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“Eighty degrees!” she blurts, and Silas looks back at her. “At the edge of the lake, that’s the bearing.”
Silas reroutes his finger on the map, following her direction. “Yes, this is it!”
The contour marks become dense and rounded, indicating a steep ridge, and just around the opposite side, where their direction shifts like the flow of an eddy, is the location of the mine that still exists in the eyes of the Forest Service. If that one—the one they crawled into, dark, dank, the buzz of mosquitoes echoing off the walls into her ears—is there, theotherone, the one they stumbled upon accidentally, the one covered in a carpet of obsidian, is right ...
“Here!” Silas says sharply, tapping his finger forcefully against the thin paper. Meg reaches around him, her arm snaking to mark the place he’s pinpointing with a single pencil dot. She grabs a ruler, tracing the point of her pencil lightly along its edge from the marked spot to the grid of coordinates framing the map. She relays the GPS coordinates to Darcy.
They’re not exact. There’s no way to be. But she knows that’s close enough to give the searchers a place to begin looking for Cameron.
“Do you really think he’s there, in that mine shaft?” Silas asks, and she nods.
“I think Spencer was, at least,” she clarifies after a moment. “I’ve been all over this area for the last decade and a half,” she says softly, “and I’ve never seen obsidian anywhere else.”
“Then we’ve got to go. Now.” He barely looks to Darcy and Santos as he decides this, already at the door of the Lemon, urgency practically humming off of him.
Meg couldn’t agree more. She grabs her pack from the floor and crosses the room to join him.
“Meg!” Sheriff Walters barks, and she halts, the rush of her pulse beating in double time to the seconds ticking on the clock on the wall. “Take a radio,” he commands, and she closes her eyes in relief before moving again, strapping the receiver to her chest and following Silas out the door.
The rain is still a driving force before them; it’s hitting their faces at a punishing angle, and Meg pulls her hood over her head, ducking her face to shield it as best she can from the deluge. Her hair refuses to stay in place, plastering to her forehead and neck in wet tendrils when not whipping about in the wind, and she swipes at it impatiently, trying to clear her vision.
Silas sets a pounding pace, and for a while it’s all she can do to keep up. She doesn’t have the luxury of thinking too hard about Jessica, of the horror of her body—her remains—cradled all this time at the foot of a cliff, nor the horror of Danny’s confession, and for that, Meg is grateful. She concentrates on the pull of her muscles in her calves as they navigate the first uphill slope and then on the rhythm of her breathing as they hit the trail at as fast a clip as they can manage given the muddy, slick conditions.
In her haste to find Cameron, it occurs to Meg too late that their route to the mine will take them directly past the spot where they lost Jessica. Maybe it’s the rain obscuring her view, or the overtaxed state of her mind, but when they finally come face-to-face with the exact bend in the trail where Silas had leaped and Jessica had cried out and she and Silas had set everything after in motion, the significance hits her like a slap.
Their location is not lost on Silas, either. She knows by the way his shoulders tense. He continues on, slightly hunched, ducking a little too sharply from the force of the rain. Is he experiencing the same impulse to silence his footfalls and creep past this stretch of trail instead of jog?
She’s acutely aware of how Silas took the heat in the com van and can’t shake the feeling that she, too, owes Jessica so much more.It was me,she said,the footprints were mine,and even though the statement resounded with a satisfying ring of finality—silencing Danny, gratifying Silas—it only makes Meg a woman half-absolved. She’s straddling redemption and damnation, and if it weren’t for Cameron and his gift of possible atonement, she’s not sure she’d be able to find her way today.
But shedoeshave Cameron to think about, and when they reach the outlook over Long Lake, it’s still raining too hard, the wind blowing too forcefully for anything more than a few clipped words. She’s grateful. The radio strapped to her chest is issuing a steady stream of jumbled conversations as Team Eight attempts to meet them from the field in their search for the mine, and they descend to the lakeshore at a half trot. They’re searching in the thinnest of light; the cloud cover blanketing the sky casts an oppressive shadow over the treetops, and Meg stumbles more than once, sending streams of pebbles to cascade down toward Silas, several feet below her on the trail. He turns back, and when he reaches out to steady her, his fingers on her skin are stiff with cold. The shock of it sends an answering chill straight down her spine. His bare hands have been exposed to the elements only minutes, not hours—and certainly not closing in on forty-eight hours—and she hopes he’s not thinking what she’s thinking, assessing his discomfort and multiplying it by two full nights and a day.
As they fight their way through the dense underbrush at the shore of the lake, it’s hard for Meg to believe that she was here only yesterday,this close, calling for the boys while Max flipped rowboats and Danny checked the locks on the storage shed. Everything’s coming around full circle, spinning madly, faster and faster, and this time she doesn’t even notice the sage slapping her thighs or the branches of low-slung pine scratching her face as they push their way onward.
When they finally reach the far shore, Silas tries to take the GPS unit from Meg’s hands—she graduated from a standard compass years ago—but she’s already pulling off her gloves, and his dexterity is too compromised for him to argue when she takes it back.
“I’ve got this,” she shouts over the wind, and shedoes.
She inputs their bearing of 80 degrees, and they begin walking directly into the wilderness, following the direction of the digital arrow on her screen. Humidity clouds the plastic face of the unit, and the overcast sky filters the light to such a degree that Meg has to stop everyfew feet to keep to the course. She retrieves her headlamp from her pack, and this helps a bit, but the going is still so slow that Silas keeps striding too far ahead, rattling her, and she keeps shouting at him to wait.
They reach a clearing, and Meg stops, turning in a circle. Nothing is at all familiar in this sideways-spitting rain, and her self-assurance slips. Silas stops beside her, awaiting direction for once, and she spirals in a crisis of confidence. Did they turn off the trail too soon? Have they walked far enough? Fifteen years ago they were talking as they hiked. She wasn’t paying as much attention as she should have been. They had the benefit of the full light of day.
She calls in her coordinates to Base, but she knows it’s just protocol. The assembly in the Lemon does not have another bearing for her. Only she and Silas have ever been where they’re going, and right now, in the rain, they’re staring down a debilitating, terrifying loss. This is their chance at redemption, she thinks desperately. They have to get this right.
“How far have we come?” Silas shouts, and she fumbles with the GPS, her bare fingers cramping painfully as she scrolls through the menu to find what she’s looking for.
“Four hundred ninety feet?” He frowns, and he’s right: it makes no sense. She peers closer. “No, wait. Forty-ninehundredfeet.”
He says something about miles, or milestones, but she can’t hear him. “What?” His words are lost on the wind the instant they leave his mouth. Panic closes in. They’re wasting time. “Silas!What?”
Grasping both her shoulders, he pulls her to him to speak directly into her ear. “We’re close!” he says. “Last time we went almost a mile in from the trail.”
She nods mutely. She thinks that’s right. It has to be right.
“We traveled uphill, and then we came upon the marked mine first,” Silas reasons. “From there, the other one, with the obsidian, is just over the ridge.”
She knows ... she remembers ... and they begin to run. They reach the meadow, and yes, this looks right. Even in the rain, Meg has regained her bearings. They’re at the marked mine. The dark chasm of the entrance to the open tunnel is right there, gaping in what was then a patch of sunlight where they tossed their packs before eating lunch and what is now a deepening puddle of runoff. This is not the shaft where they’ll find Cameron, she feels sure of it, but even so, as they look in to make certain, her gut tightens in anxious anticipation. When the beam of her headlamp bounces off nothing but slick bare rock, she doesn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved.
“It’s empty!” she calls to Silas, who is already pivoting, anxious to search the unmarked, obsidian-carpeted mine. She calls in these new coordinates; she wants everyone possible on hand.
