THE TRAIL DROPS FROM THE LAKE through the forest. It switchbacks down the side of the mountain, and at the bottom is a wider off-road track and if you follow that track for, like, maybe a mile, you’ll come to the clearing where the Out of the Wild headquarters waits.

But there are a lot of switchbacks before you reach that track.

Dawn finds her strength again. She starts running. Clear of the lake and down into the forest again. There is no snow here, just wet ferns and moss. Tall trees block out the sun and cast gnarled roots across the trail at irregular intervals.

Dawn follows the trail to the first switchback and pulls a 180 and continues the descent. Her legs are weak and her ankle is sore and somebody is going to have to amputate her knees when all of this is said and done; they’re throbbing from the constant pounding, the stress of her body weight colliding with hard earth at a rate of about two collisions per second.

She’s so hungry and thirsty that she can’t really see.

She’s so scared that it doesn’t matter.

Dawn hits the second switchback and grabs a tree trunk to swing herself around. Keeps running. Then she hears Warden above her. Crashing through the forest, coming in hot.

Dawn glances back and sees him upslope. He’s not on the trail.

He’s not using the switchbacks.

Warden’s coming down the mountain in a straight line, aiming for Dawn like a guided missile.

He’s closing in fast.

So eff the switchbacks.

Dawn veers off the trail and onto the slope. It’s steep and wet and littered with fallen trees and stumps and branches. It’s impossible to navigate, but somehow Warden is doing it. Dawn knows her only hope is to try to do the same.

She slides down the muddy terrain, trying to avoid downfall and blowdown and all of the other names for fallen trees that she heard Christian and Amber use.

She grabs at living trees as she descends, using them to slow her fall and guide her. She collides into massive trunks hard, her breath stolen from her, bounces off them and keeps dropping. Meets up with the trail again as it switches back and forth, leisurely, but ain’t nobody got time for that, not now.

There’s no telling how long the drop down the mountain will take, now that Dawn’s off-trail again. It’s quicker than the switchbacks, anyway. Assuming she can stay upright, which she can’t. Not on a ruined ankle and two failing knees. Not exhausted to the point of hallucination. Not on a carpet of mud and roots and loose rock.

Dawn loses her balance. Her arms pinwheel, searching for something to break her fall. Her arms come up empty. She crashes to the earth and tumbles down the steep slope.

The fall fucking sucks.

It hurts like a mother. Over and over and over again. Dawn closes her eyes and tries to protect her head and collides into things and pinballs off them and keeps falling.

She reaches for trees as she passes them and her hands grasp at the earth and come up muddy and it does nothing to arrest her descent.

She knows she’ll keep falling until she hits something big, something hard.

Something that might kill her if she hits it hard enough.

There’s nothing she can do but continue to fall. And hope that her body can withstand the impact.