Gavin set off again, following the path of the wires down the hill. I thought it was a good idea; the pillars of the lift stood out among the maelstrom as looming shadows and, if I were stuck out there, I would have followed them too. That was, of course, assuming Lucy was trying to get anywhere. The chairs swung above us in the wind, turning almost ninety degrees. I was glad I wasn’t on one. Gavin slalomed around the pillars as he came to them, crunching the gearstick with a gusto that could have given him tennis elbow. In the back, we iced our brows against the glass, pitching forward with the steepness of the slope and squinting into the whiteout. But no Lucy.

As the ground levelled out, we passed another tin shed fed by the descending wire. Juliette ran out again and returned just as quickly. Our thin ration of hope was siphoning out. The further we went, the less likely it was that she’d have made it this far.

A few more minutes and a collection of buildings came into view; we’d made it to the resort.

‘Damn it,’ Andy muttered, jabbing at his phone. ‘Piece of junk.’

‘Reception any better here?’ I asked.

‘Nah, battery’s had it. You?’

‘Phone took a dive in the lake, remember.’

SuperShred Resort looked more like a military base than a holiday retreat, populated by giant square sheds that, I assumed, consisted of dorms a tenth the price of Sky Lodge’s chalets and, as a consequence, had ten times the occupancy. It was deserted, with the creepy air of an abandoned amusement park. (I guessed people were huddled inside; the weather was grim but not apocalyptic, so unless they had corpses of their own to deal with there’d be no reason to leave.) I could almost feel the ghosts of activity in the flutter of the fluoro triangular flags set out to guide crowds, the well-trampled thoroughfare that, even with a heavy dumping of fresh snow, was packed down underfoot. The signs heralding HIRE or FOOD seemed rueful in the emptiness, a promise of a different place. We glided through it on our rumbling beast the way you would dive through a shipwreck. It was quiet, eerie: alive and dead at the same time.

It was the opposite of Sky Lodge, designed to excite instead of rejuvenate, with the money scrounged on sleeping arrangements poured into lift tickets and gear hire. Shared bathrooms and tinea were part of the package, and I’m sure they would have gotten away with removing the beds entirely if people didn’t need somewhere to put themselves between 3 am when the bar closed and 6 am when the lifts opened.