Those Who Wish Me Dead

28

The fire came into view for the first time at the plateau that ran below Republic Peak, which Hannah and Connor reached gasping and sweating. It had not been an easy climb. They could see Amphitheater, the next peak, in the distance, and below them, a long way down, were glimmers of orange and crimson. It looked like the dying embers of the world’s largest campfire, but Hannah knew it was hardly ready to die. What looked like small flares from up here were probably flames climbing forty- or fifty-foot pines. The crews down there had lost the blaze to the wind and had likely retreated for the night. She’d heard no helicopters, which was unsurprising considering that it was dark and storms were on the way. There’d been no choppers during the day either, so she surmised that they’d thought they could contain it without the helitack units. Now they were backing off, giving themselves some rest and counting on rain, waiting to see what the storm front would do to the fire.

“That’s it?” Connor said, staring down at the colored glows. There was awe in his voice.

“That’s it.”

“I didn’t know we’d be able to see the actual flames. I thought it would just be smoke. I know it’s not right to say, but from way up here, it looks kind of pretty.”

“Yes,” she said, and she was agreeing with both sentiments-it wasn’t right to say, and it was pretty. It was absolutely gorgeous, in fact. “You should see it from the ground,” she said. “When the flames turn to clouds. When the fire runs up on you like something prehistoric, and you can see it and feel it and hear it. The sounds it can make…it’s a hungry sound. That’s the best word I can give you. Hungry.”

“How do you know so much about fires?”

“Spent some time with them, Connor. Fighting them.”

“Really?” He turned to her. “They let girls do that?”

“They do.”

“And you were down there?” He pointed. “I mean, you would have been right down there?”

“Yes. Usually, we would have trenched and watched the wind and pulled back by now. Waited for sunrise. Not always, though. It depends on the weather, depends on the circumstances, what your time window looks like. Sometimes we worked all day and all night. With this weather blowing in, though, we’d be waiting. We’d keep a safe distance and wait to see what it would do to the fire.”

“Was it fun?”

She loved him for the genuine quality of the question. It was something adults would never ask; they’d search for a different word, wonder if it had been rewarding or a rush or something of that nature, but they’d want to know the same thing this kid did: Was it fun? She was silent for a long time, looking down into the shifting lights in the blackness, shapes that moved like scarlet shadows, a role reversal of light and dark.

“I worked with some wonderful people,” she said. “And I got to see some things that were…special. Majestic. There were days when, yes, it was fun. There were days when it was inspiring. Made you think of who you were in the world.”

“Why did you quit?”

“Because,” she said, “I got a taste of the other kinds of days.”

“What does that mean?”

“Sometimes you lose to it.”

“To the fire?”

“Yeah.”

“Did somebody get hurt?”

“A lot of people got hurt.”

Lightning flashed regularly and closer now than before. The warm wind wavered between calm and howling. Stars disappeared in the west as the clouds thickened and crept along. Moisture was heavy in the air. Every warning was being offered, the mountains whispering one imperative instruction: Get low, get low, get low. She glanced back at the fire. Miles away still. Not a chance in this world that it would climb toward them fast enough. Not a chance. And if these lightning storms blew in, and they were exposed on top…

“We’re going to go another quarter of a mile,” she said. “Maybe half, no more. And then we’re going to shut it down for the night. It’ll be windy, and it might be rainy. But we’re going to stay up top, where we can see what’s happening. In the morning, we’ll figure out how to call for help.”

“Ethan said people should always be off the peaks when it storms. He said at this altitude, you’re already sitting on an aluminum roof, and the last thing you should do is start climbing an aluminum ladder.”

“Ethan sounds like a very smart guy,” she said, reaching for her pack. “But I don’t know if Ethan’s been burned yet, Connor. I have. We’re going to stay on top.”

He didn’t argue, just walked on with her, but she knew he wasn’t altogether wrong. Storms were coming, there was no question of that. The wind was gusting just as hard as it had been but now it was sticky-hot; it had swung around to the southwest, and when the gusts came, they howled. Looking back toward the tower, you could see a sky littered with stars, the Milky Way never more stunning than it was in Montana at night, but to the west, the stars vanished, and that was trouble. The front that had pushed all this warm air ahead of it and caused havoc with the fires was about to reveal itself for the monster it was, and Hannah expected it to be a hell of a storm. It had been building too long to go any other way.

The question was, How long before it arrived? She didn’t want to be on the peaks when it came, but hiking down the steep, rock-scree slopes at night was begging to break an ankle. If one of them got hurt, both of them were likely to die come morning.

She also didn’t want to go down into the tree-lined drainages. The fire was still far away, but not far enough for her comfort. And with a wind like that behind the blaze? No. She wouldn’t chance it. They’d stay high as long as they could, and they’d camp if they had to, and if the rain came, maybe it would slow the spread of the flames.

Or maybe you’ll get killed by lightning.

It was a greater risk than the fire, she knew. But still…

Deploy or die, Hannah! Deploy or die!

She wouldn’t take them down into those gulches yet. Not until she knew what the wind was going to do. Up here on the high rocks there was nothing for the fire to eat. Below them lay the land of the burnout, where scorched trees glittered like a field of candles, tributes to the dead, and that led all the way to where the main blaze raged, several thousand feet down. The wind and the terrain would hold the fire there.

“How long are your legs?”

Hannah stopped walking and looked at Connor. He’d been in front since they left-after informing her of the importance of rotating pace setters so that they didn’t wear each other out-and he hadn’t talked much as the first mile fell behind them and darkness came on.

“Pardon?”

“Are they the same length?”

“I don’t follow, Connor.”

“Some people have one leg that’s a little longer than the other. I don’t know about mine. They look the same, but it’s probably not an obvious difference. Do you know about yours?”

“I’m pretty sure they’re the same.”

“Well, if they’re not, we should know.”

“Yeah?”

“We’ll be veering in that direction. If your legs aren’t even. You veer without even thinking about it. That’s one way you get lost.”

“Connor, we can still see what we’re walking toward. We aren’t going to get lost.”

“It’s just something to keep in mind,” he said. There was a touch of defensiveness in his voice. He was full of these random facts, and while many of them-like the length of people’s legs-were useless, she had to concede that the boots had been a decent idea, and leaving the light on a very good one, and bringing the map so obvious as to embarrass her. She also realized that he took comfort in the odd collection of wilderness trivia. It was where he’d gone to convince himself that it was worth getting up off the floor and trying to run. Where he went to keep the fear away.

“What else?” she said.

“Nothing.” He was disgruntled now, and she couldn’t have that.

“No,” she said, “I’m serious. What else should we be thinking about?”

He was silent for a moment and then said, “We’re going uphill.”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s a good thing, I think, except for the storm.”

“Why is that?”

“Most people go downhill when they’re lost. I forget exactly what the percentage is, but it’s high. We’re not lost, but we’re trying to get out, so it’s about the same thing, and most of the time, people who want out of the woods head downhill.”

“Makes sense.”

“Not necessarily. If people are looking for you, it’s a lot easier for them to see you if you’re up high than if you’re down in a valley. You can signal better from up high. And you can always see a lot better. Like in your tower, right? It was easier to figure out the route from your tower than it would have been on the ground, just looking at the map.”

“Good point.” She liked this, wanted to keep him talking. The closer they got to that fire, the sharper the teeth of her memories became. Distraction was valuable.

“Lost skiers always want to go downhill,” he said. “Percentage-wise, that is. And lost mountain climbers want to go up. That’s pretty obvious when you think about it. It’s, like, their habit, you know? So even though things have gotten bad for them, their habits aren’t gone. Those stay.”

“Right.”

“It’s a profile. Like the way they try to figure out who a serial killer is. If someone is lost, they’ll make a profile of that person. So that’s what they’ll be doing to find us. They’ll be trying to think like us. I wonder what they’ll come up with. I mean, who are we, right? We don’t have a profile. Maybe I do, and maybe you do, but when they put us together? I think we’d be pretty confusing.”

“I certainly hope so.” Their pace was unbearably slow, but it had to be. It was hard walking, and unlike Connor, Hannah didn’t have a headlamp, so she was using a flashlight. The footwork was treacherous and if you dared to look more than a few steps ahead, the sudden shift in light was disorienting. So they marched on slowly, heads down, twin lights in a dark, windy world. She hadn’t hiked the mountains at night-without a fire crew, at least-in exactly thirteen months. At the start of the last season, she and Nick had taken an overnight trip to a lake fed by glacier melt and had camped alone there beside its frigid waters.

That night was the only time she’d ever heard a cougar scream. They’d been setting up the tent, and the lake had a sunset glow that seemed to come from within the water and everything had been still and beautiful and silent until that ungodly shriek.

Nick found the cat-it was sitting on a ledge across the lake from them, up on the rimrock, a shadow against the stone. It looked like it was black in the fading sunlight, but black mountain lions didn’t exist. A trick of the light. When Nick spotted the cougar, Hannah wondered if they should leave. Nick said no but that they shouldn’t go any closer either. If it was a female and she had cubs, she’d protect them.

“She didn’t have to let us know she was there,” he’d said.

The cat watched them for a long time and never moved and eventually its shadow blurred with the others, and night claimed the ledge and then the mountain. Hannah hadn’t slept well, knowing that it was out there in the dark, but that was all right. They didn’t spend much time sleeping anyhow.

“You need me to slow down?”

Hannah jerked her head up, moving her eyes out of the past and into the glare of Connor’s headlamp. He’d pulled well ahead of her.

“I’m fine.”

“We can rest. You’re breathing pretty hard.”

Actually, she’d been close to crying.

“Okay,” she said. “We’ll take a rest.” She unclipped the canteen from her belt and sipped some water and said, “I used to be in a lot better shape.”

“You don’t look too old,” Connor said.

She had to laugh at that. “Thanks.”

“No, I just mean…you said it the way an old person would. How old are you?”

“Twenty-eight, Connor. I am twenty-eight.”

“See, that’s still young.”

It certainly was. She had her whole life ahead of her, she’d been told.

On her twenty-seventh birthday, Nick had given her a watch, along with a card on which he’d written a line from an old John Hiatt song. Time is our friend, because for us there is no end.

He’d been dead nine days later.

Because for us there is no end.

It had been a beautiful sentiment that day. She’d kissed him and told him that it was true. It had proven to be, in a terrible way. There was no escape from him-time for them did not and would not end.

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” Connor said.

“You didn’t.”

“Then why are you crying?”

She hadn’t known she was. She wiped her face and said, “Sorry. It’s been a long day.”

“Yeah.”

She remembered then that Connor had come her way in the dark, with that one headlight bobbing through the blackness to her. He had been on the move for many hours to get to her, and he hadn’t slept since he’d arrived. She was standing here crying over the dead, but right in front of her, the living needed help.

“We’re going to go just a bit farther,” she said. “I want to get a little more distance between us and the tower. Then we’ll rest for a while.”

“You think that’s safe?”

She pointed ahead, into the blackness. “We’ve got to do some serious climbing at some point. Up or down, it doesn’t matter, it’s going to be hard. Going down is more dangerous, probably, especially in the dark. So we’ll push on just a little more. Then get some rest.”

“Okay. You sure you’re all right?”

She clipped her canteen back on her belt. “Just fine, Connor. I’m just fine. Let’s keep walking.”

29

They spoke just as Allison had promised they would: Ethan was the focus but he was not part of the conversation; it swirled around him. One thing he learned from listening was their names, or at least the names by which they called themselves. The other thing he learned was that they were the most chilling men he’d ever encountered. At first, he believed it was because they were empty of fear. Later, he decided it was because they were just empty, period.

“Ethan tells me the searchers found no sign of the boy. Now, so far Ethan has had a propensity to tell the truth. Would you say I received it this time, Patrick?”

“I would, Jack. I would. I’ve been with them most of the day. There was no sighting. They spent some time at a fire tower, where they spoke with a lookout, and then they moved on with renewed purpose. As if she’d told them something that encouraged them.”

“A perfect match to Ethan’s account. As I said, I believe he’s an honest man.”

“An honorable quality.”

“Isn’t it, though? And noble. He chose to join us simply to protect his wife. The man has had ample opportunities to cause trouble for me, perhaps even to escape, and yet here he is, walking beside us, guiding us even. Why would a man do that for the likes of us?”

“To keep the wife alive, I’d say.”

“Correct again. And Ethan, I tell you, he is one loyal husband. He’s working hard, and working against the clock. All for her.”

“Protecting her.”

“Exactly. The man appears to be nothing short of a local legend, and you know what? I believe he’s earned his reputation. That rarest of breeds.”

“He seems noble, as you say. Loyal, certainly. But here’s my question, Jack, and bear in mind that I hardly wish to impugn a good man’s character.”

“Of course not.”

“We agree that Ethan is a noble, brave man, a smart man, and a loyal one. Do I believe he’d do anything in his power to save his wife? Certainly. But I have to confess, Jack, that I have my doubts that he’s willing to give up the boy so easily.”

“Interesting.”

“He’s earned his reputation for protection, has he not? For salvation. Yet we are to believe that he’s guiding us to a boy, knowing all the while that we intend to kill that boy?”

“You’re dismissing the power of his marriage vows?”

“I’d also say that he looks at me with hate in his eyes. Disgust. Loathing. Why? Because I’ve killed. And yet, as I said, he’s guiding us to the boy. He’s playing a role in a child’s death now, and he can rationalize it away, because he believes that he’s protecting his wife. Perhaps I can accept that. Perhaps.”

“What troubles you, then?”

“He knows why we’ve come for the boy. He knows that the boy poses a threat. And, being the very bright man that he is, Ethan should understand something else by now. Can you guess what that is, Jack?”

“It would seem, using fairly basic reasoning, that both Ethan and his wife represent threats to us as well.”

“So you see the flaw here?”

“I do.”

Ethan could hear thunder. A prolonged rumble in the west. Somewhere ahead of them, a limb cracked loose from a tree and fell, thrashing down through the branches. The wind had been blowing steadily since they arrived on the trail but now it was gusting. The smell of the smoke rode along with it, stronger than it had been before. He had one flashlight, taken from the burned man’s truck, and it was not bright. Behind him, the brothers walked in darkness.

His plan was gone, Republic Peak no longer offering him the opportunity he’d envisioned, and he was trying to adapt, but it was hard. With the weapons and the numbers in their favor, it was very hard.

Where is Luke Bowden? he wondered. Earlier, he’d demanded that Roy bring Luke out of the mountains. He hadn’t wanted any help, because he’d had a plan. Now he had nothing, and he wanted the help.

Maybe Luke didn’t listen, he told himself. It’s possible. Probable, even. He doesn’t like to lose a trail any more than you do. He’ll have gone back to find it, and he will hear you coming, and he will know that you should be alone.

Luke would be armed. Luke would be armed and he would move like the night breeze. He might be watching them now. It no longer mattered whether he’d found the boy or not. All that mattered was that he saw the boy’s pursuers in time.

He will have to come this way. Either he’s still trailing, in which case we will catch up to him eventually, or he will pass this way when he heads back out of the mountains. He will see us, and he will know what to do.

Even better, Ethan could tell him what to do. Ethan realized he was thinking like a passive man, which was both deadly and unnecessary. He wasn’t helpless. He knew an ally existed out here, and the Blackwell brothers did not. He could signal Luke; he could do things that only someone who knew Ethan and knew the mountains would notice. Noise would be good, for one thing. Light signals, for another. He had only one light, but its beam could tell a story.

When the burned man spoke again, there was a trace of amused pleasure in his voice.

“He must have determined that there is no difference between himself and his wife and the boy from our perspective, so he has surely wondered what the endgame is. I believe he’s been wondering about it for many hours now. Virtually since we met. He’s had, as I mentioned, opportunities to change our path. Instead he chose to carry on, knowing that each hour brings his wife closer to death, and yet each step toward the boy does the same. It’s fascinating to watch. Fascinating to consider. Because he’s seen it all clearly, weighed his options, and made his decision. He will pursue the boy because if he doesn’t, it simply speeds us toward the inevitable. We will kill him for lying and wasting our time, and what good would that do his wife?”

“What do you make of this, then? Knowing these things, what would you say Ethan is thinking right now?”

“Well, he has no intention of finding the boy or allowing his wife to die.”

Ethan ignored them, let them talk while he continued to hike. As he walked, he passed his palm over the beam of the flashlight. Quick, flickering motions, his hand moving like a Las Vegas blackjack dealer’s. He did it in sets of three. Sets of three meant one thing to a trained searcher: distress. Luke Bowden was a trained searcher.

“That’s my conclusion as well,” Patrick Blackwell said. “Which means…”

“He intended to kill me.”

“I believe so. He wasn’t counting on me, then. I’ve hindered him. This is the reason for his apparent antipathy toward me.”

“He doesn’t seem to have taken to you, no.”

“Third wheel. It’s often been my curse.”

“But I don’t sense he’s a beaten man just yet. An unhappy one, yes, quite disgruntled about your joining our quest, but not beaten. And so he may still try, Patrick. I’m telling you, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he tried to kill us both.”

Ethan stopped and looked back at him. The burned man was smiling, and when he saw Ethan’s face, his smile turned into a laugh. Loud and genuine and delighted.

“You’re going to try,” he said. “Good for you, Ethan. You are going to try.”

Ethan shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m going to succeed.” It was important to keep their attention on him. Let them not even consider the idea that there might be a watcher in the woods.

The burned man turned to the other and said, “You hear that? He’s going to succeed.”

“It will be fun to see, won’t it?”

“It certainly will. Let’s walk along and see how his confidence holds up.”

Ethan didn’t understand the full weight of that remark for another quarter mile. That was when they found Luke Bowden’s body in the rocks.

30

He was on the side of the trail, stretched out on his back, blood pooled around him, eyes to the stars. Ethan stopped walking when the shape of the body came into view, and though he recognized him immediately, his mind tried to reject it. Not Luke, no, it couldn’t be Luke, because Luke was too good and Luke was also the wild card that was supposed to tilt this back in Ethan’s favor. The last best hope.

His first reaction was a foolish one-try to help. He went to the body and dropped onto his knees beside it and reached for Luke’s hand, thinking he might find a pulse, and if he did, it wasn’t too late. He had Luke’s cold hand in his own when he finally focused on the source of the blood. A diagonal line was laced through Luke’s throat, and in the flashlight glow, Ethan could see the cartilage of the larynx exposed, the blood around it already drying and collecting dust from that endless western wind.

“A bit late for medical attention,” Patrick Blackwell said. “Let’s not linger too long, because I can assure you, it is a pointless exercise. You’ll not breathe any life back into him.”

“Damn you,” Ethan said. The words were soft and choked. “This wasn’t needed. All you came for was-”

“I’m aware of my own goals, thank you. And on the matter of what was needed, I’d differ strongly. He was a curious man, and he had a radio, and I’m afraid that was not a pleasing combination for me.”

Ethan didn’t speak. There was no point to it. Words from him would do nothing but bring more from them, and he believed their words would drive him mad soon. He looked at his old friend’s body. Luke had been done; he could have called it quits along with the rest of them, but he didn’t, because he was a rescuer. The search had not been successful and so he had doubled back after a long, hard day and continued on in the darkness, looking for the lost boy.

Ethan’s lost boy.

“You didn’t need to,” he said again. He couldn’t help himself, looking at that throat wound, thinking of the waste of it all. Thinking of Luke’s wife, who’d danced with her husband at Miner’s Saloon just a few weeks ago, full of laughter. She was always laughing, seemed as if she’d never stop.

This would stop her.

“Did you extract anything of use from him?” Jack Blackwell said. He’d joined Ethan in the dusty rocks and was looking at the body as if it were a discarded cigarette butt. “Or were the circumstances not favorable for talk?”

“He wanted to do most of the talking, I’m afraid. I gathered only that he was looking for the boy. He was, as I said, curious about me. Particularly my rifle. I was hoping to ease his concerns, as you can imagine-”

“Of course.”

“-and so I offered him the rifle so that he might be reassured. At this point it became clear that he desired to speak with some people on his radio, and I thought that was less than ideal.”

“Understandable.”

“From there, we had little chance for conversation. But since he returned this way, I can only imagine he did so because he believed the search party had taken a wrong turn earlier.”

“Ethan’s theory as well.”

“I had some time to think about that. I have to ask: How would a boy fourteen years of age, with limited knowledge of the mountains, manage to elude a quality search party that was familiar with the terrain?”

“Your suggestion seems to be that Ethan knows more than he says?”

“I’ve wondered, at least. It would seem that the boy had a contingency plan, would it not? And if such a plan was in place, well, it would most likely require Ethan’s expertise.”

“Ethan, your thoughts?”

This came from the burned man, the one called Jack, and Ethan was so numb to them now, he almost didn’t respond. It took him a moment to realize the question had been directed at him. He was still holding Luke’s hand.

“You’d like my thoughts?” he said.

“Indeed.”

“I think that you should die slowly. With every hurt in the world.”

The burned man smiled sadly and sighed. “Ethan. There’s no time for this.”

“Agreed,” Patrick said. “I think we should get moving again.”

Jack got to his feet and put one hand on Ethan’s shoulder and used the other one to press the gun to the back of his head. He lifted Ethan by his shirt, and Ethan didn’t fight him, just released Luke Bowden’s hand and stepped away. He wished that Luke’s eyes were closed. The dead always seemed to prefer to watch, though. He’d noticed that with corpses over the years. They were looking for something in the end, almost always.

“I don’t know where the boy is,” he said. “Neither did Luke. He could have found him for you as well as I could have, don’t you see that? You should have just used him, killed me; it would have been the same. Neither of us knows where he is.”

“You’ll forgive me, I’m sure, if I say I have difficulty believing that,” Patrick Blackwell said. “I’ve been all day in these mountains, Ethan. I’ve covered some ground, and I’ve spent plenty of time with my eye to the scope. Either the boy is possessed of remarkable speed and endurance, or he managed to hide without a trace after leaving a clear trail for the first several hours of his journey.”

Eye to the scope. Ethan looked at his rifle then, that bit of machinery that gave the other man dominion. Ethan wasn’t much of a gun guy. He’d used them, of course, had trained with them in the Air Force, and he owned a few now, but he wasn’t even an armchair expert. It was a heavy rifle, that much was clear, bolt-action, maybe a.300 magnum. It would shoot long and it would shoot accurately, and with that scope, even an amateur would stand a killing chance. This man was not an amateur.

They began to move again, and Ethan walked numbly ahead. All his plans were gone; his ability to plan seemed gone. They walked away and left Luke in his own drying blood.

They were walking in a well-spaced formation, with Jack directly behind Ethan, and Patrick floating some twenty feet in the rear. The men hadn’t discussed this arrangement, just assumed it, and it was a good one. Ethan could tell, based on the volume of Patrick’s voice, that the man changed his pace now and then, sometimes stopping entirely, and Ethan imagined that was because he was scouting the darkness and responding to what he heard or felt or saw. Patrick knew something about tracking, there was no question.

And yet he’d been unable to find the boy. It wasn’t an irrelevant point, Ethan thought. Not at all. Ethan had spent time with Connor. The kid was fit, and he would have been running hard on adrenaline, but he was not adept at woodcraft. So how had he vanished?

“One bit of information I was able to glean before things took an untidy turn,” Patrick said, “was that the gentleman had decided to return to the fire lookout.”

“And why was that?”

“He didn’t have a chance to clarify, unfortunately. But I can tell you from my own experience that the boy’s trail was clear enough until the searchers were redirected by the lookout.”

“Then I’d say maybe the lookout lied.”

“I’d suggest we stop at the lookout, then. See what the situation there is and see if perhaps we can get a different version of events than the searchers received today.”

“I think that sounds fine,” Jack said. “Ethan? Your opinion?”

For a moment he wasn’t going to speak, had decided he was done responding to them, but then he thought of the woman from the fire tower and the possibility that the men were right, that she’d lied. There would have been one reason only for her to lie, and that was if Connor had convinced her to. If she’d lied to help him, it made sense.

“We don’t need to stop at the tower,” he said. “That would be foolish. We only need to consider that she lied.”

“And how better to know if she lied than to ask her?” Patrick said. “All due respect to your considerable skills, of course, but I doubt that you’re going to sniff the bark of a hemlock tree at just the right angle and know more about the lie than she does, Ethan.”

“It’s foolish,” he repeated. “A needless risk. She lied for a reason, just as you say. That means she’s prepared on some level. Nobody lies to a group of searchers about a missing child without cause. What do you think the cause is?”

Jack spoke in a mock whisper. “I suspect Ethan is suggesting that the boy has warned the lady of our imminent arrival, Patrick.”

“A damned clever man, he is. His talents are wasted in his current profession, I might say. Should have been a detective. Think of the lives that might have been saved.”

“Well, he’s trying to save one tonight. Give the lad a chance.”

“I’d love to. All the same, though…I simply feel we should speak with her directly. You understand?”

“I do. Allow me to convey it to our guide.” Jack cleared his throat and then spoke in a mournful voice. “I suppose we are going to meet with dissent here, Ethan. While your perspective is certainly appreciated, you have to grant my brother and me a little leeway. We are given to somewhat different methods of tracking than those to which you are accustomed. Surely, in time, we’ll all figure out how to work together. But for now, there must be a give-and-take, don’t you see? A bit of patience.”

“There’s no need,” Ethan said again.

“Patience,” Jack whispered, and nudged him with the gun.

31

It took only Allison’s signature to get them out of the hospital. She heard the words risk and liability on a loop as she nodded her head and said that she understood and signed her name again and again, an awkward, unfamiliar signature, crafted with her left hand.

They had given her pain pills but she didn’t take any yet. Not at the start. She wasn’t sure how bad the pain would get, and she’d always been taught that it was wise to save your bullets.

“Why didn’t he leave a way for you to contact him?” Jamie Bennett asked as they left the hospital. “It doesn’t seem like Ethan.”

Allison didn’t like how she said that-she didn’t know the first damn thing about Ethan-but she couldn’t argue either. It wasn’t like Ethan.

“I think he expected it to be fast,” she said.

“But it hasn’t been.”

“No.”

Jamie had rented a Toyota 4Runner instead of a Chevy Tahoe this time, but if she was less inclined to run a foreign car off the highway than a domestic one, it wasn’t obvious. Allison endured three stomach-clenching, tire-testing whips through the switchbacks before she said, “Imagine how Jace is going to feel when they rescue him and he comes home to find a dead mother.”

“What?”

“Slow down, Jamie. Slow the hell down.”

“Sorry.” In the pale light from the instrument panel, Allison saw the blond woman’s jaw clench. “It’s just that I don’t know what’s happening,” Jamie said. “He’s out there, and he’s alone, and…or maybe he’s not alone. Maybe not anymore.”

The way she said it, she obviously wasn’t thinking of her son’s having been rescued.

“Ethan will find him,” Allison said, but her words rang hollow. She knew as much about her husband’s situation right now as this woman did about her son’s.

“Right.”

“We’ll get you back to him.”

“He won’t be happy to see me.”

“What?”

She took another switchback, but gentler this time, actually aware of the brake pedal, and her eyes were hard to read in the darkness.

“Trust me,” she said. “He won’t be happy. Wherever he is right now, whatever is happening, he’s blaming me. And he’s right. It was my idea. Such a stupid one. Thinking he’d be safe from them up here? I sent him away, and I left him alone, and I told him he’d be safe.”

“All that matters is that he does see you. Let’s worry about that right now.”

“Okay.”

Allison had no idea what else to tell her. What did you say to a woman whose son was somewhere in these mountains with killers on his heels, and all thanks to her? Everything that came to Allison’s mind sounded like an empty reassurance. She wondered if it might have been different if she’d been a mother herself. Did you know the code, then, did you have the right keys for the right locks? There had been some days, usually when she was saying good-bye to a group of boys at the end of the summer, when she’d wished she’d had the experience. But she also believed in what she and Ethan had decided years ago-they didn’t need to have children to have an impact on their lives. She’d seen that play out every year.

Then the boys went home. Then it was just the two of them again, for many months. She didn’t know what this woman was feeling, couldn’t, never would. And some dark part of her was relieved by that.

“Where’s his father?” Allison asked.

Jamie didn’t answer immediately. Then she wet her lips, pushed her hair back over her ear, and kept her eyes firmly ahead as she said, “In Indiana, on the phone with his attorneys and the police, trying to make sure that if…that when Jace is found, I won’t have any say in what happens next.”

“Can he do that?”

“I won’t fight it. When I find him, he’ll go home. And home isn’t with me.”

“Why not?”

“Because I didn’t want to be a mother, Mrs. Serbin. I have told this story countless times to countless people, and I have never said that. I have hedged and rationalized and made excuses and told lies. I have not told anyone other than my ex-husband that I never wanted to be pregnant in the first place and that I spent the months after I found out I was trying to talk myself into wanting to be a mother, without any luck. I thought it would just happen, maybe. That the body would convince the mind as things went along. It didn’t happen. I had a child but never wanted to be a mother. How horrible is that?”

They wound onward and upward and neither of them spoke again until they saw the taillights of another car and Jamie was forced to slow down. The change in speed seemed to disrupt the atmosphere in the car, and Allison said, “Does your ex-husband know that you’re here? Does anyone know that you’re here?”

“You do.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

“So you’re ignoring his calls. Or will he not-”

“I’ve come to bring Jace home. One way or another, I’m going to bring Jace home.”

“Maybe you should call Jace’s father. At least to tell him that-”

“Please stop.”

“What?”

“I just want to find Jace. Can we just talk about how to do that?”

“Fair enough,” Allison said, but she was thinking now about Jace and Ethan, and about the two who were probably already in the mountains, the men who spoke as if time stood still for them while they killed, after which they moved on at their leisure, and she was suddenly certain that she didn’t want to be there when Jamie Bennett found her son. One way or another, she’d said. Words from a woman trying hard to be brave, but Jamie had not met those men and she did not know what the other way would be like.

The hail started just after they reached ten thousand feet. By then, Jace was gasping without shame, not even trying to hide how winded he was, and Hannah was stopping to rest every fifty or sixty steps. The warm wind had continued to blow in their faces, thunder and occasional lightning behind it, and now came the hail. It was a shower, and the ice pellets were not small. They bombarded the plateau and rattled off the rocks, and the wind picked up to a howl.

“We’ve got to stop,” Jace said.

“Where?” Hannah answered. She had to shout at him even though he was just a few feet away.

He wanted to have an answer for that. He felt like he should have. What had Ethan said about this? Nothing; that was the problem.

“I could build a shelter,” he said. But he couldn’t. He didn’t have the plastic, and there were no trees nearby for a primitive shelter. Even if there had been, what could he build in this wind? The branches would be torn from his hands. Ethan could do something, but Ethan wasn’t here.

“We stay high,” Hannah told him. “Storms like this blow over fast.”

The hail was drilling down on them, stinging, and Hannah had one hand up to shield her face, but Jace could tell there was no confidence in her. She didn’t know what to do about the storm either. This was supposed to be his job, but all he knew was that they didn’t belong on the peaks in a storm. Great. It wasn’t that easy to get off the peaks though.

“I’ll put up that shelter you gave me. We can get in that-”

“We’re not getting in that. And it’s for fire anyhow. Not lightning. We’ve got to keep going, Connor.”

He turned and tried to look back into the wind then had to lower his head against the stinging ice. He didn’t like her choice of staying high. Lightning had been one of the first things Ethan talked about when they got up into the peaks. But down below was the glaring glitter of the mountainside on fire and the smell of smoke so strong that it made his eyes water. He didn’t know which choice was worse. He wished he had someone else to ask. He wanted to defer, to avoid making a decision. That was what parents were for. You might not like their decisions, but you had to live with them. Up here, though, with the storms ahead and the men who wanted him dead behind, he wasn’t sure if even his parents could make the right decisions.

“I wonder if my dad knows where I am,” he said.

That got Hannah’s attention. She turned back and said, “I thought they sent you up here to hide you?”

“I mean right now. I wonder what my parents have been told. I wonder if Ethan even made it down to tell them. Because if they were told…” His voice broke and he cleared his throat. “If they were told, why hasn’t anyone come for me?”

“People came for you. We chose to send them away.”

She was right, of course. But he didn’t mean those people. He’d meant his parents themselves, with armed police, the way it had been the night he saw the killings. He’d been scared then, but he’d been in the right place too. With the right people. Everything had happened the way it should have, at first. But then the police couldn’t find the men he’d seen, and now…

“Nobody will ever know what it was like,” he said.

Lightning flashed and showed Hannah’s face in bright white, her eyes dark against her skin, like sockets in a skull.

“I’ll know,” she said. “Connor, your parents sent you here because they thought it was the right thing, you understand that?”

“Look what it’s turned into. This is the right thing?”

He wanted to quit again, the way he had the night before, and the way he had when he saw the man with the rifle through the binoculars. He’d done well for a while. Once they were in the woods and walking, he’d tried to keep his survivor mentality. It was leaving him once more, though, draining away; he was like a battery on empty, and as he squinted against the smoke in the air and let the ice drum away on his skin, he didn’t know if he could recharge it again.

“The right choice can go very bad sometimes,” Hannah told him. “You have no idea.”

He sat down and pulled his water bottle free. He was thirsty, and you weren’t supposed to get thirsty. That meant you’d gone too long without water. Sip, sip, sip, Ethan said. Don’t chug, don’t gulp, just keep sipping.

Now he gulped, drinking as much as he could. Even the water tasted smoky. The wind was full of it and he was glad for the sting because maybe that meant she wouldn’t know that he was trying not to cry. He looked back into the darkness they’d come through, wondering where the men from the quarry were.

“Would you have done it?” he said.

“Sent you here?”

He nodded.

“If I thought it was the safest place.”

“You would have sent me alone. Really?”

She didn’t answer.

“It was my mom’s idea,” he said. “And she left when I was three. I see her on holidays and in the summer. That’s all. And still my dad let her come up with this.”

“Stop bitching,” Hannah said.

“What?”

“You’re here. You’re not happy about how you got here, and neither am I, but that’s not going to change reality. Here’s your reality: I’m not going to let you sit on your ass on a mountain and wait to die. Now get up.”

The next flash of lightning showed her face, and he saw how intense she looked. Angry, almost.

“You don’t get to quit,” she said. “I will by God get you out of these mountains safely, but you don’t get to quit. You’ll go home and tell them what you think and I hope they have the faintest idea, the faintest sense, of what you endured. But right now? Stand up.”

He got to his feet slowly.

“Tell me the mistake you’re making,” she said. “You’re full of observations when it comes to my mistakes. Now pay attention to yourself. What mistake did you just make?”

“Quitting.”

“You weren’t actually going to quit on me. I know better than that, even if you don’t. Tell me the real mistake.”

Jace had no idea what she was talking about.

“You’re going to run out of water,” she said. “And once we get close to the fire, it’s going to be awfully hot, and you are going to wish you hadn’t wasted all of your water up here. So refill when we get to the creek, and then ration it. Because despite what you might think, we are going to get down to that fire.”

32

A light became visible in the tower when they were still a mile from it, and Ethan saw the glow and stopped walking, only to be nudged again by the pistol.

“Guess she’s home,” Jack said. “That’s marvelous, don’t you think? Would hate to find that we’d missed our chance.”

Ethan looked at the light and thought of the woman who waited with it and tried to imagine a scenario in which he could protect her.

Came up empty.

The path was clear to them now, they knew the way even without him, and so he was expendable. They were keeping him on hand in the event that they needed him later, but that need was not so great as to save his life if he did something dangerous. And all of the options left to him were dangerous. Fight or flight, that was what he had, primal as it got, and he’d passed on better opportunities to make both choices before. He’d waited to reach Republic, only to be reminded of that thing that every survivor had to always consider-disaster was never a destination, but always a detour.

“The best thing to do is to let me talk with her,” he said. “I’m the one who understands that boy, and she would know about me by now.”

“Interesting option, don’t you think, Patrick?”

“Fascinating. But I have to say that I don’t care for it.”

“You feel the need to be involved in the discussion, is that it?”

“Well, I’ve come all this way.”

“True. Would be a shame to endure so much and watch from the shadows while Ethan reaps the rewards.”

“Indeed.”

“I suppose we’ll put it to a vote then. All in favor of staying together?”

Both men said, “Aye.”

“All opposed?”

Ethan didn’t speak. Just kept walking toward that light.

“Two in favor and one abstains. Not unanimous, perhaps, but as close as you’ll get.”

When they finally broke out of the woods and headed across the final stretch leading uphill to the lookout tower, Ethan could only hope that she was watching. If the light was on, she was likely awake. If she’d lied about the boy, she knew there was a threat, and maybe…maybe Connor was up there. It was possible she was hiding him now, trying to figure out what to do. Or waiting on help. Something. She might not be alone.

Jack was just behind Ethan, and Patrick floated some fifteen steps back and to the right. They reached the base of the stairs and all of them looked up, studying the cab. No shadows moved inside of it. They went up, turned at the first landing, up again, turn, up again, turn.

Forgive me, Ethan was thinking, a silent whisper to the woman above them. I had planned it to go another way.

He came to the top and there the wind blew hard enough that he wanted to grab the handrail. For the first time, he could see clearly through the windows. There was a table, a stove, an empty cot. Nobody moved inside.

“Open the door and then step out of the way,” Jack said. The musical good-natured tone was gone from his voice. All bloody business now.

Ethan opened the door. Stepped aside and then glanced behind him, expecting to see that Jack had drawn the pistol and was in a shooter’s stance. Instead, Jack stood casually, the black hat cocked low on his head, one hand on the guardrail. It was Patrick, down on the landing below them, who had the rifle to his shoulder.

“Go on in and say hello,” Jack said.

Ethan turned and walked through the door and called out hello, and though he had expected the answering silence, he did not expect to see what he did.

The lookout’s radio was demolished.

“Something went wrong here,” he said, and he was genuinely puzzled. He’d anticipated some possibilities-Connor’s presence, for example-but not this. He reached out and picked up a broken plastic fragment and then a severed cord. Why would she have destroyed her own radio? Her only chance to call for help?

“Are you sure you’re the only ones looking for the boy?” he said. “Besides the right people, that is?”

Besides Luke Bowden, his blood still hardening in the mountain breeze. Besides Ethan.

“Well, this is interesting,” Jack said. “She’s gone, brother. And she destroyed her radio before she left. Apparently she didn’t want us to be able to report her poor job performance.”

Ethan moved away from the radio, studying the room. Saw the Osborne fire-finder and saw the empty glass beneath it. The map was gone.

“They’re on the move,” he said. “She didn’t destroy the radio. He did.”

He understood it now. The broken radio, the lie to the searchers. Connor did not trust help. Connor did not trust anyone.

“How are you so sure?” Jack said.

“Her life revolves around that radio. It’s her job and her lifeline. To him, though? It would have been the scariest thing in the room. He found his way here because it was easy to navigate to. If she turned on the lights, like she did earlier? You can see it for a long ways. So he saw it, and he came here, and once he was here, she went to call it in. That would have been the natural reaction.” He pointed at the remains of the radio. “And there we have the unnatural reaction. That would be Connor. He wouldn’t want his location broadcasted.”

“Why lie to the searchers, though?” This was from Patrick.

“I’m not certain about that.” Ethan moved to the window, stared out at the dark expanse of mountains. There were faint red ribbons down below, where the fires coiled and burned. “But she believed him. He told her what he was running from, and she believed him.”

“The lights went on less than an hour ago,” Jack said. “They’ve not gone far.”

Ethan could see his own face reflected in the glass, seemingly part of the maze of dark mountains and ribbons of fire. He watched his mouth begin to smile as if it were something beyond his control.

“I can find them,” he said.

“I’d hope so. You’re rather worthless to us otherwise.”

“I can find them,” he repeated, but again he was whispering in his head to this anonymous woman from the lookout, not an apology this time. Thank you. I will not fail you now.

Jack looked up. His burns glistened under the light. Ethan had grown used to seeing him in darkness, had forgotten the power of his hard blue eyes.

“Well, the job is yours if you want it. If not…”

“We can’t find them standing here,” Ethan said.

“No, I would think not. But before we head off into the night, Ethan, I’d like to hear your ideas. They’ve left the safety of the tower, which would suggest they feared our arrival. Where do you think they’re going?”

“Republic Peak.”

Jack looked at him for a long time. He did not speak. When the silence was broken, it was broken by Patrick, standing at the door with his rifle raised.

“They’re going to climb?”

Ethan nodded. “It’s the highest point they can reach. There, in the morning, they can do two things: see if anyone is pursuing them, and get the clearest possible location to signal for help.”

Jack waved a hand at the radio. “Signaling doesn’t seem to be a desire.”

“She might be able to change his mind. Another night alone in the woods might change it too. But regardless, he’ll want to get high, not low. He’s already proven that, coming up here. He wants to be able to see where the threat is.”

Republic Peak did not hold the appeal it once had, as a kill site. But going there still accomplished a few things. It would surely take him away from the boy. Connor wanted out of the mountains. The woman from this lookout wanted out of the mountains. You didn’t get out of them by going higher. So they’d go low, and if Ethan could keep these bastards going high, the odds of intersection were nonexistent. After that, it wasn’t a matter of killing anyone, though he’d certainly enjoy it. It was a matter of killing time. The burned man had used Ethan’s knowledge of his brother to convince Ethan to bring him to the boy, selling a story that the other man waited inside the hospital, a killer poised for action at Allison’s door. Now they were all together, which meant that no one waited outside Allison’s door. The ticking clock was a ruse, a con. There were only two brothers, and they were both with Ethan now. He didn’t have to kill them, just outlast them. Back in Billings, things had to be happening. New search parties gathering, new information being collected. Jamie Bennett would be involved by now. Facts would be replacing fiction. The ticking clock was for these men, not Ethan.

“How far to Republic?” Jack asked.

“A couple miles. It won’t be an easy walk, though.”

“It hasn’t been so far.”

“That’s where they’ll go,” Ethan insisted. “And not just because it makes sense. Because it’s what he’s been taught. Him coming here today, finding elevation, checking his back trail, and then adjusting to his pursuers? He’s listening to my advice. And from Republic? He knows how to get down without using a trail.”

“How?”

“The way we planned it. That was our escape route. Getting to Republic one way, and getting down another. He knew what he was supposed to do. Now that you’ve passed him by once and given him the chance to do it, he’ll take that chance.”

This was more of the truth than Ethan wanted to tell them, but it would put him exactly where he wanted to be when the sun rose. Lost-Person Behavior 101: Those in need of rescue in the mountains tend to walk down even though they should walk up. Why walk up? Because you were far more visible to searchers.

These two men had been invisible for too long.

Jack Blackwell swiveled to look at his brother. The burned side of his face was exposed to Ethan, who took a strange satisfaction in the deepening color of the blistered flesh.

“Well, Patrick?”

“Two of them walking in the dark will certainly leave a trail. I could find it. But let’s see if Ethan can, and faster. If he’s right, then he should have no trouble with that. Otherwise…”

“He’s of little use.”

“Substantially less valuable, yes.”

“The crucible looms, then.”

“So it does.”

Patrick stepped away from the door and motioned to Ethan, who walked back out into the night wind and toward a second chance. It was the old test, his favorite training exercise, and his most familiar role: he was the wilder again.

It was no longer a killer’s game. It was a survivor’s game.

33

It took Ethan nine minutes to find their trail.

He knew, because the Blackwell brothers timed him. Patrick had suggested Ethan should be able to find it in five, Jack had countered with fifteen, and they had settled on ten. All of this covered in one of their standard conversations, washing over Ethan. In truth, he believed he had the trail located within those first five minutes, but he didn’t want to look too good, too fast.

It was not a hard trail to find, though it would be tough to follow soon. The plateau was rimmed by tall grasses that fell away to a tree line and then to rock, and each stage would increase the difficulty. Grass was one of Ethan’s favorite tracking terrains. You might not be able to find the distinct prints that mud or even dry soil offered, but you could move fast, because grass held the evidence of disturbance longer. It bent, broke, and flattened. The stories it could tell you, it told you quickly. The taller the grass, the quicker the read.

There were two paths into the grass from the lookout, and Ethan used the flashlight to determine which one was the right one. In so doing, he learned a great deal about Patrick Blackwell. The man had some level of training, certainly; he was better than his brother, but he wasn’t elite. Either he’d not received first-rate tracking instruction or he’d forgotten it swiftly, in the way that someone did if not called upon to practice the art.

In the first of the two impressions leading away from the lookout and into the tall grass, the track appeared lighter than the surrounding, undamaged vegetation, a pale beam headed west. The second was reversed: the pale grass on the outside, the beam of the path a shade darker. Subtle shifts, the sort that the untrained eye wouldn’t pause at but that a tracker’s eye had to pause at.

Patrick Blackwell studied each of them, gave each of them the same scrutiny.

That was all Ethan needed to know. Anyone who gave that darker path any kind of inspection was not capable of understanding a track. Finding it, maybe. Understanding it, no. The dark path had been left by someone walking toward the lookout. This was a fundamental rule and the simplest of tricks, one Ethan had learned from a British SAS member. It was a matter of reflected light, easily understood by anyone who observed the lines left behind a lawn mower from different angles. It was also the sort of fundamental rule that you forgot under pressure unless you practiced under pressure.

“They went this way,” Ethan said when the clock was at nine minutes, and he indicated the light path. “I’m sure of it.”

“Sure of it,” Jack said. “Ah, the confidence. Encouraging, isn’t it, Patrick?”

“Immensely,” Patrick said. He was looking at the trail with distaste, though, and Ethan understood why-he wasn’t convinced that it was the right one.

“It leads southwest,” Ethan said. “It leads toward Republic. Just as I told you. The other is older, probably left by some backpackers a few days ago. You see that, right?”

Patrick nodded.

Excellent, you prick, Ethan thought. You have no idea what you’ve missed. You might be able to see that it’s an older trail, but you had to examine it far too long to get that, if you even did.

“Onward, then,” Jack said.

They crossed through the grass and on toward lightning that was becoming more frequent. The wind that had been blowing steadily during the day was now only sputtering in uneven gusts, like an engine running out of gas. This was good for tracking, since strong, steady winds could quickly return the grass to its natural position, but bad for their destination. There were storms coming. The fast-and-hard breed. Unlikely to do much to help the early-summer drought conditions and guaranteed to be treacherous up on the peaks. On any other day, Ethan would be taking precautions now, looking to get lower and get a shelter built. Today, he hiked on and up.

Once off the plateau and through the grass, they found a stand of pines perhaps forty feet deep. Here was where an inexperienced tracker would lose himself almost immediately, and Ethan stopped once more and panned his flashlight across the area. Again he watched Patrick Blackwell from his peripheral vision, wanting to see what he did. This time, he did the right thing-ignored the ground entirely and looked at the trees.

This was critical because it was the first thing their quarry would have done. Reaching a change in terrain, with no trail to guide them, lost people paused to assess the obstacles, and then, nine times out of ten, they chose the path of least resistance. Or anyway, the path that appeared to offer the least resistance.

One of the pines had fallen, probably taken down by a lightning strike in a storm similar to the one they were walking into, and it lay horizontal. Nobody climbed over a tree unless he had to, so Ethan looked to the tree’s left and right and found the terrain unchanged and the slope no steeper on one side than the other. That determined, he drifted to the right. Most of the world’s population was right-handed, and he knew that Connor was too. Turning in the direction of your dominant hand wasn’t a lost person’s first instinct-taking the easiest path was-but it was common. Combine that with the fact that when you drove a car in America, left turns were far more likely to force you to cross traffic and thus far more dangerous, and Ethan believed that most people would default to the right if given no clear reason to turn to the left.

Off to the right of the fallen pine, then, and there he found the ground covered in lichen and saw the first prints. He moved to the side, careful not to disturb them, knelt, and studied them with his flashlight.

Two hikers, two sets of impressions. He put his own foot beside each one even though he didn’t need to-he did it because it was a good time waste, and his job was to waste time and last until sunrise-and demonstrated to the Blackwell brothers that each track was substantially smaller than his own.

“Woman and boy,” Jack Blackwell said in a musical, nearly cheerful tone. “That’s the idea, I believe.”

“I believe it is,” his brother said.

They moved on a few feet; the lichen faded to dirt as it led up to the rocks and now the imprints became distinct, and Ethan knelt again, and for the first time since they’d left the tower, he felt true surprise.

These were not Connor Reynolds’s prints.

The size was about right, and the depth of the impression indicated someone of about the right weight, but neither imprint matched Connor’s boots. Ethan had paid careful attention to boots. They were required gear, but despite that, kids often arrived in sneakers or basketball shoes, and he had to outfit them with boots, because broken ankles were easily acquired on a mountainside. This year, every boy had worn boots, and Connor’s had not been a wise choice. They weren’t for hiking; they were cheap imitation military-style boots, black and shining and sure to cause problems, because they weren’t broken in. Ethan had packed extra moleskin with Connor Reynolds in mind, in fact, expecting the boy to get blisters fast.

Neither of the prints he was looking at matched Connor’s. One appeared to be from a hiking boot tread, and the other was more unique. A fine boot, but heavier.

“Perhaps if we give him enough time, he will detect their foot odor,” Jack said. “A veritable bloodhound, our Ethan.”

“Sadly, we don’t have that sort of time,” Patrick answered. “We should be moving along, don’t you think?”

“I do. Any chance that we are on the wrong track?”

“None. They’re proper size, but more important, they’re very fresh prints. I rather doubt two people of similar size decided to leave the lookout tower in the night for a mountain hike.”

“Agreed. And yet our tracking expert seems perplexed.”

“I have a theory on that. I’m beginning to question his pace.”

“You think that he’d waste our time? Ethan?”

“I’m merely saying I’m curious.”

“We certainly couldn’t have that. Time is valuable to us. More so than to Ethan.”

He let them talk, and then finally he straightened and turned to face them. Patrick was closest to him now, Jack standing well removed. A reversal of position because Patrick was better equipped to judge Ethan’s work, or so they thought.

“It’s them,” Ethan said, though he knew that it was not, and he tried to keep the gratitude at this providential discovery out of his voice. Other hikers had passed this way, rare in the backcountry, and they were headed in the direction he wanted to go. His job had just been made immeasurably easier. He no longer had to convince them that he was following a trail that didn’t exist. He simply had to follow the wrong trail.

Hell, he could even pick up the pace.

34

There was police tape stretched across the gravel drive that led to Allison’s home. Everything beyond it was dark, no sign that it was a home at all. There were fresh ruts in the grass from the fire trucks and the emergency vehicles that had come to save her less than twenty-four hours earlier.

For the first time since she’d left the hospital, Allison thought about the possibility of meeting up with the men who’d so calmly entered her house in the night and heated tongs in the stove to burn her flesh. They’d been specters before, plausible but not yet near. Now, seeing the crime-scene tape, she could see them again, hear them. Smell them.

Jamie Bennett didn’t even pause at the tape, just drove right through it, bowing it inward until it went taut and snapped and then it was fluttering in the gusting wind behind them, and ahead, the remains of Allison’s house took shape. Charred walls, gaping holes where glass belonged, a buckled roof.

“Welcome back to the Ritz,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” Jamie said. Her voice was barely audible and she was looking at the damage out of the corner of her eye, as if she couldn’t face it head-on.

Allison didn’t answer her. She was staring at the house and remembering passing sheets of shingles to Ethan on the roof as an early-autumn snow flurry fell. They’d slept in a tent that night, as they had every night until the roof was done; they’d made a pact not to sleep in the house till it was finished, but they’d made that pact when it was warm and their bodies didn’t ache from the work of it yet. They’d both regretted it in the final weeks, and then the roof was done, and suddenly it made sense again.

“Where do you want me to go?” Jamie said. “I’m not sure why we’re here.”

Allison put the window down, and the air that filled the car was heavy with smoke. Some of it was stale, traces of the flames that had been hosed out of her home, but more of it was fresh. The mountains were burning, and the wind carried notice of it.

“They’ll have the road closed,” she said.

“We’ll get past them.”

“For a quarter of a mile, yes. And then you’re going to run out of road, Jamie.”

“So what’s your plan?”

“Have you ever ridden a horse?”

Jamie Bennett turned to her in the shadowed car and said, “Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“No. I have never ridden a horse.”

“You’re about to.”

Jamie put her foot on the brake but didn’t put the 4Runner in park. The headlights were fixed on the burned-out cabin but beyond, in the darkness, the stable stood, and inside it, unless someone had moved him, and Allison couldn’t imagine that they had, Tango stood as well.

“That sounds crazy,” Jamie said. “We don’t need to-”

“They’re in the mountains,” Allison said. “Not at a campground. It’s not a park, do you understand? It’s wilderness. You can get us down the road. But nobody is down the road.”

Jamie killed the engine. The headlights stayed on.

“We’ve got to go up,” Allison said. “And I can’t walk fast enough to do it. I thought about an ATV, but it’s the same story-you need a rough trail, at the very least. We could go only so high. We aren’t going to get behind the fire, not in a car, and not in an ATV. We can get there on the horse.”

Could they, though? Tango hadn’t carried a rider in months. Now she was going to ask him to carry two, up a mountain and into the smoke?

“All right,” Jamie Bennett said, and then she opened her door and stepped out. Allison followed and they walked through the ashes of her own yard to the stable. When the headlights went off, the yard was dark but the frequent lightning in the west showed enough of the path. She heard Tango before she saw him, a soft chuffing breath.

“Give me a minute,” she said.

Jamie stood alone in the yard while Allison stepped into the stable; she fumbled with her good hand along the shelf just inside the main door until she found the flashlight that rested there. She clicked it on and aimed the beam at the ground, shielding it with her hand so that the light didn’t blind the horse. He was looking at her from the darkness, his eyes a reflected glow, his breath faint steam.

“Hi, baby,” she said. “I’m home.”

He gave a soft snort and lifted his head and lowered it in trademark Tango fashion, always tilting it slightly to the side. She’d wondered if his vision was bad in one eye, because he always seemed to want to look at you from an angle, but the veterinarians had tested him and proclaimed his eyesight fine. He was just a horse who wanted a different perspective, apparently.

“Can you do it?” Allison asked. “You have a last ride in you, kid?”

That sounded bad, sounded awful, and she corrected herself, as if he might be offended. “Another ride,” she said. “Another ride, baby, that’s all I meant.”

Snort, snort. He shifted as much as the tethers allowed, eager for her to come closer, to touch him. She walked to the stall and laid her undamaged palm on his snout.

“Please be strong,” she said. She was looking at his leg. “Oh, please be strong again.”

Out beyond the stable, Jamie Bennett was moving around in the dark. Allison glanced at her shadow and felt a chill, memories of the shadows that had appeared in her yard last night returning.

She removed the horse’s mouth bit and then unfastened the tethers that held Tango in place and that had kept him from lowering himself for three months. He tossed his head as if relieved to be free of them. Then she moved to his leg, speaking softly, well aware that he might be uneasy when touched on his damaged foreleg whether it caused him pain or not. She removed the soft wrap that had replaced the cast, and then he was standing free and unprotected. He regarded her calmly, no trace of pain.

“Let’s see you walk,” she said. A simple thing, in theory. But it had been so long.

She replaced the protective bit with a standard version and then opened the stall door and led him out. He walked smoothly, without a limp, but his gait was tentative.

“You’re doing fine,” she said. “You’re doing great.”

“What’s going on?” Jamie Bennett called from outside, and Allison felt an irrational annoyance at the disruption of her private moment with Tango.

“Fine,” she said. “Just give me a minute.”

She led Tango from one end of the stable to the other and watched his stride carefully. There was no trace of weakness. She’d been told that there wouldn’t be any, she’d been promised that the bone had healed well, but still, it was wonderful to see.

Could he hold a rider, though? Let alone two? He wasn’t supposed to have any weight-bearing work for several weeks still. The rehabilitation process moved slowly. If you rushed it, you risked the horse. And if the foreleg fractured again…

“I need you to try,” Allison whispered. She rested her face against the horse’s neck, feeling his heat, remembering the way he had warned her of the arrival of the Blackwell brothers in the night. What if he hadn’t, what if she’d not had a chance to at least grab the bear spray? He’d saved her once already, she realized, and she was asking more of him. She was afraid it would be more than he could give.

“I’m hurting too,” she told the horse. And Lord, but it was true. The pain had risen steadily since she’d left the hospital and now it was distracting in its power. Just standing filled her body with jagged aches, and she thought of the jarring that would be required on horseback and wasn’t sure if she could bear it.

If he could, though…if Tango could bear it, she knew that she could too. When your own well of strength was emptied, you had to draw from other sources.

“Let’s try it,” she said. “And, baby, if you can’t do it, show me now. Please show me.”

Her voice broke and she stepped away and found a saddle. He seemed pleased to have it on his back again, and it made it harder, somehow, to see how enthusiastic he was. She’d ridden Tango with a child behind her, so she knew he wouldn’t necessarily object to a second rider-some horses did-but two adults might be different.

She walked him out of the stable and into the darkness where Jamie Bennett waited.

“I’m going to mount him first,” Allison said. She tried to keep her voice steady. “Watch how I do it.”

“All right.”

Allison handed her the flashlight and then put her left foot in the stirrup. She paused, waiting to see if Tango would respond negatively. He had no reaction at all. She swung her right leg up and over him as a bell choir of pain sounded through her body, enough to make her gasp.

“Are you okay?” Jamie said. “If you can’t make it, you need to-”

“I’m fine. We’ll see if the horse can make it.” She slid forward in the saddle, clearing some room, and said, “Are you ready?”

“I think so.”

“You’ll be fine,” Allison said.

“I’m not afraid of him.”

Allison had actually been speaking to Tango. When Jamie Bennett swung her weight onto the horse’s back, Allison closed her eyes, certain she would hear the dry-wood crack of his foreleg snapping.

He made no sound. Shifted a bit, but less than Jamie, who was trying to arrange herself in a saddle that was designed for one and coming close to sliding right off the horse.

“How am I supposed to stay on?”

“You hold on to me.”

Jamie reached with tentative hands and took a loose hold of Allison’s waist, the touch of a shy boy at his first dance.

“I wasn’t kidding when I said hold on to me. You’re going to fall off otherwise.”

“I feel like…”

“What?”

“Well, you’ve got a lot of bandages.”

“I sure the hell do,” Allison said. “And, no, it’s not going to feel good. Any of this. But we need to move.”

She gave Tango the faintest pressure with her heels, and he started forward at a walk. Even at that pace, Jamie was jostled and she finally realized that she was going to bounce off the horse if she didn’t hang on. She slid closer to Allison, wrapped her arms tighter around her, and squeezed, and Allison felt the bell choir of pain return, playing with gusto this time. Allison let out a slow breath, trying not to show how much it hurt. She was watching Tango step in the darkness. So far he was moving solidly. Still, his only activity for months had been exercises to prevent muscle atrophy, and she wondered if he could carry them for long. She wasn’t sure how long it would be. Wasn’t even sure if there was a chance of this working. What if Ethan was wrong and the boy hadn’t tried to use the escape route at all?

She nudged Tango to a faster pace, a trot that made her wince with each step, both from her own pain and from imagining his. As the horse sped up and lightning flashed in the west, Jamie Bennett clung to Allison tighter, and Allison could feel a hard object pressing into her spine.

“Are you wearing a gun?”

“Of course.”

“Can you shoot it? I mean, can you shoot it well? Anybody can pull a trigger.”

“I can shoot it well, Mrs. Serbin.”

“You may need to. If we see them…they aren’t the kind you run from. They’re the kind you have to kill.”

“It would be my pleasure,” Jamie Bennett said. “You find them for me, and I’ll kill them. You’re right-running and hiding doesn’t work. I’m done trying that approach.”

The words sounded right, bold and brave, and maybe Jamie believed them. Allison wanted to as well, but she couldn’t. If she saw them again, she knew she wouldn’t be walking away. Not twice.

Survivor-mentality requirement: gratitude.

You had to find small things to be grateful for even in the worst of circumstances, because that large thing-the simple, obvious statement of I am alive-didn’t always win the day; there were times when you did not want to be alive. As the three of them worked their way up the base of Republic Peak, Ethan made a point to be grateful to whoever had passed this way for the tracks they had left. The trail led up the slope like a divine path. It was not hard to follow, even in the night-when people hiked over a scree, they caused rock displacement with virtually every step, exposing the dark, damp undersides of stones; there were long gashes where feet had slipped, and the places of dirt between rocks trapped clear prints. One of the hikers was outfitted with poles, and those punched holes in the dirt here and there above the footprints.

Because it was convincing enough for the Blackwells, because they did not know Connor’s boots, they were content to follow it. Ethan was able to move faster, killing time no longer a problem, because he was eating up plenty of it by chasing a false path.

The moon was entirely hidden now, and most of the stars. The famous Big Sky vanishing to blackness as the storm front swept ahead. They were two-thirds of the way up the slope when Ethan saw a strike near Amphitheater, the next peak west. White light like a flicking snake’s tongue. Ahead of them there was a sound like hard rain, and he believed it was hailing just a bit higher up.

“I know pace is an issue to you,” he said. “But we’re going to be at high risk up there right now. High risk. Twenty minutes of pause should be enough. Let that lightning go over, and then we carry on. But if we keep climbing, then-”

“We’ll keep moving,” Jack Blackwell said. His breathing was heavy now, ragged even, and Ethan savored the sound, enjoying every rasp of pain.

“Here’s the thing,” he said. “They won’t be moving. They’ll do the sane thing and take shelter. I suspect they have already. We won’t be losing time.”

In truth, he was growing damned curious about who these two hikers were and where in the hell they had camped. He knew what the prints told him-two women, most likely, or one woman and one boy or a very small man, but not Connor Reynolds. He couldn’t make sense of the route, couldn’t see what the average backpacker might hope to achieve by taking it. If the goal was Republic Peak or Amphitheater, there were better ways in. It was a curious trail.

“What do you think the odds of Ethan’s being struck by lightning are?” Jack Blackwell said.

“Slim. It’s a possibility in our current environment, certainly, but still slim.”

“And his odds of dying if he decides to delay us needlessly?”

“Oh, I’d say they are substantial. I’d also point out that the high pressure is moving away from those peaks. I suspect Ethan knows this, so the storm might be a bit of an excuse.”

Ethan paused. It was a fascinating observation, for two reasons. First because Patrick had made it, and there weren’t many men who could make such a proclamation about a high-pressure system while on the move through the wilderness, and second because he was wrong.

It was called Buys Ballot’s law. In the Northern Hemisphere, if you stand with your back to the prevailing wind, the area of low pressure will be on your left and the area of high pressure on your right, because wind travels counterclockwise inward toward a center of low pressure. The directions are reversed in the Southern Hemisphere. Patrick had made the observation but drawn the wrong conclusion.

A mistake, Ethan wondered, or are you not from this place?

He thought then of their voices, that oh-so-careful speech. Flawless English, but too clean of accent. They seemed to come from nowhere.

Southern Hemisphere, he thought. You are far from home, boys.

Patrick’s world was backward here. His observation about the storm might not cost him-or it might cost them all-but this was good to know. If Ethan was right, this was very good to know.

“My thoughts exactly,” Jack was saying. “Do we take a vote, then, or do we leave it up to Ethan? I’m a firm believer in democratic process.”

“This I know.”

“But at some points, clear leadership must be taken. For the greater good. So perhaps-”

Ethan began to move before they reached a decision. Up ahead, the clattering on the rocks was louder, and he felt the first stinging lashes on his own skin. Definitely hail. He watched ice gather and melt in the beam of his flashlight.

The men followed him, and up on the rock scree, everyone was silent; gasping breaths filled the night amid the sounds of the hail on the rocks and the wind whistling and moaning around them and the oncoming thunder. The world was lit time and time again by brilliant flashes. At the top of the rock scree, on the plateau at the base of Republic Peak, the hail was gone and all that remained was the lightning and whatever chased after it.

Ethan’s mind was no longer on the storm, though. It was on those hikers ahead of them. The false path, the decoys. Their behavior was making less and less sense to him the higher they climbed. The prints up here were fresh. Not just recent, not just left within the day, but left within maybe an hour.

The grass held depressions from where two people had removed packs and sat on the ground. Those depressions were dryer than the rest of the plateau. That meant that their bodies had acted as shelters from the hail. That meant they were not far ahead at all.

Who was willing to hike toward a mountain peak in the dark and during a hailstorm? Who was willing to climb the ladder to meet lightning?

It’s not him, Ethan insisted to himself. I know that boy’s boots, and these tracks do not belong to him.

Survivor-mentality requirement: an open mind. Rigidity was the door to death.

Ethan looked at the depressions again as the plateau was illuminated in a series of four rapid-fire strobes of lightning, and he saw his mistake. He’d underestimated them.

He’s wearing new shoes. He’s wearing a pair of her shoes.

It was a wise precaution and a handsome trick, and if they’d been chased by anyone else, it would have worked, or at least bought them some time. A good tracker would have seen those prints and disregarded them, knowing they were not the same as the boy’s.

The only problem was that Ethan and the boy were both trying to be clever. The boy was trying to protect himself by changing his trail, and Ethan was trying to protect him by chasing a trail he knew wasn’t the boy’s. Now he’d not only found the boy’s trail for his killers but closed the gap between them.

35

It was the humming that finally shook Hannah free from the fog, a loud electric buzz, like an alarm clock, that called her grudgingly into reality.

“What is that?” Connor shouted. “What’s that sound?”

It fell around the mountains like a trapped ancient chant, something stumbled upon in a place where humans did not belong. They had hit some invisible trip wire and now the wilderness was being called to respond to the intruders, the high hum a siren announcing their presence on the peaks.

“The corona effect,” Hannah said. She spoke slowly, and though she knew she should be in a rush, a panic even, that felt beyond her now. She was aware that the choices had already been made, and the avenues of escape already ignored.

“What is it? What does it mean?” Connor was almost screaming.

“It’s electricity,” she said. “There’s a lot of it in the air.”

But it meant more than that. It meant there was already a ground charge. It meant one of those lightning bolts had met the mountain. They were connected now, earth to sky, and Hannah and Connor between. They were almost to the rim of the glacier that lay between the peaks. Far below them the crimson and scarlet ribbons of the fire still glowed, but that wasn’t the light that concerned her anymore. There was suddenly a blue luminescence to the rocks all around them. The white of the glacier looked like glass over a Tahitian sea.

Saint Elmo’s fire. The eerie light that had haunted sailors for centuries, scaling the masts of tall ships in empty oceans. Now, far inland, it crackled on the high rocks to their left, sparked upward in a cobalt cloud that climbed and then was snuffed out in blackness, overeager in its attempt to claim the sky.

And all around them, that possessed hum. Not a static sound but dynamic, the pitch rising and falling, though the air was flat and still. Lightning flashed and vanished and flashed again and the mountain quaked from thunder. She felt a tingle then, not the kind born of panic but the kind that should create it. When she looked at Connor, she could see that the hair on the back of his neck was standing straight up, the arched fur of a defensive cat.

“Run,” she said.

But he couldn’t run. They were too high and it was too steep and all he could do was take three unsteady steps before his feet caught and sent him stumbling to his knees. The blue world boomed with thunder and then bloomed with an aggressive flash of white before fading back to blue. Hannah hadn’t moved, hadn’t taken a single step, and below her, Connor was still trying, crawling on his hands and knees now, to get back down the mountain.

She thought of the boy who’d boiled in the river trying to reach her.

Connor tried to push himself up. Braced his weight on his hiking sticks, and she fixed on them: an aluminum pole in each hand. A lightning rod in each hand.

“Connor!” she shouted, and now she was moving, finally untethered from the fog, stumbling and slipping after him. “Drop the poles! Drop the poles!”

He turned back and looked at her and then registered the instruction and shook his hands free of the wrist straps. The poles bounced down the mountain. She took a step from one rock to the next, heading toward him.

Then she was on her back.

She stared at the night sky and realized her boots were in the way of the sky. Why was she looking at her boots? Why was she upside down? She was upside down on the mountain and somehow Connor was above her when before he’d been below. He was also down. The high hum was back-had it ever been gone?-and her body ached.

You got hit, she thought in wonder. You got struck.

She tried to move, expecting that she wouldn’t be able to, but her body responded, and she saw that Connor was moving as well. They hadn’t been hit. The mountain had been hit, again, and it had absorbed the strike for them, again. It might not continue to.

She crawled toward Connor and stretched out her hand. “Come on.” When his hand met hers, the touch carried a static jolt. She tugged him toward her and they began descending the slope together, and then the crawling turned to falling and they slid down, jarring pains and jolts as they gave in to the gravity they’d fought the whole way up here. She knew that they didn’t have long to fall-one of the drainages awaited, and she was braced for the impact when they hit it.

The landing was less painful than the trip down. They smashed into a crevice of rock, and Connor took most of the impact for her. They were wedged in the rocks now some forty feet below the peaks. Connor tried to struggle upright but she held him down.

“Stay low,” she said. “Stop moving and stay low.”

They huddled there in the rocks together and above them the world boomed and bloomed, boomed and bloomed.

No rain fell.

It wasn’t a salvation storm. It was a flint-and-steel storm. Down below, the fire crews were watching it and waiting for rain, although they probably realized by now that it would not come. All that wind carried was dry lightning, the worst kind for a red-flag day. There would likely be new flare-ups now, with all these strikes around them. It was what could happen when you put your faith in a cloud.

She held on to Connor and pressed them both into the rocks and watched the electric storm pass and felt true hatred. She’d trusted in it and it had turned on her and become an enemy. She’d met enough enemies along the way. They chased behind and loomed ahead, and she did not need them to fall out of the sky above as well.

“We got hit,” Connor said. He’d been silent for some time, watching. The worst of the storm was moving on, it seemed, though Hannah knew you couldn’t count on that, not when the skies could throw something deadly at you that was an inch wide and five miles long.

“No, we didn’t. The mountain got hit.”

“But I felt it.”

“I know. I did too. You okay?”

“I can move. You?”

“I can move.”

She looked at him in the darkness and then looked at the scarlet snakes of fires below. There was a hotshot crew down there. They might have reached them before daylight if she’d just committed to it. Instead, she’d stayed high to avoid the fire and nearly killed them both.

“If we can both move,” she said, “we should. It’s time to get you out of here, Connor.”

“We’re going down here?”

“Yeah.”

“The drainages are tough walking,” he said, but he didn’t continue arguing for once, even though it was true.

“I know they are. But we’ve done some tough walking to get here. I know you can make it. You do too, right?” When he didn’t answer she said, “Connor?”

“I can keep going. We’ll be walking straight down into the fire, though.”

“Yes.”

“To find the firefighters?”

“To find the firefighters. They’ll get us out fast.”

She pushed herself up on the heels of her hands and considered the long, winding drainage ahead of them. It was the worst kind of climbing, steep and filled with windfall. But it led straight down too. It was the sort of path you could follow even in the darkness.

“We’ll have to get close to it.”

“Yes.”

“I can smell it so strong from here. Is it even safe? Is it safe to get that close?”

A crimson tree flowered in the darkness and then faded. Spot fires flaring in the burned-out area, trailing the main blaze, as if they’d been separated from the herd and were starving fast because they could not share in the meals.

“There’s a risk to everything,” Hannah said. “I know something about what’s in that direction. The men behind you, I don’t know anything about.”

“I do.”

“There you go. And you think they’ll kill us.”

“They will kill me. I don’t know about you.”

“There’s no you or me anymore, Connor. Not at this point. Just us. It would seem like the best chance for us is to walk toward that fire.”

He might have nodded. In the darkness she wasn’t sure. He didn’t speak, though.

“We’ll make it, Connor,” she said. “Listen to me: I promise you, we’re going to make it down there, and you’re going to get out of this place and never see it again. Not unless you want to. You ready to get out of these mountains?”

“Yes.”

“Me too.”

They’d left the fire tower a few short hours earlier, walking with a plan. This time when they started out, they were crawling. As the storm faded and dawn came to replace it, they moved out of their old world and into a new one, as if the lightning had bridged the divide and taken them over to another land. It was all gray, this world, from both the light offered by a sun still trapped behind the mountains and the smoke rising to meet it. Once they made it out of the drainage, they found a flattened stretch of land, and it was Connor who realized its significance first.

“This is the trail,” he said. “This is the Republic Pass trail.”

So it was. Four miles to go. Roughly the same distance they’d covered since leaving the tower, and yet it would-or should-feel like a tenth of that. They’d be walking downhill on a trail now, not fighting over the peaks and into a storm.

“Almost home,” Hannah said, “and nobody’s behind us yet.”

36

When the lightning began to strike the peaks, even the Blackwell brothers knew it was time to pull back.

“Just for a bit now,” Jack said in a soothing singsong, as if urging a sick child to rest. “Just a few minutes is all.”

They knelt below a shelf of rock carved out by an ocean some thousands of years before, and for the first time, they were all within arm’s reach of one another.

Survivor mentality: appreciate the opportunities the environment gives you.

But what were those grand opportunities? Ethan could grapple with one brother in the dark and wait for the other to kill him.

The mountain trembled with thunder, and the wilderness was illuminated again and again in a rolling strobe of light. A few hundred yards away, one of the lightning bolts connected with a jack pine; it went up in a glitter and then part of it fell to the ground and continued a slow burn, half of it standing, half of it down on the mountain. Wildfire season. This was how most of them would begin. Dry, angry fronts like these. Isolated strikes in desolate lands.

“Seems to be passing,” Patrick said.

“The worst of it is over, at least,” his brother said. “A bit more lies behind.”

“Enough that we should waste the time?”

“At some point there’s a measure of risk to be assumed. You think we’ve reached that point?”

“We’re close to him. It’s still dark. I’d hate to waste those things. Too much has been going on behind us since morning. When they come for him tomorrow, they’ll come big.”

“Let’s finish it, then.”

Ethan watched them slide out from under the rock shelf and then separate, as was their way, and whatever chance he might have had was gone. He didn’t move right away. He stayed crouched beneath the rocks and watched the lightning and smelled the smoke and thought of how close they were to the boy now.

“Ethan?” Jack Blackwell called, congenial. “I hate to press you, but we’re on a bit of a deadline here.”

He slid out from under the rocks. Thunder cracked again but it lacked its earlier bass menace as the storm drifted eastward. The lightning flashes were still there, sporadic but still there, and not a single drop of rain had fallen.

“That’s the peak you wanted,” Patrick Blackwell said, indicating Republic as it lit up in another flash. “Correct?”

“Yeah. But there’s no point going up there now.”

“I thought you were certain that was their destination. The trail seems to agree.”

“They’d have gotten off the peaks when the lightning started.”

“If I might interrupt,” Jack said, “I seem to recall Ethan’s notion about the visibility afforded up there. The idea that we might be able to see anyone in the vicinity.”

“He did have that notion, you’re correct, Jack.”

“Worth the climb, then, I’d imagine.”

Ethan didn’t know where Connor and the woman from the lookout were, but he was certain they would be within visible range of an observer at the top of Republic Peak. Would fall within the crosshairs of the scope on Patrick’s rifle.

Ethan thought again of his father, and for the first time he had an answer to the man’s question. How will I know that it works? Connor Reynolds can tell them. When he walks out of these mountains alive, he can tell them that it works.

“You climb first,” he said to Patrick, nodding at the steep wall of rock that now lay in shadows, knowing what the response would be.

“No, no. We’ve entrusted you with leadership. You go on and climb. Don’t worry, Ethan. We’ll be right behind you.”

Where Republic Peak turned from a steep walk into a true climb, Patrick Blackwell slung his rifle over his shoulder and stayed close to Ethan, and Jack fell back. They did it without discussion but Ethan understood it, and of course it was the right move, they never seemed to make anything but the right move. On the rocks a rifle shot would be awkward and difficult, while the pistol, requiring just one free hand, was much more functional.

Ethan watched it take place and saw it for what it was: his last chance extinguished. Any hope of killing them both, always minuscule, was now nonexistent. He could take one, though. When Ethan died, he wouldn’t die lonely.

The brothers were silent for once, focused on the climb, reaching for hand- and footholds in the shadows. Hand and foot, rock to rock, on toward the sky.

To the east there was a thin band of pink, and the black sky of the storm had lightened to a pale gray that allowed them to see just well enough; the rocks were still dark, but their shapes were clear. The forested hills fell away behind them and they climbed to meet that lead-colored sky, more than two vertical miles in the air now. It was a climb Ethan had made many times and always enjoyed and he wished that it would go slower, because it was his last climb and it seemed he should be allowed time to think. There were prayers and wishes and whispers required, but they were moving too fast and he couldn’t sort them out, couldn’t even land on an image of his wife; everything was simply another rock with his hand closing over it and the summit getting nearer and with it the end.

That was fine, then. It would end with a hand on a rock anyhow, so focus on that, he decided, think of nothing else: hand on rock, rock on skull-all he had left to achieve. He was hoping that his own rock was still on top of the summit pile, the last one he’d held, the one he’d been imagining for so long on this hike, when Patrick Blackwell swung away to the left and scrambled past him.

The sudden speed came without a word or a warning. All along Patrick had been content to remain just below, hovering near Ethan’s feet, following his path, and then as the summit neared, he’d moved away and onto a more difficult path but he moved faster, and now he was in the lead and Ethan was between them both and Patrick was not looking back, but moving faster still, as if he were in a race over the face of the rocks, like so many of the boys Ethan had watched, each determined to be the first one to the summit.

No, Ethan thought, no, damn you, I had to get there first, you were doing just what you should have been doing, you were staying just in the right place…

He tried to match him then, tried to catch him and pass him, and below him, Jack Blackwell saw it and called, “Patrick.” That was it, just his name.

Patrick Blackwell glanced back at Ethan and said, “What’s your hurry?” as he pulled himself up onto a ledge below the summit and slung the rifle free.

Ethan stopped with the barrel a foot from his face, Patrick’s hand casual on the trigger, his back braced against the rock, where he would have no trouble shooting. Below them, Jack had stopped moving.

“Everything all right, Ethan?” he called. “Seemed to become a race there for a moment. Why don’t we let my brother take the summit first. He’s always been the competitive sort. It would mean something to him.”

Patrick Blackwell was smiling at Ethan. Understanding some of it, if not the specifics.

“Maybe you can relax a minute?” Patrick said. “You just relax.” He slid sideways on the ledge a few feet, far enough to clear the rifle out of Ethan’s reach, and then he turned and grabbed the rock above him and pulled himself up, one fast springing motion, dragging his rifle over the stone, and then he was at the summit and standing upright again, and at his back was the pile of loose stones on which Ethan had pinned his hopes.

“Come on the rest of the way now,” he said.

Ethan looked at the rock in hand. A slab of stone, useful for holding on to the face of the mountain, useless as a weapon. His weapons were waiting above, and he was below, and he felt as if it had always been that way.

He climbed up and straightened and stood and there they were at the top of the dark world. Patrick Blackwell held the rifle on him until his brother had also reached the summit and then he moved several steps away and lowered his eye to the rifle scope and began to search the slopes. Jack had his handgun drawn and was looking at Ethan with curious amusement.

“You seem flustered,” he said. “Have we troubled you?”

Ethan moved to the pile of stones, the pyramid that marked 10,487 feet in the air. He was facing Yellowstone now, his back to the Beartooths and his home. He looked at the rocks and told himself the job would have been impossible to accomplish even if he’d beaten them to the top, even if something, anything, had gone according to plan.

There will be another chance, he told himself. Getting down, maybe, there will be another chance, another way, a better one.

“Jace, Jace, my old friend,” Patrick Blackwell said, staring through his scope. “So good to see you. So very good.”

Jack turned from Ethan and looked at his brother, and the amusement left his face.

“You can see him?”

“Indeed. He’s with a woman. His friend from the lookout tower, I imagine.”

“You’re sure it’s him?” Jack asked.

“If there’s another pair like them hiking toward a forest fire, I’d be rather surprised, but come have a look. It’s the first time we’ve seen him live, after all. You’re entitled, brother.”

Jack moved away from Ethan and toward his brother. Patrick was kneeling with the rifle braced on the rocks, facing the northern slope.

Why did they go high, Ethan thought, why in the hell did she take him high? I was supposed to be buying them time. I was supposed to be winning this.

Jack walked over, knelt beside his brother, and accepted the rifle while passing Patrick the handgun, keeping them both armed. The right move. They never made the wrong move.

Except for their eyes. For the first time since the hospital, Jack Blackwell’s eyes were not on Ethan. They were on the rifle scope, and Patrick’s followed, both of them gazing north, away from Ethan. He looked down at the pile of stones and saw that his own was no longer on top. Someone had been here since and covered his with a bigger piece, a jagged slab. He reached down and picked it up. He did it slowly and gently, so as not to make a sound. Neither of the Blackwell brothers turned.

“It would seem to be him,” Jack was saying. “An interesting route they’ve taken. Why go up to go down? But no matter.”

“I can take them both.”

“From this distance?”

“Yes.”

They were still facing down the slope, and Ethan had advanced four steps almost soundlessly, though he didn’t know if a sound would have mattered; they had stopped regarding him as a threat at this point and were focused on their quarry. They were close together, finally.

“I hate to see it end from here,” Jack Blackwell said. “But I suppose it doesn’t matter that the boy won’t know. His mother will.”

“Yes.”

“A miss would be bad, if it gives them time to take cover. Prolong things and carry us farther in the wrong direction.”

“I won’t miss.”

“Hate to see you do such fine work for free. I’ll pay you a dollar for each.”

“Deeply appreciated.”

They would have to trade weapons again. It was clear that Jack deferred to his brother in regard to the long gun. There would be a moment of exchange, a moment when both of them held guns but were not prepared to fire them, and that was all Ethan sought. He was five feet away. The rock in his hand was heavy but not heavy enough to slow him down if he rushed at them. He could swing it, and he could swing it with force.

Get the handgun, he told himself, because the handgun could be fired quickly in the chaos. His breathing had slowed even as his heart rate quickened, and he focused on the back of Patrick Blackwell’s skull, because that was where it would have to start, everything would begin and end from the spot where Ethan could place the rock against those bones.

“Earn your dollars, then,” Jack said, and he sat up, both knees planted on the rocks, and passed the rifle to Patrick, who lowered the handgun to make the transfer, and there was the moment, both of them unprepared and vulnerable and finally, finally, close enough together for both to be at risk at the same time. When he began to move, Ethan felt astonished that such an opportunity had presented itself, because he’d never imagined that he could get more than one of them, and yet here they were, his for the taking.

He traded silence for speed over those last five feet, drawing the fist with the rock in it back and then slinging it forward, focused on that skull, ready for it to shatter.

The skull wasn’t there by the time he reached it.

They were fast men. Lord, but they were fast.

He’d surprised them and still they knew what to do; their instinct, these two who made one united force, was always to part. Patrick rolled left and Jack rolled right and then there was distance between them and the guns somewhere in the middle, and Ethan’s rock missed Patrick entirely and found air where he was supposed to be, Ethan falling with the force of the blow. A hand flashed out and found his neck in what was no doubt supposed to be a killing blow, or at least a crippling one, but here Ethan benefited from his own stumble and the hand chopped at the side of his neck instead of the center of his throat.

A choice to be made then, split-second, he had to look either left or right, because you couldn’t do both simultaneously, and so he stayed with the target he’d come for and swung the rock again and this time found success, caught Patrick Blackwell full in the face and felt jawbone shatter beneath the rock, tore the flesh of his own hand on Patrick’s broken teeth as he punched through his mouth. The rock fell free and then Patrick was silent and down in the darkness and somewhere behind them Ethan could hear Jack scrambling.

Guns, he thought stupidly, urgently, there are guns and you need one.

But he couldn’t find one, and it was happening too fast and he knew Jack was quick and deadly and so he did the only thing he could think of and wrapped one arm around Patrick Blackwell and then rolled with him and heaved him upright, thinking that if he had one brother between himself and the other brother’s bullets, he’d be fine. He could feel the metal barrel of the rifle under his arm, pinned against Patrick’s limp body, and thought that if he got a little space and little time, just a little, he could not only equalize this situation but control it.

He was halfway to his feet when the first shot rang out and something scalded his side and knocked him back to the ground. Patrick dropped with him, onto him, and there was a pause before the second shot, because Ethan had now inadvertently achieved his goal-he was shielded, and Jack saw two heads side by side in the darkness, and one of them was his brother’s and he would not take the kill shot until he was sure which one he was aiming at. He’d seen Ethan’s body clear enough for one shot and had taken it, but now he couldn’t take another, not with Ethan lying there tangled with his brother in the dark, and so that most precious thing, time, had been offered to Ethan again-fleeting, but there.

Get up, Ethan demanded of himself as the blood spilled hot down his side, get up, and get back.

Down to the other most basic instinct now, down to flight. The fight had come and now it had gone; he knew where the threat was and knew that he had to retreat from it and knew that only if he kept Patrick with him did he have a chance.

There was just one problem with that: Ethan had run out of mountain.

It was only when he tried to drag himself upright the second time that he realized how close to the edge he was and that to retreat was to fall, and fall a long way. He ducked his head to keep it pressed against Patrick’s. He had to dance his way toward death, cheek to cheek; there was no other way to keep the bullets at bay.

“Ethan.”

Jack Blackwell’s voice came out of the dark rocks, firm and impossibly steady. Unfazed.

“Put him down, and we can go on about our business here. I make it very quick, or very slow. You’re making the choice for me right now. You’re choosing to go slow, and that’s so foolish.”

Ethan was struggling to keep his head pressed against Patrick’s, and it limited his vision, but he could see Jack Blackwell’s silhouette. He’d risen and stood tall against the shadows, a solitary interruption against that band of pink sunrise. He had the gun pointed at Ethan but was unhurried as he advanced, and that was fine for Jack, because he had no need to hurry, he had the gun and time and space, and Ethan had none of those things, he had only the fall waiting behind him.

So he took it, and took Patrick Blackwell with him.