He didn’t realize that messing up the rock piles would within a few days confer on Brandon and Evan a significant strategic advantage in a particularly high-stakes race back to headquarters.

No.

But I bet if you’d told him, he would have been pretty damn pleased with himself.

Chapter 85

DAWN STARES DOWN AT THE PILE of rocks at the top of the path up the spine of the ridge. She recognizes the rocks, as weird as that sounds. She can see how this pile was once something more.

A cairn.

A guidepost.

An essential marker on their way to safety.

And now it’s just rocks.

Dawn and Lucas struggle down the face of the ridge and rejoin the path at the bottom. Mercifully, the path winds through some low alpine lichen for a while, and it’s easy to follow and kind of protected, so it’s not as cold down here for a few minutes.

And Dawn starts to think about how Brandon and Evan won’t have the cairns to guide them, either. So they’ll have to slow down a little bit, assuming they aren’t actual bloodhounds who can just follow Dawn’s and Lucas’s scent.

Even Warden, who has his photographic memory, is bound to be slowed down by this weather. So it’s not like the missing cairns give the bad guys a huge advantage.

Not really.

Except that all it takes for Brandon and Evan (and Warden) to win is if Dawn and Lucas can’t make it to headquarters.

And right now, it’s starting to get dark.

It’s cold.

And it’s wet on the ridge.

And Lucas is starting to stumble when he walks.

No matter how Dawn and Lucas die, if they die, Warden wins.

And no cairns means the odds of dying up here increase exponentially.

Chapter 86

NIGHT’S STARTING TO SET IN. It doesn’t feel to Dawn like a full day should have passed already, but it has, and they’re still on the ridge and still probably another day’s hike from headquarters.

Her feet ache so bad she would gladly cut them off. The blisters on the soles of her feet have blisters. Her knees are in pain from the constant up and down on the rocks, and her thighs burn.

She’s hungry. Starving. They’ve stopped a couple of times for handfuls of trail mix and rehydration candies, but it’s not nearly enough, and as Dawn walks she thinks about food and it’s torture.

She thinks about pizza and cheeseburgers and onion rings and Cherry Coke. About butter chicken and pad thai and sushi. A whole Italian feast: lasagna and spaghetti and fettuccine and chicken Parm. About hot bowls of ramen and pho and shepherd’s pie and pork chops and steak.