I feel the scream boil up from my gut, and while I keep it throttled behind my teeth, my fingers close over a good chunk of rock. I stand and, with an explosive grunt, I hurl it. The drone slips to one side, dodging the rock.

My phone rings. I answer and shout, “What?”

“Do that again and I’ll nail his other ear to a tree,” Finn says.

“Fuck you, asshole.”

“Any time, Suzie Q. Keep walking.” And he’s gone.

I stare at the drone that continues to hover above the treetops.

“Suzie?” Frankie says in my ear. “What happened?”

I turn away from the drone to hide my face. My voice is thick with emotion and I clench my fists, wishing my hands were around Finn’s neck. “He cut off Tane’s ear and left it for me in a box.”

Frankie starts cursing in Spanish, too fast for me to understand. Then Uncle Gavin says, “Frankie, shut it. Susannah, where are you?”

I start walking uphill again. “Not quite halfway up.”

“The cable car doesn’t start running until later this morning,” Uncle Gavin says. “If he has Tane with him, he had to walk him up the mountain earlier, which wouldn’t be easy. So he probably didn’t hike all the way to the top.”

Or Tane’s dead and Finn is just stringing me along. I don’t say this out loud, though. But I know every one of us is thinking it. “Frankie, you still on the safety road?” I ask.

“Yeah.” Frankie sounds a little winded.

“Caesar, you still with me?”

His deep voice is both comforting and ominous. “To the very end.”

I walk on, climbing through the trees. My quads and calves are starting to ache. The mountain is beautiful, even with the fog, but I can’t enjoy it. God, I hate Finn, even more than before if that’s possible.

Almost two hundred yards later, my heart pumping and my breathing now heavier, I walk into the biggest clearing yet. I stop and get a bottle of water out of my backpack and drink, taking in the scenery. The trees continue in a green wall on the left, but to the right they drop away to reveal another expanse of bare rock, this one scattered with moss and grasses and sloping gently down from the trail. I return the water bottle to my backpack and walk on, scanning the clearing, then stop abruptly. Sitting on a patch of grass about twenty yards away off to the side of the trail, just visible through the fog, is Finn. Someone else sits next to him, slumped against a tree, a hoodie covering his head. I think it’s Tane but the fog makes it hard to see. I walk down the slope toward them, hands open and spread wide.