Jack stood there watching the medics work on Matty. Everything moving slow. He shook his head.

“I’m sorry. I have to look for her.”

He pushed past her, into the snow.

V

The last time I had the dream, the stairs went higher than ever before. And they were high up. The weird, twisting stairs and the turns. The hallway longer. More narrow, stretching.

I’m running. I can hear myself breathing. I run so hard that I almost give up, but I don’t. I get there, to the very top. Outside. The stairs just end, overlooking the night. Stars and black sky. And I freeze, looking out at all that dark. He follows. And he’s right behind me. Breathing right into my soul.

Then I jump.

And I don’t fall.

I fly.

When Bardem came down out of the woods, he had already ripped his shirt and wrapped the torn strip around his neck and shoulder and tied the ends under his opposite arm, like a sling. The shirt was wet through with blood. His head was foggy. He tried to think. The knife had pierced the muscle near his neck, perhaps four inches deep. If a major vessel had been knicked. He thought not.

He stopped and leaned his back against a tree, breathing. He swung the rifle from his arm and stood it in the snow and leaned on the forestalk. Just stand here a minute.

The pain took his breath. He spat, strands of bloody drool hanging from his lip. Bright red. He turned and looked back one last time at all the trees standing out of the gray snow, and he knew she was somewhere in those trees in the night, and he just stood there looking. The winter moon. Nothing moving. The silence.

He should have found her. But he had not.

He raised his head and let the rifle drop into the snow. It was still too dark to see, but he knew the black shape of the highway, and he walked toward it. Dawn almost upon him. The loom of granite burned to the horizon. Something imponderably still out there in the night. Where are you? Where did you go? Her tracks. Just gone.

His neck hurt.

His chest. His heart.

He should have found her, but he had not.

When he reached the highway, he waited until a late-model Lincoln Navigator with a lone driver came down the road. He walked out onto the road and stooped in the headlights. The SUV stopped in the middle of the lane, engine idling. The man watched him through the windshield. Bardem limped forward and raised his hands in supplication.

The door opened, and the man stepped out. “Hey, you okay?”

Bardem lowered his arms. Blood running down his back. “I need you to step away from the vehicle, and I need your shirt.”

The man stood there, looking at him.

“Take off your shirt,” Bardem said.