The cliff extends high above Dawn, reaching back up toward the Raven’s Claw and the tarn and the trail, a sheer, uninterrupted drop. There’s a pile of snow at the base of it, and a couple of fallen logs that Dawn thinks she could lean against as she pees. She pushes her way through the forest toward those fallen logs, and she’s halfway to where she wants to be when she sees it.

And she wouldn’t even see it if she hadn’t slipped a little bit, nearly tripped over a hidden root and stumbled forward and had to catch herself on a tree branch before she face-planted, but she was already almost on the ground anyway, and from her position more or less on her knees, she peered forward underneath the fallen log that was her objective and directly at the bottom of the cliff and the boulders and big piles of snow at the base of it.

And that’s where she sees it.

She’s not even sure what it is, not at first. Just a flash of color in an otherwise monochrome land, color too bright and vibrant and obnoxious to occur naturally in nature.

This color is chemical. Cooked up in a lab. Probably created out of plastic and some assortment of weird poisonous dyes. This color stands out amid the white and the black and the various shades of gray, even though it’s just a scrap mostly buried in snow and obscured by rocks and trees.

This color is yellow, bright yellow.

It’s the color of Alex’s Bear Cub jacket.

Chapter 63

DAWN HAS NEVER SEEN a dead body before. Not in person.

Aside from that little scrap of jacket, Alex is almost completely buried in the snow. He’s buried enough that Dawn can almost fool herself that it’s only a jacket she’s seeing, not a body.

Almost, but not quite.

Dawn picks her way cautiously up to the scrap of yellow jacket, as if it’s somehow going to come to life and, I don’t know, attack her or something.

“Hello?” she says, and her voice shakes and she’s irrationally embarrassed about that, somewhere in the part of her brain that isn’t cold and really scared and still kinda has to pee. The scrap of yellow jacket that may or may not be attached to a body does not respond.

Dawn creeps up right beside the scrap of yellow jacket that may or may not be a body, and it doesn’t move, and there’s too much snow to tell straight away if it’s a body or not.

She nudges the snow with the toe of her boot and it doesn’t really give very much, but it certainly feels squishier than a rock.

It feels like a person who has been lying under the snow for a while.