Because wherever Dawn was a few moments ago, she was there alone. In her head, in her thoughts.
(With her dad.)
She’d forgotten about Lucas; he was elsewhere.
But he’s here now.
He’s here, and he’s in a bad spot.
And Dawn’s instantly awake.
LUCAS ISN’T BREATHING RIGHT. And not in the way that guys sometimes do when they’re passed out asleep and snoring like a bear or, like, an eighteen-wheeler.
That’s annoying, but it’s not, you know, concerning.
Dawn wakes up because she realizes that Lucas isn’t moving. And she listens and she can’t hear him breathing over the sound of the wind, and then she panics and starts to believe he might be dead, and she reaches for him in the dark and finds his face and his neck and feels around for a pulse.
And his pulse is there, but it’s weak.
And when she turns on her flashlight and shines the light at him she can see he’s breathing, but it’s super shallow. And then every now and then he’ll, like, gasp really loud and suck in a mouthful of air like he’s dying, and his face will contort and she can see he’s in pain.
And she can see all the blood that’s leaked out through the hole in his jacket.
* * *
Dawn points the flashlight beam at the rock wall. Props it up there so it will stay and she’ll have both her hands free.
Lucas is curled up on his side with his legs bent. Gingerly, Dawn tries to roll him a little bit. She reaches for the zipper on his jacket.
Lucas stirs, but he doesn’t wake up. It’s so cold in the little crevice but his skin is hot to her touch, too hot. He whimpers a little bit as she unzips his jacket. But he doesn’t wake up, and Dawn doesn’t know if that’s a good thing or not.
There’s so much blood underneath.
He was wearing a T-shirt to sleep in, and that’s all he has on underneath his jacket. He’s a Black Bear, so the T-shirt is red, but it’s a bright cherry red. It’s nothing like the deep crimson staining his midsection.
The fabric is slashed open, just above Lucas’s belly button. His whole stomach is sticky with blood, some of it dried and some of it fresh. Some of it has soaked through the shirt, gluing the fabric to his skin. Dawn stares at the stab wound and feels sick to her stomach.
Lucas whimpers again. It’s the noise a child would make, or maybe a sick animal. It’s pain and fear and exhaustion.
Dawn zips his jacket back up, to the top. Then she turns off the flashlight and sits there in the dark, her back to the storm, straining her ears to listen to Lucas breathing.
* * *
Time passes. Dawn can’t say how long, only that she lies there and listens to the wind and feels Lucas breathing softly, and every now and then he’ll wake up and gasp a lungful of air again, and he’ll cry out from the pain of moving and his breathing afterward will be hot and fast and feverish.
He’s in bad shape; that much is obvious.
And sooner or later, Dawn realizes that she can’t ask him to go any farther.
“Lucas,” she says. She turns on the flashlight. “Lucas, wake up.” She shines the light on him. He doesn’t open his eyes. He’s shivering now, from the cold or from something else entirely.
“Lucas,” Dawn says. She shakes him, gently, and watches his forehead furrow. He stirs a little bit, but doesn’t open his eyes.
“Hmm?” he says, finally.
“Lucas, I think you’re hurt,” Dawn tells him. “Like, really bad.”
Lucas doesn’t answer immediately. He exhales, and it sounds ragged. “Yeah,” he says. His voice is weak. “Warden got me.”
He shifts a little bit, and Dawn sees how every muscle in his face goes tense with the effort and the pain of moving. And she can see the blood staining the front of his red Black Bear jacket and she wonders how he even made it this far, how he didn’t just drop dead hours before.
“I don’t think…I can do this,” Lucas says, and that scares her. It scares her because she knows how bad Lucas wants to play the hero, how he wants to be the one who saves the day.
Solid and dependable.
“I think,” Lucas says, “I think I just need to lie here for a while.
“Dawn,” Lucas says. “Are you as scared as I am?”
DAWN’S OUT OF THE CREVICE before she knows what she’s doing. She’s fifty feet away before she knows that she’s gone.
She’s left Lucas as comfortable as she can manage. As warm and dry as he’s going to get on this ridge. She’s left him with nearly all of the food—not that there’s much. He’s got enough, Dawn figures, to last a day.
She’s not sure he’ll survive longer than that. Not if she can’t find help.
She’s lucky she doesn’t walk right off that cliff, though. Plummet down into the abyss and die somewhere on the rocks. She’s not thinking right, not at all, hyperventilating and her thoughts going supersonic consumed with the idea of saving Lucas. And Amber. And whoever else is still alive.
She’s at the edge of the cliff before she realizes she made the wrong turn. Stops, just in time, and turns and hurries back toward the crevice and past it, before she can tell herself she’s better off staying put.
Before she can really feel the chill in the air.
Dawn passes the crevice and for a second she thinks she hears Lucas call her name from inside it. He sounds breathless and weak and she wants to go back to him, to lie with him and comfort him, to keep him warm and pretend she’s not afraid.
But he’ll die on this ridge unless she keeps moving.
Unless she can somehow get him help.
Dawn keeps running, keeps moving. Picks her way across the ridge, away from the crevice and the abyss behind it. Back as best she can figure toward the trail. Toward Brandon and Evan.
Toward Warden, and whatever he has planned.
She’s walked about a hundred yards before the adrenaline wears off and the cold really hits her.
The cold bites at Dawn’s face and the wind whips through her jacket, and Dawn shakes from the chill and it only gets worse when she stops moving. Her legs and her feet ache and her whole body is exhausted. There’s no visibility beyond the beam of her flashlight, no help coming for her, no rescue.
Dawn is hungry and her body is weak.
She stumbles over the rocks and forces herself onward, up the spine of the ridge with no sense of where she’s going or where she’s even standing, where she exists in the grand scheme of the world.
There is rock and there is night and she moves across both and she can see the blood all over Lucas’s jacket when she closes her eyes and it’s enough to keep propelling her forward.
She’s not going back there.
She’s not letting him die.
BUT LUCAS MIGHT DIE ANYWAY, Dawn knows.
She might, too.
She’s numb from the cold and the hunger and the fatigue. Her thoughts slow to sludge and her body won’t respond to basic commands. She falls and scrapes her palms on the rocks and lies there and the wind whistles over her and it would be so easy to just close her eyes and sleep.
Dawn lies there and even the cold doesn’t seem so bad anymore. Even the rocks seem comfortable beneath her. She could drift away, here, and it might even be pleasant. Dawn closes her eyes and it feels good and nourishing, and she knows if she keeps them closed much longer she won’t ever feel the cold again.
Her body feels like it weighs three hundred pounds. Just pushing herself to a sitting position is a chore; standing again is a serious job. Dawn’s head is swimming by the time she’s upright. She’s afraid she might faint.
The wind seems to redouble its efforts to freeze her to death. Or, barring that, knock her back over, where she’ll maybe decide to sleep this time.
Dawn stands in place for a minute, trying to blink
away the hunger and the exhaustion. It does marginal good.
She forces herself to start walking again. The beam of her flashlight illuminates the ground just ahead of her, and Dawn knows there isn’t a trail to follow and that she’s pushing forward on faith.
She knows Brandon and Evan and Warden are out there, waiting for her, and that they’ll kill her as sure as the wind will, if they find her.
She knows her odds are slim and she’ll probably die, but she knows that Lucas is depending on her. And Amber, who is compassionate and caring and who would be doing the same thing, Dawn knows, not only for her but for any of the kids in her group, no matter what they thought of her.
She makes it another ten, fifteen minutes. Pitch dark and uneven ground, the burn of her muscles as the ridge rises and falls beneath her.
And then Dawn slips again. Misjudges a step and plummets down a bare rock face. It’s only ten feet, but when she hits, she hits hard. Twists her ankle on something and batters her arm. Loses her headlamp somewhere and watches the beam blink out.
She tries to stand and nearly screams from the pain. Tries to hobble and just straight collapses. And knows, as she hits the ground, that this is it. There’s no more pushing forward. Not on this ankle. Not like this.
This time, it doesn’t feel so seductive, the thought of falling asleep. Of dying here on the mountain and never again being cold.
This time, Dawn wants to keep going. For Amber and Lucas. For herself.
She just can’t.
She just straight freaking can’t.
DAWN DOESN’T DIE ON THAT RIDGE.
She doesn’t even have a particularly uncomfortable night, not after she passes out at the base of that fall.
Dawn spends the night clueless, in a state of blissful unconsciousness. Things happen while she’s out, but she’s not privy to any of it.
And then she wakes up, and the sun is shining and the terrain doesn’t quite look as alien and foreboding as it did last night. And then Dawn shifts her weight a little bit and she realizes she’s wrapped up in somebody’s sleeping bag.
She’s warm.
And mostly dry.
And that somebody who owns the sleeping bag is watching her carefully.
It’s Brielle.
THE BLACK BEAR SITS on a rock across a small clearing from Dawn. She has her big hiking pack beside her, half full or a little less. She doesn’t look as tired or, you know, gaunt as Lucas did, or Dawn feels. She looks like she’s spent some time in the woods, sure, but she doesn’t look like she’s about to die from it. She looks like she could go another week or so, easy.
Wordlessly, Brielle hands Dawn a granola bar, which Dawn devours. She’s so hungry she can barely tear the wrapper open, but she gets it done, and gets it down.
Brielle hands her another bar. “Last one,” she says. “For now. We have a long day ahead of us.”
Dawn eats the second bar slower, but not by much. Slow enough that she can taste the chocolate chips, anyway. When she’s done, she stuffs the wrapper away. “How did you find me?” she asks.
Brielle shrugs. The expression on her face is still inscrutable. It’s impossible to tell what she’s thinking, about Dawn or the situation or, like, life in general. “Your flashlight,” she tells Dawn. “I saw the beam. You know you’re on the wrong ridge, right?”
Dawn nods. “Warden kicked over the cairns,” she says. “It got dark. We got lost.”
Brielle’s expression softens, just a tad. “You could have died,” she says.
Dawn says, “I’m still not sure I didn’t.”
According to Brielle, Dawn made it nearly all the way back to the main ridge before she took her little tumble. Hence why Brielle was able to see the beam from her flashlight—and why Brandon and Evan and Warden may have seen the same.
“I followed them out of camp,” Brielle tells Dawn. “Yesterday morning. After you and Lucas turned back.”
Brielle looks at her. “That was pretty brave,” she says. “Going up against Warden like that.”
Dawn looks away. “I couldn’t just let him get away with murdering Alex and Christian,” she says. “No matter how much I wanted to escape.”
She closes her eyes. Feels tired and weak, despite the food, despite the rest. Feels overwhelmed by what lies out there waiting for them, by the magnitude of what’s left to do.
Brielle snaps her fingers. Dawn opens her eyes.
“Wake up,” Brielle says. “We gotta go. I don’t know where the boys are, but they’re bound to be somewhere close.”
Dawn doesn’t say anything. She listens instead, to the sound of the mountain. Hears wind, and nothing else. Nothing that suggests Brandon and Evan and Warden are nearby. But they’re out there, Dawn knows. And Lucas’s clock is ticking.
Amber’s is, too….
ACCORDING TO BRIELLE, Kyla joined Warden and the boys in the pursuit.
“She didn’t look, like, happy about it,” Brielle tells Dawn. “But it’s not like she was going to make it to the highway without Warden, either.”
“But what about you?” Dawn asks. “Weren’t they worried about leaving you behind?”
Brielle shoots her another look. “People don’t notice me,” she says. “I mean, I’m sure Warden did, but the others? I bet they couldn’t even tell you my name.”
She’d hidden, she said, when she heard Dawn and Lucas fighting with Warden, and managed to stay hidden as Brandon and Evan riled themselves up for the chase, and after the four Pack members disappeared back up the snowy trail, she’d come out of hiding and gathered what she could and set out to follow.
“No offense,” Brielle says, “but I really didn’t give you and Lucas much hope of getting back to headquarters, not in a storm. But I knew Warden would probably think I left with you, and the others would just forget about me, so I thought I could slip past and, you know, get to safety, while the rest of you fought it out.”
She speaks matter-of-factly, as though this kind of life-or-death disaster is what she normally does for fun, as though two people aren’t already dead and more people want to murder each other.
As though she isn’t talking about leaving Dawn and Lucas to fend for themselves.
But then she kind of smiles at Dawn. “Anyway, I’m glad I found you,” she says. “I didn’t really want you to die.”
* * *
They pack up and head out.
It’s an overcast morning and the ridge is covered in fresh snow, but there’s more visibility than yesterday, at least. Dawn can see the spur ridge stretched out in front of them to where it meets the real ridge in the distance. Behind them, somewhere, is the end of the spur ridge, and Lucas.
Dawn tells Brielle about Lucas as they hike. Her ankle is sore, but if she moves slow, she can limp across the rocks on it. Brielle watches her, stays close to Dawn like she’s worried she’ll fall again, and Dawn wonders why the other girl doesn’t just abandon her.
But Brielle isn’t going anywhere apparently, so Dawn tells her about Lucas and the spur ridge and the crevice in the rock and the blood. How Lucas was stabbed and it’s not only Amber they have to try to save now, but him, too.
And Brielle listens with a grim expression, and when Dawn is at the part where she slips and falls and breaks her flashlight, Brielle glances back once more across the terrain toward the end of the spur ridge and shakes her head.
“What a clusterfuck,” she says, and at this point, Dawn is inclined to agree with her.
“You said you left after Warden and the boys,” Dawn says, after they’ve walked a ways in silence. “But I guess you didn’t find them.”
“Not yet,” Brielle replies.
Dawn looks south along the solid spine of rock that marks the trail, two or three more miles over jutting mounds of snowy rock. “Then they’re still out there,” she says,
and she shivers but it’s not from the cold. “Ahead of us.”
* * *
There’s nothing to do but move cautiously.
Brielle and Dawn turn their coats inside out so that the bright colors are muted somewhat against the fresh snow. It’s probably pointless; the rest of the world is white and gray, and Dawn’s coat is yellow and Brielle’s is bright blue, but they do it anyway, and they try to stay low as they hurry across the top of the ridge.
The Raven’s Claw is behind them now, north. Headquarters is south. Warden and the others are no doubt south already. They hope.
Dawn isn’t sure what Brielle plans to do if they see Warden and the others. Hide, probably; Brielle doesn’t seem like a fighter. Dawn supposes they’ll cross that proverbial bridge when they come to it.
(But you already know they’re going to come to that bridge.)
In the meantime, she tries to focus on the hike: one foot in front of the other, watch that tender ankle, that slippery snow. Follow Brielle and try to keep quiet, stop every now and then to scan the ridge up ahead and behind for signs of life.
It’s weird, but Dawn doesn’t feel as desperate, not with Brielle here. The Black Bear seems to know what she’s doing, and she doesn’t seem afraid. She shoulders her hiking pack and picks out the trail for them to follow, and Dawn looks out at the ridge ahead of them and can see where in the distance it drops down from the alpine, where the trail will begin again in earnest, back to headquarters.
There is still no sign of Warden and the others, not even fresh tracks in the snow. The mountain is quiet; even the wind has died down some. It’s almost peaceful, if you don’t think about the murderous psychos on the loose.
After a while, they stop for a rest and a quick snack of hydration candies before they keep going. The sun’s obscured by clouds, and Dawn’s from the city and couldn’t figure out the time anyway, but it still feels like early morning, even though they’ve been hiking awhile.
The Wild Page 17