They were gone. She ran, crisscrossing, disbelieving. She stood and waited, listening. A frantic sensation like a river rushing filled her ears. She searched again, looking for tracks. She found the scuffled snow. She moved her gloved hand across the indentations she was sure they’d made. There was the Land Cruiser but not where she’d thought it would be. She looked for markers, but she hadn’t thought to settle on them earlier, and now it was all a repetition of harshening frosted shapes, the road like the sloping of the shoulder, pylons duplicating against mountain views, the sky that uninterrupted shade of cement.

She didn’t have a cell phone, but the willowy antenna of the Land Cruiser came to her. The radio. Or maybe Rex or Jeff had left a mobile in the glove compartment. Who had the keys? Her mind was moving along a syncopated path, and she was walking toward the tailgate, trying to remember if the door got locked after they pulled out the fiberglass boards, when all of a sudden her foot turned, an ankle twisted, and she pulled herself away from a backward slip. She fell flat on the ground, but her chin was in air.

Her belly and chest were on the ledge. All she could see was so white, so without shading of any kind, that at first she had no depth of field. It was only when her eyes could detect the most delicate grays that she sensed her position. Her face hung over a great distance.

Shocked, she pushed back, or tried to, and then she saw them. They were faceup—Frank’s legs and arms extended, Jeff bent, Rex in a sprawl. At the heel of the sheer drop where they lay, so steep it was brown and free of snow, she could make out the beginnings of the return of the storm, a sifting of snow shaking once again through the air.

She arched herself away from the cliff. Her ankle was tender but didn’t seem broken. She saw it now—they had each watched one of the others disappear and gone to help, only to make the same plummet. She was convinced they were knocked out, not dead. There was no blood she could see, even from this height. The snow had to have cushioned them.

She crawled slowly, paying heed to any icy silver on the surface. She was going to stand and try limping for the Land Cruiser but thought it safer to stay low. Her sense of the incline seemed inaccurate, and theirs had been too. Everything was so white they’d lost their bearings. When she reached the bumper, she pulled herself up and pushed the tailgate’s switch pad. The back windshield floated upward with a spring-loaded gasp.