She can hear him getting nearer, moving fast, panting as he speaks.

“It was always Dan, Maeve. Dan shot Justin on the trail. Dan came knocking on Anna’s door that night, then pushed her outside in the cold—”

The words cut through the night air. Maeve stumbles, stunned and alone. Her stomach rising into her throat.

Dan didn’t know where Anna was sleeping the night she died. None of the others did. Only Sim had seen her there. Only Sim could have known which door to knock on.

She starts moving again, close enough to keep him in sight.

“I’m trying to protect you, goddamn it. You need me.” Sim’s voice growing strained.

The trees here are needled and snow-covered; Maeve feels like she’s cutting her way through a maze that springs back and re-forms around her, sprays and pricks at her face. Her hood catches and pulls away—for a moment she thinks it’s him, he’s there, but no, it’s only another branch. She tugs it off, angry, and yanks the hood right down.

She comes, finally, to a break in the woods. Not quite a clearing, but at least some breathing space, the forest floor hard between iced-over roots. Maeve looks down. She’s found it, the path she followed the day before. The woods here carry sound differently and she can hear, again, a trace of the world outside the tree line. The wind moving off now, the skies beginning to clear.

She can hear, too, the faint, constant thwack of the tarp somewhere far ahead on the ridge. Guiding her.

Then, close behind, almost not even yelling: “Maeve—”

She takes off at a run. She’s leaping now to stay just ahead of his beam without tripping and she can hear him swearing whenever he falls behind, unused to the trail, the knots of ice-covered roots and powder bluffs that Maeve herself learned only the day before. The key is to stay light and, above all, stay on your feet. She’s using the bloody hand now, and it’s no longer numb, the pain of it screaming high into her arm every time she wraps her fingers around another rough branch and hauls her body along. Where the woods grow darker again, she can still follow the sound of the tarp, caught in its tree, beating against the wind.

Ahead of her there’s the root-gnarled crest that leads to the cache, rough now with new ice, and she slips, almost falls, clambers higher.

At the top she leans hard on a bare trunk, gripping it for balance and trying to catch her breath. Day is coming. There’s an openness to the trees here, a spare feeling to the branches—they’re thinner, somehow—and the first real light makes the woods seem gray and dim but no longer black. The wind comes spiraling in and cuts through the gully. She can let him catch up now. She only has to wait.