Dawn passes the crevice and for a second she thinks she hears Lucas call her name from inside it. He sounds breathless and weak and she wants to go back to him, to lie with him and comfort him, to keep him warm and pretend she’s not afraid.

But he’ll die on this ridge unless she keeps moving.

Unless she can somehow get him help.

Dawn keeps running, keeps moving. Picks her way across the ridge, away from the crevice and the abyss behind it. Back as best she can figure toward the trail. Toward Brandon and Evan.

Toward Warden, and whatever he has planned.

She’s walked about a hundred yards before the adrenaline wears off and the cold really hits her.

The cold bites at Dawn’s face and the wind whips through her jacket, and Dawn shakes from the chill and it only gets worse when she stops moving. Her legs and her feet ache and her whole body is exhausted. There’s no visibility beyond the beam of her flashlight, no help coming for her, no rescue.

Dawn is hungry and her body is weak.

She stumbles over the rocks and forces herself onward, up the spine of the ridge with no sense of where she’s going or where she’s even standing, where she exists in the grand scheme of the world.

There is rock and there is night and she moves across both and she can see the blood all over Lucas’s jacket when she closes her eyes and it’s enough to keep propelling her forward.

She’s not going back there.

She’s not letting him die.

Chapter 96

BUT LUCAS MIGHT DIE ANYWAY, Dawn knows.

She might, too.

She’s numb from the cold and the hunger and the fatigue. Her thoughts slow to sludge and her body won’t respond to basic commands. She falls and scrapes her palms on the rocks and lies there and the wind whistles over her and it would be so easy to just close her eyes and sleep.

Dawn lies there and even the cold doesn’t seem so bad anymore. Even the rocks seem comfortable beneath her. She could drift away, here, and it might even be pleasant. Dawn closes her eyes and it feels good and nourishing, and she knows if she keeps them closed much longer she won’t ever feel the cold again.

Her body feels like it weighs three hundred pounds. Just pushing herself to a sitting position is a chore; standing again is a serious job. Dawn’s head is swimming by the time she’s upright. She’s afraid she might faint.

The wind seems to redouble its efforts to freeze her to death. Or, barring that, knock her back over, where she’ll maybe decide to sleep this time.

Dawn stands in place for a minute, trying to blink away the hunger and the exhaustion. It does marginal good.