Dawn’s the only one who can tell them where Amber fell. She’s too tired to explain it and she doesn’t know how, anyway. So they give her a helmet and hustle her into the helicopter, and the helicopter takes off and speeds away from headquarters.

It doesn’t take long to get over the terrain. What cost the group hours and days takes minutes in the air. Dawn sits at the window and looks out over the forest, the valleys and the ridges. She can see the spur ridge where she and Lucas tried to hide for the night. And she can see the cliff where he died saving her life.

She can pick out every lake and campsite and grueling traverse, and none of it looks as bad from up here as it did down there.

It looks small. Easy.

It looks like nothing.

Fart Mountain, though, still looms. It’s still scary. It still makes Dawn shiver, just looking at that bare rock jutting up high from the snow.

She gives the helicopter pilot directions to the backside of the summit, and she can see the ledge where Kyla froze and where Amber fell helping her, and at the base of the ledge she can see a patch of orange jacket sticking out of the snow, and she knows that it must be Christian’s body and that Warden must have pushed him off the ledge.

But she doesn’t see Amber.

Dawn searches the ground underneath the ledge and doesn’t see the counselor, as hard as she looks, and for a moment she thinks she must be mistaken, it must be some other ledge, they’re in totally the wrong spot.

But then she sees it, just by straining her eyes: a patch of green hidden in the shadows amid the snowy white northern slope of the mountain. And it’s lime green and unnatural and she knows it’s Amber’s jacket and that Amber is down there.

But the jacket isn’t moving.

The helicopter hovers overhead and the green jacket doesn’t move, just lies there mostly buried in snow, and Dawn stares out the helicopter window and then she starts to cry, and it’s not just for Amber but for Lucas and Alex and Brielle and even Kyla, even Christian a little bit, for Brandon and Evan, too.

And even for Warden.

She’s crying because no matter how bad things seemed at the beginning, she’d never in her life imagined this terrible end, all the dying and anger and bloodshed and fear.

She’s crying because she wishes she could just go back to last week, when they were all setting out on the trail to Fart Mountain, when all she had to worry about was cooking food and pumping water and dodging angry bears, and maybe choosing between two cute boys.