“There’s no point in leaving tonight,” Warden tells the Pack. “We’re better off making camp before this weather gets worse. Get a fire going, get dinner started. We need to work as a team.”

Warden’s eyes are on her, and Dawn realizes he’s looking for allies.

We all need to work as a team.

She claps her hands, feeling suddenly energized. “I’ll gather firewood,” she announces. “Who wants to start pumping water?”

Author’s Note

IT COULD BE THAT at this point you’re thinking Dawn’s plan is a little unrealistic.

Like, surely she can see that her nana will call Wendy and Cam the minute Dawn shows up in Chicago, and Dawn will get her ass hauled back home.

This is true.

And Dawn knows it’s a possibility.

But she also knows:

1. She really wants to get off this mountain, and
2. She can probably convince her nana to hold the phone on calling Cam and Wendy, for a couple of days, anyway. At least long enough to try to explain why her nana shouldn’t just send her back.

Also:

1. She REALLY wants to get off this mountain.

She’ll figure out the rest when they get to Chicago.

Chapter 52

TEAMWORK MAKES THE DREAM WORK. Or at the very least, it keeps you and your besties from freezing to death.

It’s tough to find firewood up here in the alpine. The trees are all stunted and small, and there isn’t much dead wood just lying around. Dawn has to go pretty far out from the campsite to find anything good, down along the trail they followed to get up here. Brandon and Evan are getting firewood, too; she can hear them laughing and jostling each other somewhere nearby, but she never quite sees them.

It weirds her out, though, how, like, unaffected they are by this whole turn of events. Like, Amber might die. There’s a big storm coming in. The radio’s smashed, and their first thought was to destroy the emergency beacon.

Even if it means Amber might die.

It’s getting dark now. Cold. Dawn walks so far down the trail that all she can hear is the wind and the boys’ disembodied laughter. There’s not much of a trail, either, and when there is, it seems to branch off in a bunch of directions. Dawn is so focused on finding wood that she’s hardly paying attention anymore, and soon she can’t even hear Brandon and Evan.

Dawn looks up with an armload of firewood, and she can’t remember which way she came from.

Around her, a few flakes of snow start to fall, and suddenly, Dawn realizes she’s lost. She’s been following a path that she thought was the trail going back up to camp, but it veered off and terminated at the edge of a cliff. If it had been any darker, Dawn might have walked off it.