It was difficult to picture Cady—my Cady—trekking through the jungle, facing off against a drug cartel. “You must have gone down there to find something,” I said, my mind reeling. “Or someone.”
“The details of the job don’t matter,” Cady said, which was another way of saying that the details of the job were none of my business. “What matters is that things went south, and if we hadn’t pulled out when we did, we’d all be dead.”
“And Ash?” My grip tightened around the mug in my hands.
“He wasn’t dead when we left.” Cady let out a long, uneven breath. “That’s all I know. Mac and I went back for him as soon as we could, but he was…gone.” Cady’s voice was hoarse. “I would have moved hell and high water to bring Ash home, even if there was nothing to find.”
I tried to imagine what it would have been like if the search for Bella had been a search for Free or Jude. I wouldn’t have stopped.
I couldn’t have stopped.
“My father gave up.” Cady shook, physically shook as she spoke. “Mac gave up.”
“You didn’t,” I said, because I knew Cady.
“I had to.” I could see the muscles in Cady’s throat tensing. She braced her palms against the bed. Ready position. “I was pregnant, Kira.”
I heard my own sharp intake of breath.
“My father didn’t know,” Cady murmured, the words catching. “Neither did Mac. But every time they hammered me for taking risks with my own life, I knew that I was taking risks with his.” She closed her eyes, just for a moment. “So I stopped.”
Cady had given up looking for Ash—for Jude. This was what I’d thrown in her face downstairs.
“I’m sorry,” I said. My voice cracked, and I stalked toward the window. My back to Cady, I stared out into the darkness. “I know that you’re just watching out for me. I know that this situation with Bella—it’s not the same.”
Cady joined me at the window, staring out into the night. We couldn’t see the mountain through the darkness, but I could feel it.
“One to ten?” Cady asked me.
“Eight.” I wouldn’t lie to her, not after the truths she’d just given me. “Girl is back. The flashbacks—I’m handling them.”
“I don’t have to go back out there,” Cady told me. “The search can carry on without me. I can take you home.”
“No,” I said, stepping back from Cady and from the window. My hands shook, and I used the mug to steady them.
Cady had given up the search for Ash for Jude’s sake. I wouldn’t let her give up this one for mine.
I crept into the room I was sharing with Free at a quarter to two, but didn’t fall asleep until the sun began to peek over the horizon the next morning. I dreamed of darkness—not the forest, but the kind of darkness that comes with walls on four sides, closing in.
Bad things happen to bad little girls.
I knew it was a dream, but it didn’t matter. I could still feel myself clawing at the tiny crack beneath a shadow-cast door, a whimper rising in the back of my throat. I was still whimpering when I woke up—and I wasn’t the only one.
Silver stood over me, nudging me awake. Pup. Wake up, pup. Her high-pitched whine broke off as the world came into focus for me and her tongue lapped at my face.
Kira, I thought. I’m Kira. That’s Silver. Kira and Silver. We’re fine.
In the early years, I’d woken up like this more mornings than I could count.
“Good morning, Sleeping Beauty.” Free tossed something at me. It wasn’t until it landed on my stomach that I realized it was a Pop-Tart. I sat up before Silver could get ideas about snatching it.
“Breakfast?” I asked Free.
“Breakfast, part two. Part one was rough. Ness is down with the flu, and let’s just say that Bales Bennett’s culinary skills leave something to be desired.”
Given the size of Free’s appetite, I deeply suspected she’d eaten whatever it was that Bales had attempted to cook anyway. As I eyed the Pop-Tart, she tossed something else at me—a file folder.
“What’s this?” I asked, shoving Silver over after a quick scratch behind her ears. I flipped open the folder just as Free answered my question.
“An overview of Miss Penelope Ferris’s research into our missing persons.”
“The librarian?” My mind went immediately to the conversation I’d overhead between Gabriel and Bales the day before.
“One and the same,” Free replied. “Jude has developed an ill-fated crush on her—he digs the glasses.” Free hopped up on the dresser, her heels bouncing lightly against the drawers. “Boy is still hanging out at the library in what he insists is ‘completely necessary recon’ and not at all an effort to prove himself helpful to his new lady love by stacking shelves.”
“Did he tell you he’s a lover, not a fighter?” I asked.
“I believe the direct quote was ‘Make love, not war or questionable breakfast choices.’”
As the last remnants of the dream slid off me, I wondered whether or not I should break it to Jude that the current object of his affection had almost married someone else. Deciding it wouldn’t make much difference either way, I bit into the Pop-Tart and began thumbing through the files Free had given me. So many people, gone without a trace. I read over their names one by one. When I got to the last one, my gaze darted up to Free’s.
She would have married my brother, Gabriel had said, if things had turned out differently.
“I see you’ve come to the first case our librarian friend documented.” Free turned toward the window. “One Andrés Cortez.”
* * *
One hour, multiple readings of the files, two Pop-Tarts, and three split-second, gut-clawing flashbacks later, this is what I knew: Andrés Cortez had gone missing four years earlier, at the age of nineteen. He’d dropped out of high school the day after his sixteenth birthday to help support his family and had been working as an unofficial guide on the mountain since he was twelve. For eighteen months prior to his disappearance, he’d also held down a day job as a mechanic two towns over.
He’d been reported missing by his fourteen-year-old brother. Gabriel. I felt like I should have known, like I should have been able to scent the tragedy on him.
According to the official records, the investigation had found no evidence of foul play. The working theory seemed to have been that Andrés had kicked the small-town dust off his feet and left his life and responsibilities behind, the way his own father had years before. In the weeks leading up to his disappearance, he’d spent several hundred dollars on wilderness supplies.
People around here go missing all the time. I could hear shades of meaning in Gabriel’s words now that I hadn’t before.
“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” Free asked.
With effort, I pulled my attention from the file and looked up at her. “Wonder what?”
Free leaned back against the wall. “Nine people in the last four years, starting with Andrés Cortez. I’m asking myself what a ‘normal’ number of disappearances around here might be.”
Over half a million people are reported missing each year. I didn’t recognize the statistic, not at first. Unlike my time in the forest, this was a memory I had to search for. When I found it, I felt like I was watching it unfold from under water.
“Over half a million people are reported missing each year.” The doctor pauses.
“How does that make you feel?” She leans back in her chair. “Kira?”
“Hungry.”
“It makes you feel hungry?”
I shrug.
“Let’s try something different. Let’s talk about the dog.”
I cock my head to the side. “Silver?”
“The new dog. Saskia.” Another pause—longer, leaner somehow. “Someone hurt her.”
There was a roar in my ears, a whisper, and then
nothing.
“The cases might not be connected,” Free was saying. “These missing persons might have nothing to do
with Bella.”
And how, I thought, does that make you feel? I had to stifle the urge to physically shake off the question. Feeling was dangerous. Thinking was better.
As long as I was thinking, I was me.
“Say the cases were connected.” I turned to Free, my focus intense. “Andrés Cortez is the earliest case we have a file for. Do you think he was the first?”
Free balanced precariously on the windowsill, one knee pulled to her chest and the other dangling toward the ground. “The first what?”
I thought of the doctor, asking me about Saskia. Someone hurt her. There was still a part of me that believed that was what humans did. They hurt things—not because they had to, not in self-defense, not to sate their hunger.
Because they could.
“The first victim.” Free answered her own question—or maybe the expression on my face answered it for her. “You think all these people were kidnapped, like Bella?”
I didn’t know what to think.
It was Free’s suggestion that we talk to Gabriel. It was my idea to go alone. Every instinct I had said that Gabriel wouldn’t do well with being outnumbered. I was the one who’d spent the most time with him. I was the logical choice. Free wasn’t happy about that, but she agreed: I would talk to Gabriel.
I would ask him about his brother.
For the first time since Cady had sent me off the mountain, my body and the restless energy inside it felt aligned. I made it to the shack I’d seen Gabriel disappear into the night before and paused. Up close, the term shack seemed insufficient. It wasn’t big—maybe twenty feet by twenty—but it was solid. It had been made with wood but made well. The color had faded with time, enough so that I doubted Gabriel was the one who’d taken hammer to nail. But someone had built this place, board by board.
I understood, objectively, that knocking was something people did. But announcing my presence—giving away my position and waiting, open and exposed—wasn’t something I’d ever been able to bring myself to do. Jude had joked for years that my version of knocking was to stand silently outside a door, glaring intensely.
I might have given up on this particular door—I wasn’t even sure why I’d come—but I heard something. The sound was muted, but I had a way of listening, focusing on one thing and blocking out everything else.
And there it was again—a low-pitched murmur. A moan.
A breath caught in my throat, I pressed the door inward, slowly at first. The hinge creaked, the old wooden boards protesting beneath my feet as I shifted my weight. Allowing the house to announce my entry sent my shoulders hunching upward, but after freezing on the makeshift porch for a moment or two, I made my way inside.
The first thing I noticed was that the cabin consisted of a single room, plumbing on one side, a shelf with non-perishables on the other, and a bed in between.
The second thing I noticed was the body on the floor.
Body. For an instant, I was somewhere else, looking at someone else. I could see long, dark hair. I could see blood pooling on white tile.
I stumbled backward, my hand grappling for the wall and hitting paper. I didn’t turn to see what I was touching. I couldn’t tear my eyes from the floor. Sunlight streamed in from the door and a nearby window, illuminating the shape of the form sprawled there.
Not a woman. Not bleeding.
Gabriel.
I was used to the forest haunting my dreams, used to shades of memory bleeding over into the light of day. But this was different.
This wasn’t the forest.
This wasn’t Girl.
My breath was coming quickly, my heart hammering in my chest as I knelt next to Gabriel’s body. He lay facedown, his head turned to one side. My hand crept toward his face. It was only after I’d felt his breath, warm against my palm, that I realized why I’d reached out.
To make sure he was breathing.
To make sure he was alive.
I could see now, the way his chest rose and fell. He let out another low-pitched moan, and I understood what I should have assumed from the onset—he was sleeping.
How many nights had I spent on the floor instead of pinned down under covers in a bed? How many times had I woken, a strangled cry dying in my throat?
And yet, when I’d seen him lying there, I hadn’t thought that he was sleeping.
I shouldn’t be here.
In the months after Cady had found me, that feeling had been with me constantly. Even once I’d accepted that I was Kira, that I was human, that I was wanted, the white-hot realization that I wouldn’t ever fully belong in this world could hit me in an instant.
Get it together, Kira. Bales had said the day before that Gabriel wouldn’t thank me for having overheard their conversation. I doubted he’d be any more charitable finding me crouched over his sleeping body.
I stood and backed away in a single, liquid motion. I turned toward the door, intending to flee, but as I did, I caught sight of the wall I’d reached for when I’d stumbled backward. My hand had hit paper, and now I could see why.
The surface was covered, ceiling to floor, with notes and maps, photographs and pins. I recognized bits and pieces from the missing persons reports I’d read over, but that was nothing compared to the whole.
An eight-foot-by-ten-foot map of Hunter’s Point and the adjacent mountain hung in the center, marked up so thoroughly with black marker and flags that I could barely make out the words underneath. Smaller maps broke the rest of the Sierra Glades into quadrants.
Seven hundred and fifty thousand acres, I thought, reaching up to press my fingertips gently against the map in the center. In a lifetime, Gabriel couldn’t cover that much ground.
But he could try.
Bales had claimed that Gabriel knew the mountain better than anyone. Now I understood why. I thought back to the way that Gabriel had helped me find Saskia when she’d gone missing.
Caves, I could hear him telling me. My brother used to insist that they were out here, but I spent an entire summer looking and never found one.
Based on what I’d seen on Gabriel’s wall, I was willing to bet he’d spent longer than one summer looking. In fact, I would have bet the clothes off my back that he’d spent years.
“A quiet Kira bodes well, I always say!” Jude plopped down beside me. I was sitting with my back up against the tree I’d slept under our first night in Hunter’s Point.
“Is this an ‘obsessing over the fact that I’m stuck here instead of out searching’ quiet or a ‘meditating on what was in those files’ quiet?” Free asked, jumping to catch hold of the tree’s lowest branch and pulling herself effortlessly up. “Or an ‘I should have taken Free with me to talk to Gabriel’ one?”
Jude stretched out his mile-long legs and laid the folder of information we’d obtained from the librarian delicately on his lap. “I have always felt, deep down,” he said once it became clear that I wasn’t going to answer Free’s question, “like I might be the second coming of Sherlock Holmes.”
Jude had also, at various points in time, claimed to be the second coming of Ann Landers, William Shakespeare, and Princess Di. I said as much out loud, and my foster brother adopted a serene expression.
“I have layers.”
Above us, Free positioned herself on the branch, allowing her legs to dangle down. “And what, oh second coming of Sherlock, are your finely honed instincts telling you about our missing persons?”
Jude pressed two fingers on his right hand to his temple, like a medium communing with the spirits. A look of intense concentration settled over his face.
“Now would be a good time for you to say something,” he told me in a stage whisper. “Propose a theory, and I will do my Sherlockian duty and tell you why you’re wrong.”
A theory? I was about as much use at putting together theories as Saskia was at putting people at ease.
“I believe in you,” Jude told me. “I really do.”
“And I believe you’re keeping something from
us,” Free added. “I really do.”
One for all, and all for trouble.
“I don’t think Gabriel believes his brother just walked away from their family.” I should have told them more than that. I should have told them exactly what I’d seen at Gabriel’s place—and exactly what the sheriff had told me. But Gabriel had helped me find Saskia the day before.
Gabriel and I were both the kind of people who slept on the floor.
“Do you think good old Gabe believes that his brother’s case might be connected to Bella’s?” Jude asked.
Yes. The force of my instinctual response was savage in my mind, but I was saved from responding by the sound of the world’s most mournful baying. NATO had found us, Duchess on his heels. As Free tore a stick off the tree and tossed it for Her Ladyship, NATO hunkered down between Jude and me and continued the hound dog version of a tragic ballad.
Jude tousled his K9’s head back and forth, scratching at just the right spot behind his ears. “The world isn’t as bad as all that, old man.”
I felt, rather than saw, Saskia edging toward us. She’d spent the past twenty-four hours giving everyone—myself included—a wide berth. Meeting her liquid gaze, I had the oddest sense that she was on the verge of adding her howls to NATO’s.
I didn’t know the reason for their canine melancholy, but I had my suspicions. “We train them to find what they’re looking for.” I turned from Saskia to study NATO’s deep brown eyes. “And in training, that’s something they can do.”
But out in the real world, that wasn’t how search and rescue worked.
“First the river,” I said, reaching up to stroke a hand along NATO’s velvety-soft ears. “Then the mountain…”
In both cases, the hounds had caught Bella’s trail. And both times, that trail had gone cold. Whoever had taken Bella knew how to cover their own tracks—and hers. A local. Someone who knows that mountain.
Duchess dumped the stick she’d fetched for Free ceremoniously at my feet. I picked it up and threw it again for her. This time, Her Ladyship did not deign to fetch. She sat down next to NATO and bit his tail—gently enough to tell me that she wasn’t really looking for a fight. In response, NATO licked her face and cuddled up. Saskia took up position three or four feet from the pair of them.
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