Though the sun remained below the horizon, a curtain of dirty gray showed to the east, starting to rise across the black bowl of the sky. It was just light enough that he might risk a fire. Given the condition of his fingers, there wasn’t a better choice. He stopped, panting, warring with himself.

I will get to you. He’d promised the kid.

And he pictured that yellow shipping bill floating away on the wind outside the holding house in Fullerton, the last record of Alison Siegler.

He had to heat his body just enough so it could keep driving forward.

He scanned his surroundings with the NVGs, looking for any sign of the sniper. Nothing.

Inside a ring of close-set trees, he cleared a small patch of ground. He gathered a few fallen branches. Melting snowflakes clung to the bark, so he used the piano wire to strip the wetness and expose the dry wood beneath. The wire pinched his pink hands. It was a sloppy, imprecise process, but it got the job done.

He coiled the piano wire back into a coaster-size loop. British secret-service agents used to hide Gigli surgical wire saws in their clothes during World War II, and Evan took a cue from them now. Yanking the padded insole out of his left boot, he slid the wire up toward the toe and then replaced the insole on top of it. As he laced up his boot again, he felt barely a bump beneath the ball of his foot.

Next he removed the packet of Doritos from his waistband. By now they were mostly crushed, but he selected a few of the bigger pieces and arrayed them on the ground. One of the lesser-known benefits of Doritos is that they’re highly flammable.

With a fingernail he scraped a gob of pine pitch from the nearest trunk and smeared it across the crushed chip fragments to increase the combustibility. Then he tore two strips from the bottom of his undershirt and braided them into a rope, which he tied to either end of a not-too-thin stick to form a bow. His fingers were growing numb; had he waited a few minutes more, he’d have been unable to form the knots.

Now he sawed the rope back and forth rapidly across another stick held perpendicular, causing the stick to spin in the makeshift tinder. Before long he busted a coal, which he flicked into the bits of chips. A few steady breaths stoked it high enough to catch the humble heap of branches, and then a tiny fire flickered beneath his outheld hands, warming the palms.

Normally he’d bring water to a rolling boil before drinking it, but he didn’t have anything to use as a pot, and besides, he trusted fresh-fallen snow. He warmed himself, chewed a bit of ice, then ate an apple. The whole time he kept his NVGs lowered, scanning the hillside and the valley below.