surprised at the feeling that comes with starting a fire.”

“Oh, I’m rather familiar with it, Ethan.”

Ethan didn’t look at him, didn’t react. Told himself not to think of Claude Kitna. Not to think of the source of the smoke they’d passed. Instead, he thought of the fire that Allison had started. That was a survivor’s fire. That was the heart that he had to match.

“So we hike fast, and we get high,” he said. “I’m telling you this so you won’t question where we’re going or what we’re doing.”

“I’ll question everything, actually. But carry on.”

The wind freshened and blew at them warm and dusty from its journey over dry terrain. There was a thickness to it, a humidity that felt misplaced in the high mountains, and Ethan knew there was a storm behind it. The days had been too hot and too dry for too long this early in the summer. It had fed the fires, and now rain would come in and maybe help, maybe hurt. A good drenching downpour would be a blessing to the firefighters; a lightning storm might be a disaster. This wind did not feel as if it came from a savior. “Feel that?” Ethan asked.

“The breeze. Yes, Ethan. I feel it.”

“Not a breeze. That’s a warning.”

“Is it, now?” The burned man managed to keep his voice drawling and uninterested even when he should have been out of breath. He was hurt and they were moving fast and it had likely been some time since he’d slept, but he did not show any of that. Ethan was concerned by this. Ethan had the feeling that the burned man was a survivor himself, and that was trouble.

“It’s coming ahead of a storm,” Ethan said. “And we’re two miles up in the air. It doesn’t take long for lightning to connect with the earth when you climb this high to meet it.”

“I’ve come through a fire already today, Ethan. I’ll welcome the storm.”

They continued to work their way along the trail, flashlights on now because darkness had settled, and when the burned man moved, he was loud, too loud, and Ethan smiled. No, this was not his world. Ethan had made the right choice. They would reach Republic Peak and there the burned man would die. It was a matter of hours, that was all. Two hours, maybe three. That was all the burned man had left, and he did not know it. Ethan had made the right choice, and he would prove it in blood.

“You say the searchers have not sighted him, but the fire lookout did,” the burned man said. “Yet we aren’t going to the lookout. You’re ignoring that. Seems unwise.”

“I’m not ignoring it. One person has seen him. How? By having the elevation advantage. If we get to Republic Peak, we’ll be higher than him, no question. I don’t know how you’re feeling, how much you’ve got in you. If you want to sit it out and let me make the climb, then we’ll do it that way. Running away from you won’t help me, so you know I’ll come back down for you.”

“Your concern is touching,” the burned man said, “but I have plenty in me, Ethan. Don’t you worry about my resources. You just set the pace, and I’ll keep up.”

This was the answer Ethan had been expecting, and it was good. He’d wanted to goad him a little bit. Ethan would attempt to discourage him from the summit again when they were closer, and the burned man would hear that and commit to reaching the top because he would not want Ethan to think he was weakening.

“You believe he hid from the searchers, don’t you, Ethan?”

“Yes. Because he thinks you’ll be with them, or near them. An ordinary boy would try to get out of the mountains as fast as possible. He’d seek help. Connor-that’s the name I know him by, at least-is not interested in finding help, because he doesn’t trust help. From anyone. As long as he knows you’re here-and he does-then he will not willingly give himself up. He made that clear when he ran off last night.”

“You can find him?”

“I will find him.”

“And what do you think will happen to him then?”

Ethan hesitated. “I’m not sure.”

“Yes, you are, Ethan. Yes, you are. So admit it. If you find him, what will happen to him?”

Ethan was silent, and the burned man said, “You’re wasting time. Answer the question.”

“You’ll likely kill him.”

“I certainly will kill him. It’s not a matter of likelihood. It’s a matter of certainty. And you know this, but still you’ll find him for me. So you are willing for him to die.”

Ethan turned back and looked at him. The burned man was smiling, his face pale in the glow from the flashlight.

“I don’t desire it,” Ethan said. “But I also don’t know him. I don’t love him. I love my wife. If sacrificing him allows me to save my wife…”

“A noble husband.”

Ethan turned from him, away from that smile. He looked again at the shadow of Republic Peak and thought that they could not get there fast enough.

“Let’s get to it,” he said. “We need to cover ground.”

The voice that floated out of the blackness then was so calm, it didn’t even startle Ethan, though surely it should have. It just entered the conversation as if it belonged there.

“Would you prefer I join your party at this juncture, or should I stay with the others?”

Ethan looked in the direction of the sound but the burned man did not. His eyes remained on Ethan.

“If they haven’t found him yet,” the burned man said, “I suspect it’s unlikely that they will. And I have the utmost confidence in my friend Ethan here. So why don’t you join us.”

“My pleasure.”

The way they say things. Like they’re alone in the world. Like it was built for the two of them and they’re lords over it, Allison had said. And then she had begun to cry.

The second man emerged from the woods soundlessly. He was armed with a rifle. Ethan watched him walk and realized that he had heard nothing from him until the man had wanted to be heard and he understood then with immediate, terrible clarity that these men were the same in awful ways and also different in awful ways. The burned man was not familiar with the wilderness. His partner was. As bad as it was that there were two of them, it was far worse to know the nature of the second man. All of the advantages Ethan had believed he held were gone now.

The second man walked to within ten feet of them and then stopped. He was shorter and more muscular and had close-cropped hair but he looked a great deal like the burned man. Brothers, Ethan thought, they were brothers.

“Good to meet you, Mr. Serbin,” he said. “Had the pleasure of making your wife’s acquaintance last night. You weren’t at home.”

Ethan didn’t speak. Far ahead, Republic Peak stood against the night sky. The perfect place to kill one man.

Not two.

27

It was never full dark in a hospital room. There was always the glow of some monitor, a night-light in the bathroom, a bright band under the door. Allison eyed the shadows and hoped for sleep and had no luck, and then the old shadows vanished and new ones emerged as the door eased open a few inches.

For a moment, it held there, just cracked, and whoever was on the other side was silent. Allison knew then that it was them, knew that they’d finished with Ethan and had returned for her, and she wondered how it was that this was a surprise to her, because of course they were not men who let you walk away; it was not enough for you to be burned and beaten. They meant to put you in the ground, and she wasn’t there yet.

There was a scream in her throat when the door opened wider, and then it stopped again and there was something so tentative in its motion that she was certain it didn’t belong to either Jack or Patrick, her last nocturnal visitors. They moved in unusual ways, but never tentatively.

The door opened farther, letting a broad beam of light fall into the room, and Allison blinked against it as a tall blond woman entered.

Allison said, “You bitch.”

“I know,” Jamie Bennett said, and closed the door behind her.

The room was silent for a few seconds, and dark again, and Allison thought, Do not say that you’re sorry, I don’t want to hear that, don’t you dare say it.

Jamie Bennett said, “May I turn on the light?” A click of a switch, and there she was. Tall and blond and beautiful. Unbeaten and unburned.

“Do you know where my husband is?” Allison said.

“I was hoping you might.”

“I don’t.”

Jamie nodded. Allison looked at her face, saw the red eyes and the deep fatigue, and was pleased by them. At least it was costing her something. Not enough, but something.

“They came because of you,” Allison said. “Because you screwed up.”

“I know it.”

“Do you?”

“Yes, Mrs. Serbin. I know more than you do about how much blame there is for me.”

“No,” Allison said. “You don’t know more than I do about it. Have you heard them speak to each other?”

Jamie Bennett stayed silent.

“I didn’t think so. Until you’ve heard them, you don’t know.”

She was both surprised and disappointed that the other woman had begun to cry.

“He was your problem,” Allison said, though her heart was no longer in the attack, and she hated that, because, damn it, she was entitled to her anger. “It was your job to keep him safe. Not anyone else’s. You were supposed to do your job like a pro. Look at what’s come of your game.”

“I couldn’t do it like a pro,” Jamie Bennett said.

“Obviously.”

“I wanted to. You don’t believe that, but I wanted to. There was nothing I wanted more in the world than to keep it professional. But it is absolutely impossible to do that with your own son.”

Allison opened her mouth, felt the sting along the lines of stitches, closed it, and tried again. Speaking softer now. “Your son?”

Jamie Bennett nodded. One tear traced her cheekbone.

“That boy who is missing, the one they came for, that’s your child?”

“That’s my child.”

Allison didn’t say anything for a long time. Outside, a cart squeaked by and someone let out a too-loud laugh and the patient in the room beside them hacked a wet cough and the two women sat there and stared at each other in silence.

“Why?” Allison said finally.

“Why to which part? Why am I here? I’m trying to find him. That’s the only thing that I-”

“Why do they want him?”

Jamie Bennett crossed the room and sat in the chair where Ethan had been earlier.

“He saw them kill a man. He found a body, and then he saw these men appear with another man, and they killed him, and Jace saw it all.”

“Jace.”

“That’s his name, yes. He was Connor Reynolds when you met him.”

“Yes. Ethan’s gone after him. He left me here and went back to find him.”

“I’ve been trying to reach Ethan. I haven’t gotten through.”

“You don’t get a cell signal in the wilderness, Jamie.”

“And they haven’t found the men who…who did this to you.”

“No. They have not.” She lifted a finger to her face and touched the bandages and said, “Who are they?”

“I have no idea. I have their physical descriptions, and I have the names they call themselves, and beyond that…nothing.”

“They’re brothers,” Allison said.

“I understand that they look alike.”

“More than looks. They’re brothers. The names might be lies, but that part is not. They go together. It’s a shared blood.”

“I’d like to promise you that we will find them,” Jamie Bennett said. “But I’m done making promises.”

“Who did they kill? Who did…Jace see them kill?”

“Witnesses. My witnesses. For a federal trial, one that was supposed to put seven people in prison, including three police officers. I was hired to do part of the protection assignment. I failed.” She took a long breath, brushed hair out of her face, and said, “My witnesses-they weren’t just killed. They were taken to Indiana, to the place where my son lives with my ex-husband, and murdered there. They’d sent me a note indicating the location. I was supposed to discover the bodies, or have them discovered. Instead, my son saw it. And now…now they have to address that.”

“Why would they have done that? Killed the men and dumped the bodies by your family?”

“To prove that they can’t be touched, and I can be,” Jamie Bennett said. “I’m sure the message was a threat, and one that entertained them. It’s their pattern, or what we understand of it. They’re very good at what they do, but they’re of…more creative minds than your typical hired killers. More like sociopaths than professionals, frankly. They like to entertain themselves while they work. Killing the witnesses I had promised to protect and then leaving them so close to my son…I think that pleased them.”

“They know that he saw them.”

“Yes.”

“But they didn’t kill him. Why not?”

“They didn’t find him. He hid well that day, and they ran out of time. I got him away then. To a safe house. The sort of thing I told you his mother wouldn’t trust. Remember that, the night I met you, that night in the snow? It wasn’t a lie. His mother didn’t trust the safe house. His mother had just lost two witnesses from one. Do you remember when I said I would protect the boy for free if I thought I could?”

Her voice broke and she turned from Allison. That was the only motion she made, but somehow she seemed to continue retreating.

“His mother was never a very good mother,” she said. “That’s why he lived with his father. But his mother still loves him. She loves him more than…” She stopped talking and gave a sob of a laugh and then said, “You like that? How I still have to talk about myself as if I’m not the mother?”

“I understand it, at least.”

She turned back to Allison and said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Serbin. I’m so sorry. I should never have involved your husband. Or you. It was just an idea that came to me in a desperate time, and I remembered your husband, remembered that training and how good he was and how remote this place was, and I thought…I thought it might work. For long enough, anyhow. Just enough time for them to be caught. I’m so sorry you’ve paid for my mistake.”

Allison stared past her and out the window to where the lights of the town glowed. On the other side of the lights, the mountains lived in blackness, and somewhere on them were Jamie Bennett’s son and Allison’s husband and the two men who smelled of smoke and blood.

“You might have made a lot of mistakes,” Allison said. “But coming to Ethan wasn’t one of them. I can promise you that. I can’t promise you that he’ll get your son back to you safely. But I can promise you that nobody has a better chance.”

“I’m going after him.”

“No, you’re not.”

“It’s why I’m here. That’s my son. You heard me say it; you’re the only one who knows. I’m going to help find him.”

“No, you’re not,” Allison repeated. “You don’t know how. If you were with Ethan, maybe. Without him…you’ll just get stopped.”

“Then help me. Tell me where Ethan would have gone.”

“I don’t know! If I knew, I’d be there myself! To tell him to quit.”

“How would Ethan have started? So far, all I know is that he’s gone to search. You have to know more than that. This is what he does. What has he told you about the way he does it?”

He would have gone to the last place he’d seen the boy. He would have hiked back up the Pilot Creek trail and found their camp, and there he would have begun to track him.

“Would he have listened?” Allison said.

“What?”

“Your son. Was he the type of kid who would have paid attention to what Ethan said? Would he have listened and retained, or would he have been too scared? Would he have been concentrating only on staying with his false identity and hoping that nobody came for him?”

“He would have listened. It’s one of the reasons we…one of the reasons I picked this approach. I wanted him off the grid, yes. But I also thought that your husband would help him. Mentally, emotionally. That he wouldn’t be alone in the way he would have been in other situations.”

Allison looked at the dark mountains again and said, “It will probably be too late.”

“I’ve got to try. Mrs. Serbin, if you have an idea, then you’ve got to let me try. Just tell me where to go or who to talk to and I will leave you alone, I will-”

“We’ll go together.”

Jamie Bennett didn’t say anything, just looked Allison up and down. Taking inventory of the damage.

“I’m burned, and I’m sore. I’m not broken. I can move.”

“You don’t need to-”

“Bullshit. Your son is out there, and my husband. And I hate hospitals.”

“You’re in one for a reason.”

Allison pushed herself upright. It wasn’t pleasant-there were throbs of pain from places she hadn’t known were hurt-but she could do it. She swung around and got her feet down on the floor. All that was required now was standing. That was all. Tango had been standing for three months. How many people did she need to explain that to? Only one. Herself.

“Stop,” Jamie Bennett said, but there wasn’t much heart in it.

“Ethan gave them escape routes this summer,” she said. “Every night, at every campsite. He said Connor-sorry, Jace-fell back when they were hiking last night. If he hasn’t been found yet, then he’s not on a trail. They would have found him. If he went into the backcountry, and if he was the type of kid who listened, then he might have tried to get out using the escape route. It would have been the only option he knew.”

“So where would he be?”

“Trying to hike into Silver Gate down the back of a mountain.”

“Silver Gate,” Jamie Bennett said. “That’s…that’s where the fire is.”

“Yes.”

“Would it be close to him?”

“I have no idea what’s happening in those mountains. Now, I know you can drive fast. You’ve demonstrated that. So drive fast again, but this time stay on the damn road, all right?”