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How is that even possible? We checked for them on the way up, stopped three separate times to check snow conditions. “You said it was fine!” I turn on Tomas, screaming like a crazy woman. “You said the snow was solid, tightly packed. You said—”
Ophelia puts an arm around me, pulls me into her side and holds me tight. I struggle against her for a second, but she doesn’t let me go. Just holds me against her as she reaches out for Logan with her other hand and holds him, too.
Behind me, I can hear Z, Luc, Cam, and Tomas talking low and urgent.
“We need to go!” Z says forcefully. “Now. Before it’s too late.”
“He hasn’t turned his beacon on,” Tomas argues. “We’ll be looking blind.”
“Maybe he can’t turn his beacon on!” Cam says, her voice going higher with each word. “Did you think of that? We have to go get him!”
“Give the avalanche a chance to settle!” Tomas insists. “If we go down there before it’s done—”
“Fuck that!” Luc says and I turn just in time to see him and Z running for the two snowmobiles that we hauled up here behind the snowcat. “We’re following the avalanche down the mountain—the damage is already done. We can’t make it any worse.”
“Eighteen minutes!” Cam yells as she swings herself onto the snowmobile behind Luc. I watch, spellbound in horror, as the snowmobiles explode forward, disappearing off the side of the mountain in a spray of snow.
“Eighteen minutes for what?” I demand, shocked at how shaky my voice sounds.
“I don’t know,” Ophelia tells me and she doesn’t sound any better.
“Eighteen minutes to find him before the chances of him staying alive go way down,” Logan says, his voice flatter than I’ve ever heard it.
Oh my God. Oh. My. God. Ohmygod. This time when my knees threaten to give out, it has nothing to do with the rumbling in the ground and everything to do with the reality Ash is facing.
“What do we do?” I demand. “How can we help?”
“Can I start hiking down?” Timmy’s dad asks.
“No,” Tomas tells him. “Get in the snowcat. It’s the best way.”
“But it’s too slow!” Logan tells him. “It’ll take forever to get to him.” For the first time, I realize his phone is in his hand. He’s got it on speaker and it’s ringing over and over and over again. The second it goes to voicemail—Ash’s voicemail—he hangs up and dials again.
“Z, Luc and Cam will find him,” Ophelia tells him. “You know they won’t let anything happen to him. You know they’ll bring him back.”
“Yeah. That’s what the firemen told me when they pulled me out of the car. That they’d bring my parents to me.” His voice slaps at us like the fiercest winter wind.
Ophelia doesn’t answer him and neither do I. How can we, when there’s nothing to say. His parents are dead, his brother is in the middle of an avalanche … I wrap an arm around his shoulder, squeeze tightly.
He doesn’t say anything, but he shifts until he’s resting against me, his head resting against my ribs. In his lap, his phone continues to ring uselessly. Again and again and again.
“There are more supplies in the snowcat,” Tomas says as he starts ushering us toward the red behemoth that brought us up here. “Z has the beacon locator, and I’m sure he’ll let us know as soon as he finds Ash. But we’ve got most of the first aid stuff. We should start down the mountain now.”
His words make sense to me, especially since small first aid kits are all Z and the others have on board the snowmobiles. I grab on to Logan’s chair, start shoving him toward the snowcat as hard and fast as I can. We need to get moving. Now.
It’s only a matter of minutes before we’re all buckled into the snowcat and heading down the mountain. Logan is right—this thing is slow. Like insanely, ridiculously, super slow. I didn’t really notice it on the way up, but now, when every second counts, it feels like it’s taking forever.
All I can think about is that I got Ash into this mess. He told me he didn’t want to snowboard again, told me he’d given it up. Told me, even, that it was too dangerous for him to think about when he was in charge of Logan.
I hadn’t listened to him. Hadn’t believed him. I’d been so caught up in worrying about Timmy, in trying to make sure that I made his wish come true, that it never occurred to me that doing so might end up hurting—or worse, killing—Ash.
As soon as the thought comes to me, I try to ignore it. To push it back down deep inside of myself. But it’s hard, especially with Logan on one side of me, dialing Ash’s satellite phone again and again and again—with no luck—and with Ophelia on the other side of me, doing the same thing with Z’s phone, with exactly the same result.
I keep glancing at my watch, counting down the seconds. The minutes. It’s been fifteen minutes since the others took off on the snowmobiles and—thanks to Cam and Logan—I am now desperately aware of what that means.
“They’ll find him,” Ophelia says again, reaching across me to squeeze Logan’s shoulder. He nods, but I’m not sure he even hears her. He’s staring out the window with blank eyes and an even blanker face. He’s miles away and I don’t know how to reach him. Don’t know if I should even try.
But at the same time, my heart hurts to see him like this. So scared, so miserable, so lost. He’s young, too young for all the bad things that have happened to him, and I just want to pull him into my arms and promise him that everything is going to be all right.
