“We need to eat something.” Curtis leads me into the restaurant. “Sit here and I’ll see what I can find.”

I open my mouth to protest. And sigh. “Okay.” I can’t have been upright for more than five minutes but my knee feels more swollen already and I need to save it for the long trek down.

He hesitates, clearly reluctant to leave me. “There was that stash in the control room.”

“Just grab whatever’s fastest.”

“I’ll check the kitchen.”

The stag looks balefully into the restaurant with its creepy eyes. I can’t bear it. I limp over to the fireplace, hoping it’s not screwed in place. Up close, its eyes don’t even match. One is glossy dark brown, the other black, as though it broke and someone did a bad repair job. I grasp either side of the wooden plaque. Good; it moves. Something snakes out the back of it. A cable. Roughly level with the stag’s left eye.

Once again, the floorboards shift beneath me. I peer into the shiny black eye. Is that what I think it is?

CHAPTER 54

TEN YEARS AGO

Odette’s fingers twist and coil in her lime-green pipe gloves. “She’s been training for this all winter. Where is she?”

She’s so fraught about Saskia’s absence that it’s hard to believe she scored a 9.4 in her last run. From the way she keeps looking at me, it’s as though she senses I know more than I’m letting on. She mustn’t find out what I did.

I can’t believe Saskia didn’t show. I went too far this morning. I think about the state she might have been in after she left my place. Curtis sits on a snowbank at the side. Odette goes off to question him again.

Brent hasn’t shown up either. Why? Please don’t let it be because of me.

I watch the men’s semi-final without really seeing anything. Odette hurries back over, shaking her head.

“And at the top of the pipe, the girls are gathering for the final!” The commentator sounds like he drank multiple cans of Smash for breakfast—or picked up his commentating skills from watching horse racing.

“We have Claire Donnahue in red, Odette Gaulin in green, Milla Anderson in blue . . .”

I have no idea how I reached the final. I’m running on automatic pilot.

“Are you doing a Crippler?” Odette asks.

The four other girls look my way.

“Probably,” I say.

Odette checks up the slope, looking for Saskia even now. “She should be in this. Do you know something, Milla? If you do, tell me, please.”

Can I trust Brent and Saskia not to say anything? Brent, maybe. Saskia, not so much. Should I at least tell Odette that I saw her this morning? Because if it comes out later, it will look suspicious. I open my mouth. “Last night—” I begin.