AFTER A TIME, THEY REACH the barrier trench, sweaty and out of breath and exhausted. It’s darker in the trench but steadily getting lighter, night turning inexorably to day.

Briefly, they stop to sip water out of one of Dawn’s canteens, and Dawn transfers as much food as she can into Lucas’s pockets.

There’s blood on his jacket. A tear in the lining. “Warden’s knife,” Lucas tells her. He pulls the jacket tighter; he won’t let her see. “It’s just a scratch,” he says. “I’ll be fine.”

Dawn studies his face. He stares back at her, earnest, and Dawn knows he’s probably lying, that he’s hurt worse than he’s ready to admit. But there’s no point in pushing him right now.

(She didn’t steal the first-aid kit from the Pack.)

“What were you even doing out there, anyway?” she asks Lucas. “Shouldn’t you have been, like, asleep?”

“I had to pee,” he says, sheepishly. “I saw you and Warden in the light of the fire. I thought—” He looks away. “I just had to know for sure that you like him.”

Dawn makes a face. “I don’t like him,” she says. “He’s a freaking murderer, Lucas.” She explains to him what she knows about Warden. About Christian and Alex.

“You didn’t tell me?” Lucas says. “You knew Alex was murdered and you didn’t want to tell me?”

“I just thought it was safer if no one knew that I knew,” Dawn tells him. “I didn’t want to tip off the killer.”

Lucas doesn’t say anything, and Dawn can tell he’s hurt. They stand there in silence and drink a little more water.

“Anyway, thanks,” Dawn says. “For saving my life.”

The trail up the south side of the trench is steeper than the trail up to the Raven’s Claw tarn. Dawn and Lucas pull themselves skyward using tree roots as handholds, the weight on Dawn’s back threatening to pull her down again to the bottom, send her falling to her death.

Dawn’s legs are burning. Her knees hurt and her hands are numb. But she can’t afford to stand around feeling sorry for herself.

(Lucas was, after all, stabbed. And he seems to be doing okay.)

Gradually, Dawn and Lucas climb out of the trees again, and back into the falling snow and the wind. It’s light enough now that they don’t need flashlights, and if they look back across the barrier trench, Dawn and Lucas can see the shadowy visage of the Raven’s Claw looming over them.

Ahead of them is more bare rock, a trail marked by cairns across the alpine. Dawn knows they’ll follow this ridge for a few hours before they descend again to the lakes where they camped, and then after that, they’ll climb up to another ridge, a longer ridge, and after that they’ll drop back into the forest and follow the trail toward headquarters.

Dawn remembers how long it took to hike this far from headquarters. How tired she was.

It seems like a LONG WAY AWAY.

She was walking right here when she and Warden traded Origin Stories, Dawn remembers. Following this ridge but in the opposite direction, the Raven’s Claw looming ahead of them and nothing but blue sky around it, no hint to the drama and awfulness that waited for them on the mountain.

She walks beside Lucas away from the Raven’s Claw, and Lucas doesn’t say anything, just keeps hiking, one foot in front of the other, and Dawn thinks about Warden and how she might have actually fallen for him, and she feels stupid and naive and kind of hates herself for it.

But also, she kind of misses that moment, too.

If that makes any sense.

Lucas walks quietly beside her, solid and dependable and never missing a step, a golden retriever with a job to do. He doesn’t look scared anymore.

They hike in silence, steadily climbing through fresh snow, marking their progress by the little rock-pile cairns that sit half buried on top of bare rock. Above them, the weather is calming, the snow easing off, and they can start to see a couple of cairns ahead, start to see the mountains on either side of the ridge and the valleys in between them, the dark, inky-black lakes where they’re headed.

Lucas says nothing, and Dawn says nothing, and they keep moving forward, one foot in front of the other. And for a while it’s like they’re completely alone, like they’re the only people left alive in the world.

It’s the howling that chases that train of thought from Dawn’s station.