He was running on increasingly numb legs. Any stop could kill him. And yet if he got too cold, his body would lock up and he’d die of exposure. Which meant he had to balance himself on the razor’s edge, running himself to the brink of freezing before pausing to reheat over a fire.

To the brink but not an inch further.

He drove on up the slope.

*   *   *

René surveyed the wreckage of the spa, his jaw tensing until he could feel knots at the corners. David stood behind him, an ice pack pressed against his pretty face where it had struck the pebble-studded bench inside the mist room.

One of René’s men struggled to fish Calaca’s corpse from the pool; another mopped blood from the tile. Manny was downstairs safing the lab, and René had dispatched Dex with the remaining three guards to follow Evan’s tracks. The snow proved helpful, the footsteps clearly marked. A radioed update had informed René that Evan had backtracked a few times to obscure his trail but hadn’t had enough time to pull it off convincingly.

Dex was good with footprints.

René rubbed his eyes until they burned.

David removed the ice pack and pressed gingerly at the bruise coming up on his forehead. “Guy was like a typhoon,” he said. “It was pretty insane.”

René opened his bloodshot eyes. His thumb and forefinger held dust from the foundation he’d dabbed over the spider veins on his nose earlier. The look he gave David must have held everything he was feeling, because David recoiled from it, blanching. Fear had stripped away the kid’s seen-it-all veneer; he looked his age, not a day older.

David cleared his throat. “I’ll be upstairs.”

René said, “You’ll be right here until Manny gets back.”

For once David offered no pithy retort.

As if on cue, the elevator doors opened and Manny emerged. He ran a tongue across his gold teeth, one cheek quivering nervously beneath the eye. “You’re gonna want to see this, boss.”

René felt something inside him turn to ice.

*   *   *

Evan ducked under a half-snapped tree trunk, hurdled a snarl of branches, pressing up the face of the mountain. The crisp air charged his lungs, set them tingling. Though he’d made it halfway up the mountain, the final incline looked to be the steepest.

As he scrabbled up a cracked sheet of shale, his boots sent pebbles cascading behind him. He tumbled over the brink into a bed of decomposing needles. The sharp tips poked his palms as he shoved himself back up.

He paused to tie his boots even tighter but had trouble gripping the laces, his fingers fumbling around the cords.

Another few minutes and he’d be too cold to help himself.