“I’ll tell you when you give me the gun, Maeve. Put it down.” Dan’s voice is steady and as soon as she stops moving, he comes closer again. “If Sadie is dead, then Sim killed her, not me. Just put it down. I don’t want any more of this—”

Maeve pulls back, thrown by his choice of words. If Sadie is dead…

“There’s no if. I’m telling you she’s dead. Sadie—”

Sim moves up behind her, and she pivots to face him.

“It’s not true, Maeve. Don’t listen. He killed Justin out there on the trail. That’s why he won’t tell you what happened. He would have killed me too.”

The two of them closing in, one on either side. Sim losing patience, his voice echoing.

“Give it here, Maeve. Give it to me!”

There’s a crack, the sound of ice splitting on a pond, and Maeve pulls up. Then a shudder down below: the ice tearing away from the rock this time in a sheet, the bear’s rough bark rising up around them.

“Stay back, please—” Maeve says. Her voice is breaking and she realizes that she’s lost, she is crying. She’s going to die out here, bleed to death while a rescue chopper circles overhead. She will never get back to Talia and Rudy. She pictures them, their faces at the wide bay window, watching the driveway, waiting and waiting for her to come home.

Dan is almost near enough to touch her now, she knows that. Maeve freezes, willing her hand to start working again, but it’s twisted and burning, locked around the gun’s grip. She can feel her shoulders sagging. She just wants him to take the gun away, to let her go. He steps in, reaching for her.

“I didn’t kill anyone, Maeve.” His voice peels along smoothly, the trained, steady tone of negotiation. “Nielssen jumped me for that gun and disappeared back up the trail—and then Sadie was gone too. She followed him.” He steps in again. “You know you believe me, Maeve. She would do anything to stay close to him. He had her scared of me, filled her with stories—”

“He’s lying, Maeve. Look at him. Remember? Always in charge, holding everyone else down. Top gun—”

Maeve looks from one to the other, reeling. Top gun. Not Sadie’s phrase originally, then, but the other way around: words that Sim had fed her. A way of setting her against Dan.

Dan shouts over him. “Maeve! I told Justin to go get help. To keep going down till he found someone.”

Her stomach flips.

“Justin’s alive?”

She glances up into the steel-gray sky, listening again for the engine hum. If Justin somehow survived, made it down far enough to find help—

There’s a flicker in her peripheral vision, Dan moving in, and she spins back, hanging on, her bloody hand trembling.