“Draw back from the tree line.” He’d spoken the command, it seemed, rather than thinking it. It was the only way he could make his limbs move.

He scuttled backward, shoving with his heels, before realizing he wasn’t standing up.

Rising without using his arms was difficult, but he managed. He withdrew into the thicket, nearly tripping over his boots. Both rifles were back in the clearing along with the AK, but he couldn’t possibly operate them anyway. Blood snaked down his right arm, dripped from his fingertips.

The pain tasted of—

—wet concrete, the humid air of Parking Level 3 pressing into his pores, the elevator lights casting a red glow and—

—he fastened his left hand tighter over the wound, breathing—

—the all-too-familiar tang of iron, the sickly sweet trace of cherry blossom, which—

—he swore he smelled, but he knew he was here in a snow-layered valley in Maine, stumbling upslope and trying to tamp the blood back into his body. He wondered if it was possible to be in two places at once. Maybe that was what dying was, pulling up the net of time, events and places jumbling together and—

—Jack is clutching his bloody shoulder—

—as Evan was clutching his and—

—Jack says, “I’m already dead. It caught the brachial.”

“You don’t know that. You don’t—”

“I know that.” He lifts a callused hand, lays it against Evan’s cheek, perhaps for the first time ever.

Evan tripped, his knee plowing into a drift. He wobbled for a moment, leaning into the rise. The spill—so bright against the snow, a robin’s red, red breast.

Shoving himself vertical again took several phases. His feet moved, somehow carrying him onward, upward. He pinballed off trees. They proliferated, an endless span of trunks splitting the earth like the bars of a cell.

At last he sensed an openness ahead, the woods giving over to a bare patch of blinding white. Through the last trees ahead, a stretch of uneven powder swept up to the summit fifteen or so meters above.

He had to make it.

The snow sucked at his boots. He yanked them free, fighting for balance. He would not go down. His teeth chattered. He couldn’t feel his arm.

It occurred to him that he was going to die. And yet all he could see was the—

—paroxysm of pain racking Jack’s body. Jack fights out the words. “Listen to me. This is not your fault. I made the decision to meet you. I did. Go. Leave me. Go.”

Evan thinks he is choking, but then he feels the wet on his cheeks and realizes what is happening to his face. “No,” he says. “I won’t go. I won’t—”

Jack’s good hand drops to his belt, and there is a clank, and then his service pistol is up between them. He aims it at Evan. “Go.”

“You wouldn’t.”