The sullen overcast humid morning unfolded like a nightmare to Jonathan.
Danny was gone. Danny was gone.
The blue flowers in that new light looked like some shoddy carnival decoration the day after, spent seeds smudging the sludgy snow beside them a dark dirty blue. Mangy, bedraggled nectar deer with droopy wings huddled around the blossoms in the drizzle of rain.
Danny was gone, Tee-Tee with her, but her pack was still there and her boot prints headed off into the distance, turned to slush-filled tracks and then nothing at all.
Staring at that dirty blank canvas through his binoculars didn’t help. Nothing moved out there.
Poor Rack was beside himself, walking in circles, pacing, and almost slipping in the snow and on patches of ice, cane little help. Mamoud had to caution both Rack and Jonathan to stop shouting out her name, as an avalanche was possible. And so, with a dreadful paltry whispering they had spread out to search, Rack agreeing through gritted teeth to man home base.
But by midmorning, the conditions not ideal, Jonathan and the others had returned to the smoldering campfire to admit defeat.
Or worse. Jonathan had discovered four bewildered-looking black bears on a ledge hundreds of feet below them. But no sign through the binoculars of Danny—or of the bear gun.
“One of you should get the hell down there,” Rack said. “What in the blazes are you waiting for?”
“We don’t have the necessary mountain-climbing equipment,” Mamoud said. “And there’s no guarantee she is there.”
“But we have to try!” Rack said, then a muttered “sorry” for the loud voice.
Jonathan could understand his frustration, even though he knew Mamoud was right. Sarah would’ve said no different.
“I heard a gun discharge at three in the morning,” Alice said. “It was distant. I couldn’t tell where it came from. There was nothing to be done.”
Certainly not now.
Rack couldn’t believe it. “What? You heard gunfire and you didn’t wake us? You didn’t notice Danny was gone?”
“No.” Alice, impassive, with the look Jonathan had grown to hate. The one that said her own problems were much more pressing than theirs, and always would be.
Rack was halfway to apoplectic, glaring at Alice, hardly able to speak, his hands clenching and unclenching, leaving red marks on both his palms. Jonathan wondered if he was about to break up a fight.
“Apologies,” Alice said, in a nonapologetic way. “I was half-asleep. It barely registered. I thought I might have dreamt it.”
“What you mean,” Rack said, pointing his finger at Alice, “is that you don’t care about Danny!”
“Come too close pointing fingers and you’ll find out what I care about,” Alice said.
Mamoud stepped between them, expressing distaste, as if they had both turned out to be bratty children.
“You must stop this. This is of no use to Danny, or to us.”
“Rack, it makes more sense to head for the way station,” Jonathan said, holding on to his friend’s shoulder to steady him. “She knows where we’re going. If she can, she’ll catch up. And there might be help at the way station—to send out a proper search party.”
But in the pit of his stomach was the terrible knowledge that Danny wouldn’t have been at risk if not for him. That he should have found some way to stop her and Rack from coming along. That, in what now seemed the far-distant past, he shouldn’t have allowed them to join him at the mansion in the first place.
Rack stared at Jonathan as if he were mad. “So we just abandon her. Is that seriously what you’re telling me?”
“I know you hate the logic of moving farther away from Danny to save her, but …” He wanted to say it’s what Danny would’ve done if one of them had gone missing, but feared Rack would really lose it then.
Mamoud stepped between them as if this were now his permanent job. “We reach the way station as quickly as possible, and use it as a base. Otherwise, we’re just wandering around in the snow. And we don’t know what made her fire the weapon. If she even did.”
Rack opened his mouth to rebut that point but stopped, squinting down at a lower loop of the trail. “What’s that—down there?”
All Jonathan could see where Rack pointed was a blotch surrounded by a few mountain goats, perhaps three hundred feet below.
Alice squinted against the sun’s glare, shaded her eyes, frowned, said, “It appears to be a gigantic schoolmarm in a gray sweater and burgundy skirt.”
Rack grabbed Jonathan’s binoculars, pulling Jonathan close, as they were still around his neck.
“It can’t be,” he said. “But it is!”
“I saw that schoolmarm earlier,” Jonathan said, “down by the lake. Thought her very odd.” More than odd, less than odd, searching for Sarah’s equivalent, some “teacher-creature” dredged up from childhood, but there was none.
Alice gave him a look that said, Why didn’t you tell us?
So he in turn gave Mamoud a look. Mamoud shrugged.
Rack went rigid, still staring through the binoculars. “It’s not a schoolmarm. It’s not a schoolmarm!”
Even at that distance, Jonathan and the others could tell that the top of the schoolmarm’s head—no longer covered by a scarf—had opened up and become a vast maw, into which the monster was shoving two of the mountain goats.
Jonathan grabbed the binoculars back, took a peek.
Finished eating, the not-schoolmarm had reconstituted its head and stared up at them.
An icy dagger of fear ripped through Jonathan’s spine. But also a frisson of fascination. Of all the strange things he’d seen on Aurora, this was the most inexplicable. And yet he found the creature oddly … beautiful … in the same way he found certain kinds of invertebrate sea life beautiful.
“It can see us!”
“Well, of course it can see us,” Rack said. “We can see it.”
The monster took one last look at them, as if fixing their position in its brain. It let out a peculiar pleading bleat of a roar, almost as if asking a question.
Then the thing dropped to all fours and began to lope up the trail with surprising and uncanny speed.
Mamoud took lead, Alice right behind, and set a brutal pace because the monster below them moved so fast, with a fluid grace despite the bulk.
Yet the surreal truth that as they ran past what had before enchanted them (blue flowers and flying deer be damned) the distance between prey and predator was still considerable, because the trail wound around the mountain rather than going straight up.
Worse, the icy suspense of not seeing the monster for a half hour at a time, until they rounded the next bend, or had a view down to the lower loops. No sense of how much ground it had gained until it once again came into sight. Still bounding forward on all four legs … feet? Hands? Who knew.
Fatal thought: Is this how Sarah had died? Not by avalanche, but encountering something like this?
“It’s no Celestial Beast,” Rack said. “It’s more like every reform school student’s worst nightmare.”
Rack, just grimly trying to keep up the pace, his breath loud and shallow.
Yet when Jonathan had tried to take Rack’s pack, pull it off his back, go on the attack, Rack had angrily shrugged him off: “I can handle myself !” Then redoubled his efforts, dislodging pebbles and rocks that tumbled into the abyss.
By the time Jonathan managed to draw level with Rack again, his friend was hyperventilating, had slowed.
“I meant for your balance, Rack. I meant because I’m more used to hiking. You can take something of mine in trade if you like. Don’t be proud about it.” And yet who was Jonathan to say what was pride and what wasn’t?
Alice and Mamoud were already a hundred feet ahead of them.
Rack’s hesitation, the naked look of terror in his eyes. Then he nodded. “You’re right. You’re right.”
Quickly, they switched it up, Rack taking Jonathan’s belt of supplies and Jonathan doubling up with Rack’s pack.
Rack hugged Jonathan tight and Jonathan hugged him back.
“Time to redouble the pace,” Rack said.
He turned and headed after Alice and Mamoud with fresh energy, Jonathan bringing up the rear. But even Jonathan’s calves were beginning to tremble from the effort.
How long before the monster caught up to them?