But more than that, Max thought of Pip. Max had once had a child taken from him, a child he had failed to save. And now he saw Pip’s face every time he closed his eyes. He would not fail again.

The Canadian border twisted from east to west, following a labyrinth of connecting rivers and lakes. To cross, Reed would need either a boat or a choke point where the river thinned to a gap narrow enough to walk across. Lyle had talked about two such choke points: Loon Falls and a set of rapids to the west. If Reed wasn’t heading for the falls, he must be headed for the rapids. If nothing else, Max could find the river and follow it until he found the rapids—or became hopelessly lost.

Max used the setting sun to gauge a northwest heading. He cinched the straps of his backpack and headed downhill, leaving the dead body of Peter Molinar on that lonely hilltop.

Alone in the woods, he thought back to his failed experiment as a hermit. He couldn’t kill a rabbit to save his life. But that had been the problem, hadn’t it? He really didn’t want to save his life. Hell, he was half dead already. He had watched hundreds of sunrises and sunsets, yet as hard as he tried, he could not remember a one of them. Nights were dark and days light, but there seemed to be no color in either, not until this last week. And had he lost his sense of smell? Of taste? Eating had been reduced to a means to an end—existence. He had been taking up space, and nothing more.

But now he felt more alive than he had in three years. The aroma of mud and pine buoyed him as he crossed yet another valley. The rhythm of his breath, in sync with his footfalls, became like music as he leapt over rocks and fallen trees. He charged up slopes and pushed through scrub, undeterred by the biting limbs. He felt a sense of passion unlike anything he’d felt in a long time—not since that day he had chased Mikhail Vetrov onto that frozen lake. Max was a beast freed from a cage. A hunter—not of rabbits but of men.

He finished his climb to the crest of yet another hill and was about to start down the other side when he saw it—the river just beyond a short valley. He had somehow stumbled his way to the Canadian border.

As he marched down, his thoughts turned back to the mission at hand. Had he navigated to a spot east of the rapids or west? If he turned the wrong way, he would end up walking away from Lyle, and like it or not, Lyle needed Max.

The sun was already touching the horizon; he would be out of light soon. The terrain leveled off as he neared the river, the rocks of the hill giving way to a wetland. He was glad that Henry had found him a good pair of boots, impervious to the slop underfoot.