The prison lay at one end of a shallow valley so the first thing we had to do was climb out of it. The slopes wouldn’t have been a problem if we’d been walking on grass, but the snow was deep enough that it felt like wading and the ground underneath was smooth rock that was as slippery as ice. As it got steeper, Danny turned around and took my hand, acting as my anchor when I began to slide back and giving me an extra boost when I needed it. We marched in silence, too out of breath to talk, but every now and again he’d squeeze my hand: you okay? And I’d squeeze back, I’m okay.

Then we reached the rim of the valley and in front of us….

It was like nothing I’d ever seen, nothing I’d even known existed. From horizon to horizon, there was just a sea of rolling white hills, some bare and some covered in thick, snow-covered forest. Ahead of us, the land rose sharply to form a towering peak, the top covered in clouds.

Just looking at the landscape made my stomach sink to my feet and I couldn’t figure out why, at first. Then I realized it was because of what I couldn’t see. There wasn’t a building in sight. There wasn’t a road or a power line, there were no planes in the sky…there was no trace of mankind. At night, there wouldn’t even be any lights. I looked down at the ground: the snow was completely unbroken in front of us. We were probably the first people to walk this way in weeks, maybe months. If we die out here, they might never find the bodies.

The panic rose in me, filling me until I could barely breathe. I’d never felt so alone. So tiny. I spun to face Danny—

He put his hands on my shoulders. “Stop. Just breathe. Breathe.”

I stared up into those deep green, glittering eyes. I wasn’t alone. My breathing eased a little.

“Now listen. Here’s what’s going to happen. You and me, we’re gonna hike over there,” he pointed off beyond the peak, “about fourteen miles. We’re gonna meet up with JD and the others. And we’re gonna get ourselves to the border, back into Latvia and back home to Mount Mercy. Okay?”

He sounded so confident. So completely certain. The landscape was huge but Danny, somehow, was bigger. I nodded.

But then I looked again at what we had to cross. Fourteen miles. No way we could cover that in a day, not in this terrain. And we had no supplies. We didn’t even have a tent. We’d have to climb the peak and the higher we got, the colder it would get. I felt the panic rise again—