A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER, it’s clear that they are lost.

And by clear, I mean that the ridge they’re standing on has come to its logical conclusion, and its logical conclusion is a sheer drop into pitch black with no conceivable way of descending it.

“It’s too dark to tell,” Lucas tells Dawn as they stand at the precipice. “The trail could be down there, like, lost in the fog. Like, just beyond our flashlight beams, or whatever.”

Dawn looks around the barren ridge and picks up a piece of rock about the size of a grapefruit. She throws it over the edge of the cliff, and she and Lucas both listen to hear it hit something. They listen for a long time.

They listen for so long that Dawn starts to believe maybe the rock already landed and they just didn’t hear it.

But then the sound wafts up, faint and far away, of a rock striking more rock and clattering away into nothing. The rock might as well have landed on the moon, for how far it traveled.

It’s a million miles down.

Dawn and Lucas, they’re standing at the edge of an abyss. And there was no abyss on the agenda for the outbound leg of the hike.

They’ve dead-ended, somehow.

And that’s horrible news.

By this point, Dawn is shivering. Uncontrollably. Her teeth are chattering like you only see in cartoons. Her fingers and her toes and her nose are all numb.

She can hardly think straight. But with about the last of her brainpower, she remembers how the ridge they were hiking to get to the Raven’s Claw a few days ago joined with another ridge, somewhere along the way. Both ridges combined in, like, an upside-down Y, so she’d barely noticed them coming together.

But where the ridges came together on the outbound leg, they would have to branch apart on the return trip. And now Dawn realizes how easy it would have been for her and Lucas to take the wrong leg of the Y. The stub end. Especially in the dark, and with no cairns to guide them.

It’s impossible to say how far they’ve come along this incorrect ridgeline, only that it’s clear they’ll have to go back.

But Brandon and Evan are back there.

And it’s cold. Very cold.

Suddenly, Dawn wants nothing more than to just lie down and sleep, but however beaten down she’s feeling right now? Lucas is worse.

Lucas is pale. His lips have a blue tinge to them and he’s shivering even though he’s trying not to show it. He’s clutching his jacket at the spot where Warden’s knife stabbed him, and his movements are slow, like he’s numb from the cold or from blood loss or both.

“I think we have to find shelter,” he tells Dawn, and his voice is scary weak, and he can’t meet her eyes.

Dawn looks around at the barren rock and doesn’t see how shelter is possible. “Where?” she asks.

Lucas rubs his forehead. “I think I saw a little protected alcove back there,” he tells her. “It should keep us out of the wind, anyway.”

It’s their only hope, Dawn knows. They can’t stay out here any longer. Now that they’re not moving, the cold’s really settling in: bitter, life-sapping cold, blasted into their faces by an unrelenting wind.

And it’s clear that Lucas can’t make it much farther.

She nods, weakly. Turns around. “Let’s go.”

Fifteen minutes later, they’re huddled inside a shallow crevice, shielded from the wind on three sides by the rock. Dawn lets Lucas go first and then crowds in behind him, and the gap in the rock isn’t quite deep enough to fit them both, so she still feels the wind at her back as she squeezes in and crouches beside him. Still, it’s marginally warmer here, and if they huddle together, they can probably survive the night.

Dawn lies there and shivers and feels Lucas shivering beside her. It’s not windy in this little crevice but it’s open at the top and the temperature is still falling. Their clothes are wet and they’re on top of a mountain.

And Dawn is so tired but she can’t fall asleep, not until her mind has forced her to think about all of the things that have gone wrong.

Like, from the very beginning.

From the moment she killed her dad.

That’s what Dawn thinks about, lying there in the cold.