I PACK A fresh bag, since Raph took the one I had. I bring a little food. A knife, fishing line, things that might be useful. I take my bow and my quiver of arrows, and then, after a long debate in perfect silence, I walk outside and find the grenades.

When I stored them, I wrapped them in cloth and plastic to keep them dry. Now I unwrap them, two round, dark blotches. Deadly fruit.

I put them in my bag slowly, take them out again, consider. I have seen enough movies to understand the general principle of how they work, but there are still unknowns. I can’t be certain how far I’ll have to throw one, how much damage it would do. But Raph has a gun and all I have is a bow. I need some kind of advantage.

In the end I only take one. I feel safer that way, like there’s less of a chance I can screw something up.

Bo drags himself out of the cabin. I send him back in with a snap of my fingers and a scowl. I can’t shut the door. If I don’t come back, he’ll be trapped in here. But he can’t come with me, not in his condition.

I have to do this by myself.

He keeps trying to follow me. Finally I sit in the doorway, Bo stretched out next to me, and stroke his side until he drifts into a fitful sleep. Then I creep away.

This time, he doesn’t follow.

My fingertips are gummy with blood from his fur. I rub them off in the snow, hands shaking. He can’t die. He can’t leave me alone. He wouldn’t. He won’t.

I don’t know exactly where I’m going yet. To find Raph, that’s all. Before he can find me.

I walk without much purpose and realize I’m heading back to the blackberry patch, where I saw him last. As good a place as any. I keep low and go slowly. Keep my ears trained for any rustle or sigh, but it’s like the whole forest has hushed up for the night. Tonight belongs to us, the human interlopers.

It’s the first time in weeks I’ve felt like something that doesn’t belong out here, that isn’t part of the forest, at least in some small way. The forest doesn’t care that I’ve been here for so long, that I’ve become part of its every day. It won’t help me just because I’m less of a stranger than the men with their plane and their guns.

I creep closer to the edge of the clearing and spot the remains of Raph’s search for the crate. The heater still pumping out warm air. The hole, barely more than a few inches scraped in the hard ground. And Daniel, lying on his side with one arm twisted awkwardly under him. I watch for a long time, but he doesn’t move. He doesn’t breathe. Dead. My fault.

The uncertainty, not knowing if I killed him or not, was sickening. This is nothing. A pang of regret, less for killing him than for the fact that he’s here at all. If anything, I’m relieved to have the answer.

I killed him. And now I know that I can kill a person. A human being.

I walk toward the north end of the lake. Out on the ice, the plane crouched, waiting. Maybe Raph is there. Guarding it from me. Maybe he’s searching for me, and the forest will take care of him. It takes back what it can. Daniel’s dead body or Raph’s living one, it won’t care.

But I won’t be that lucky.

When I get close to the old cabin I make a wide circle, searching for signs of Raph. The only thing out of place is a fire down by the shore. In its light, the pilot sits leaning against the same rock as before. His eyes are closed. My rifle is across his lap.

I unsling my bow from my back and put an arrow to it. He’s too far away for a good shot, and I don’t trust him not to wake up if I try to creep closer, but I can’t just leave him there. Not if I want to go for the plane or go after Raph.

I lick my lips. I have to risk it.

Then I see a shape across the clearing. Bone-thin, slinking through the trees. The wolf-dog, hungrier and more desperate than ever after a desolate winter. He tests the air with his nose. The moonlight glints off his eyes, a horror-movie effect that sets my hair on end.

The pilot jerks. Not asleep, then. And he’s seen.

“Git,” he says. He lifts the rifle, but it shakes and dips in his hand. Even his voice is weak.

He squeezes off a shot. The wolf-dog flattens itself into the ground but doesn’t retreat. A second shot goes wide and splats into the snow and dirt. The wolf-dog advances.

You have two bullets left, I think.

The pilot shoves to his feet. The wolf-dog is mad, crazy. The pilot’s got to put one through its head or its heart, and fast. It advances, moving swiftly over the snow. The next shot catches its flank and it howls in pain—and flings itself forward.

The pilot swears loudly. He whips the barrel of the rifle up, trying to track the wolf-dog’s movement, and the fourth shot rings out. Snow bursts behind the wolf-dog.

It keeps coming.

The pilot’s finger tightens.

Click.

I look away, but I can’t block out the sound. The pilot doesn’t scream, at least, but he fights, and I hear the blows of his fists against the wolf-dog’s side, the wolf-dog’s barking, the sound of cloth and skin tearing.

Then there is silence, and I look up again. The wolf-dog stands over the pilot’s body. Blood splashes out over the snow and stains the wolf-dog, muzzle to shoulders. His breath hisses out in clouds of steam, and the blood steams, too, thickening in the air.

A growl rattles between the creature’s teeth, and it looks at me like I might try to take the meat it’s won.

I draw my arrow back, aiming carefully. The wolf-dog comes forward. Gravel scrapes under its paws.

It charges. I release.

My aim is better than the pilot’s. The arrow catches the wolf-dog in the chest. Its momentum carries it forward, but it’s already dead or dying, and its legs collapse. It falls, bleeding, its blood mixing with the pilot’s. By the time I reach it, it’s stopped breathing.

I glance at the pilot, look away quickly. But not before his empty eyes catch mine. I start to move away, but I stop. Force myself to turn back. I swallow against the sour taste in my throat and approach the torn-up corpse.

The rifle lies on the ground, half under him. I grab the strap and pull. The body rocks toward me, then back as the rifle slides free. I swallow. Not done yet. I reach into the pocket of his coat, and I’m relieved when my fingers touch cold metal right away. The keys. I pull them out and back away two steps, staggering with my eagerness to get away from the body.

“I didn’t kill you,” I say. “This isn’t my fault.”

His gray-blue eyes stare sightlessly at me. I turn away.

My hands are shaking as I drop the keys into my pocket. And then my fingers close around the cold metal of the last bullet. Wherever Raph is, he’ll be coming here now, drawn by the gunfire. I have minutes. Seconds.

The plane is unprotected. I hesitate, indecision clutching at me as it did before. I can stay and hide and fight, or I can run for the plane and hope I get to it before Raph catches up to me.

I look at the pilot, at the wolf-dog. Standing your ground gets you killed.

The faster I get help, the faster Bo gets help.

I run for the plane. My bag slaps against my back. I load my rifle as I run. One shot. The one I’ve been saving. I hook the strap over my shoulder opposite the bow.

I see him coming down from the tree line when I’m halfway across, but it’s too late to stop now. Out here in the open I’m too vulnerable.

I fling myself across the ice and haul at the plane door. Unlocked unlocked unlocked, yes—it opens.

I pull myself into the seat, slinging my bow into the seat beside me so I’ll have room. I stare at the instruments and dials. I’ve practiced everything about getting to the plane, but I haven’t actually practiced taking off, and suddenly everything I know rushes out of my head.

Checklists, I think. But I don’t have time for safety.

I can do this. Put the key in. Turn everything on. Nav. Radio. What else? My mind is blank. Steering lock. I pull the pin, hands shaking. And everything else is gone, and it doesn’t matter because I’m out of time.

All I can do is start the engine. Start the engine and move because there’s no time for anything else.

It growls to life and I reach to close the door, but Raph is here. I yank on the door, but he jams his shoulder in the way and grabs at me. I twist, trying to bring the rifle up.

He grabs fistfuls of my jacket, pulling me out of the seat. We spill onto the ice. The strap of my bag digs into my shoulder. The contents spill, scattering.

He drags me toward him. The rifle skitters on the ice after me. I yank, scrabbling for it, and grab hold just as he flips me onto my back.

He twists the rifle neatly out of my hands, yanks the strap from my shoulder.

I plant a boot between his legs and shove off hard. He stumbles back with an oof of breath and pain, and I grab for my bag, for the thing that didn’t fall out, for the bundle of cloth that unwraps easily.

The grenade. Cold in my hand.

He’s raising the rifle, he’s aiming, and I lie flat on my back on the ice and raise the grenade above me, my fingers wrapped tight around the pin, ready to pull.

He freezes. We stand there and pant for a couple of seconds before he speaks.

“The hell do you think you’re doing?” he says.

“Keeping you from shooting me.” I pull the pin out, mashing my hand hard around the grenade, keeping the lever depressed so it won’t go off. “See? Shoot me and we go boom.” I can’t believe how calm I sound, given that my heart is trying to climb its way out of my throat and plop onto the ice.

It takes five seconds for Raph to decide what to do, and in that time I’m trying to see a way out of here and failing.

He makes a choice for me. He dives for me, for the grenade, letting the rifle fall.

I roll out of the way. My elbows bark against the ice.

I’m still holding the grenade with both hands, terrified it will slip free. I can’t push myself up. His hands close around mine with crushing pressure. We struggle, his weight and strength against mine.

He hauls at me and I come halfway upright, flailing to get at least my good leg under me.

All I can think is that I have to hold on, have to get away, but my fingers are numb with cold and they slip. I slip. My hands loosen at the same moment as my weight suddenly jerks against his grip.

He fumbles. The grenade flies out from between our fingers.

We each act on instinct. His says, Catch it.

Mine says, Run.

Only I can’t run, just fling myself on all fours across the ice away from it, parallel to the plane as the grenade strikes, bounces, rolls, and by the time Raph has taken one step toward it he’s realized what he’s done and he heaves back around.

One second.

Two seconds.

Three seconds.

Boom.

---

•   •   •

THE SOUND IS so immense it isn’t even sound. It’s pain and pressure and the air ripping apart around me.

I flatten myself against the ice, covering my head with my hands like that’s going to help. My leg flares with pain.

My ears ring and roar. My vision blurs, and I feel like a giant’s foot has crushed me into the ground.

But I’m alive. Is he?

I can’t see.

I need to. I need to move.

But instead I see—my mother, still, blood on the side of her face, looking at me, looking and not looking, empty.

My father, head going back with a jerk, blood a mist in the air.

Wolf’s teeth, wolf’s jaws clamping shut over my arm, cold water sluicing up the ice.

And I can’t move. My hollow self has filled up. All that emptiness just left room for fear, and now I’m choking on it.

I can’t hear anything except the roar, but I feel the ice crack under me. Feel it heave.

There has to be something more than fear, and I find it. I find it in the frozen image of a photograph, my mother’s arm around mine, wind whipping our hair across our faces.

I find it in the look my father gave me, the one that said maybe if we’d had more time, I would have realized how much we could be to each other.

I find it in Will’s voice, his idiot grin as I inch my way across the floor and don’t give up.

And in Griff, and Scott, and Lily who told me she wanted to be brave like me.

It isn’t the food and work that make me strong in that moment. I’m still injured. Still weak.

But I’m not alone. I’ve never been alone. They are, every one of them, reaching out to me with the words they spoke and the things they did for me.

They made me strong.

Move.

That’s enough. Enough. ENOUGH.

MOVE.

I get my hands under me. Push upright. I brace one foot against the ice, then two—and pain stabs through my calf.

It’s my bad leg. Worse, now. I crane my neck back to look. Blood soaks through my pants. But that isn’t what my eye tracks to. Black water. The blast broke up the ice. There’s a hole where the explosion was centered. Shattered, cracked ice reaches out from it with still-stretching claws.

Raph is on his side on the ice. His face is pointed away from me, and I can’t tell if he’s alive, but he isn’t moving.

The cracks reach out under the plane.

I have to get to it.

The rifle is between me and Raph. I crawl over the ice to it, weaving as the world tilts and spins around me. I use the rifle to push myself upright.

I lock my leg and grit my teeth and get upright, barely, leaning heavily on the rifle, and limp toward the plane. The ice lurches alarmingly under me. Water sluices up here and there, sloshing over the fractured sheets.

I hear Raph grunt behind me as he pushes himself up. I hurry forward. I step over a crack that’s gushing water like blood from an artery and reach the plane. I pull myself up into the seat and reach for the controls.

The engine is still going. It’s only been, what, thirty seconds, a minute? It seems like an hour. A day.

I fumble at the controls.

The plane heaves. Nononono—the ice is breaking up under me. I have to move, but the plane only tips with a shudder, the front wheel sinking forward.

For more heartbeats than I can spare, I somehow believe that I can do something. Get away, take off. Enough heartbeats for the ice to give still more, the weight unbalancing and the plane nodding forward into the black.

And then there isn’t even time to grab the radio, to get a message out that will tell someone—if they’re even listening—how to find me.

A scream of fear and frustration rips out of my throat, felt but not heard.

I throw myself out the other door, the far side of the plane, onto the still-solid ice beyond. The plane is beginning to sink. The water clutches at it greedily, pulling it down into the dark, and I can only drag myself away and farther away as the ice shifts and cracks and settles.

Raph is on his feet, reeling away from the spreading hole. He nearly makes it to shore before he collapses on his knees. I watch him instead of watching the plane’s slow surrender to the water, and I don’t move until I feel the ice twitch under me again.

I drag myself toward shore. My chest hurts. It’s hard to breathe. I realize I’m sobbing, my whole body clutching up with it. I move forward on my elbows, pushing weakly with one leg and dragging the other behind me. I leave a streak of red on the ice.

The shore is close and miles away, and it only seems to get farther, but the ice under me is solid now. Solid enough to rest.

I check Raph again. Not moving. I shut my eyes.

The world contracts to the steady roaring in my ears. The ground seems to pitch under me, but I know it isn’t the ice. Just whatever damage I’ve done.

I don’t sleep, exactly, but I drift. I half-dream, and in the dream I’m flying. Bo is beside me on the seat, and home is ahead. I’ve made it. I’m safe.

I don’t ever want to wake up.

---

•   •   •

I DON’T KNOW how long I’m on the ice. When I come back to myself, back to the ground, the first thing I notice is that I can hear again—sort of. One ear is still full of the ocean-roar sound, but from the other I can make out the muffled sounds of the wind and the creaking ice and my own breathing.

My leg has stopped bleeding. I hurt, but that’s nothing new. I push myself cautiously upright, touching my head—tender—and my chest and my limbs, checking that everything is in one piece.

When I’m certain that I’m not dead, I look around. The plane has vanished. The hole is ragged, twice as big across as the plane, and still only a fraction of the lake’s surface.

Raph lies on his back maybe twenty yards away, his head rolled to the side away from me. I squint, trying to tell if he’s breathing, but I can’t see. I pull the rifle against my body. I still have the last shot.

Getting to my feet takes a full minute. Even then I wobble, but I take one step after another and draw close to Raph. By the time I’m ten steps away I can see he’s breathing—uneven, shallow breaths.

Five steps away and I have enough of an angle to see his face. His eyes are closed, his face oddly swollen. A bubble of blood forms at the corner of his mouth. It expands slowly, turning pinkish as it thins, then pops, splattering his face with tiny red droplets.

I lift the rifle and step forward. Two more steps. I’m close enough that he could grab me, if he moves, but he’s not moving.

One of his hands is on his chest, the other flung out away from me. He’s on his back, but his legs are twisted to the side, and the stray, strange thought floats through my mind that it can’t be very comfortable.

One bullet. One bullet I’ve been saving for him, and here’s my chance.

“Hey,” I say. He doesn’t move.

I inch forward and nudge his shoulder with the rifle. He still doesn’t move.

He isn’t going to wake up. I’m not going to get to look him in the eye. And even if I did, he would never have felt sorry for what he’s done. Never felt guilt or shame or regret. He’d just have hated me. I can’t make him hurt like I hurt.

But I can kill him.

I level the gun at his chest and wrap my finger around the trigger. One tug and I’ll be done. Put a bullet through his heart. Or maybe his head.

I hold there. Seconds drag past. My breath comes out in quick, sharp puffs of fog. Just one little pull, hardly a twitch. A few muscles, one finger. Boom, dead. Easy.

And yet I don’t pull the trigger. I lower the gun. Raph’s breath hitches, then resumes.

He’s nothing. Less than nothing. Killing him won’t do anything. It won’t bring my dad back.

I sit down. I put the rifle over my lap, and I watch his chest rise and fall and rise and fall. The pauses between his breaths get longer, the rasping louder. But it goes on. And I watch. I’m too tired to move. Too wounded. And I need to know that he’s dead. I need to be sure.

It’s an hour, maybe two, before it finally stops. It happens suddenly and quietly. A ceasing. No death rattle, no dramatic last collapse of his chest. The stillness creeps up on me. I only realize it’s there long seconds after it’s begun.

I wait longer, to be sure. I touch his cheek. It’s already cold, like he’s been dead all along, even though I know it’s just from the frigid air.

I feel like I should say something. Something fierce or forgiving, angry or aloof. But I don’t feel anything toward him now, and I have nothing to say.

I look up at the sky. It’s clear as glass and vast as heartbreak, and endlessly, endlessly empty. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. The plane is gone, but I’m not lost. The satellite phone is on Raph’s belt.

I take it from him carefully, trying not to touch him. I clutch it against my chest. It’s safety. It’s rescue. I’m saved, but I’ve thought that before and been wrong.

The call is a blur, barely registering. There’s a number on the phone for emergencies, but it’s some emergency center in Alaska. Nowhere close. They still talk to me, though. Say calm, soothing things I can barely hear, even with the volume turned all the way up and the phone pressed against my ear, as I try to explain brokenly, haltingly, who I am and where I am.

Eventually they say people are coming. They tell me to stay by the lake, to make a signal so they can see me.

But I can’t stay here. If we’re going to be rescued, we’re going to be rescued together. Bo and me.