Dzo let her lean on his arm as they hiked out of the clearing. He was shorter than Chey, maybe ten centimeters shorter, but his shoulder felt hard as a rock and she got the impression he could easily have carried her. They headed along the course of the trickling stream. The water was cold and very clear. Red pine needles spun on the surface and caught on exposed tree roots and then slid past them again.

Not so very far away from the stream ran an abandoned logging road. It didn’t look like much to Chey—just a winding lane where the trees didn’t grow quite so closely together. You had to follow it carefully with your eyes to see it at all but Dzo assured her that to the animals of the forest it was like a six-lane superhighway. “I’ve got a friend, now, who’s only about twenty klicks from here. He can patch you up right quick,” he assured her when she demanded to know where they were headed.

“Twenty kilometers?” she gasped. On her ankle she’d be lucky to get twenty more paces. He just nodded, making no attempt to reassure her that she could do it—and then lead her to another clearing where he’d left his pickup truck. She was so relieved to see the vehicle that tears leaked out of the corners of her eyes.

It looked like she wasn’t going to die in the woods after all.

The truck had little to recommend it other than its very existence. The body was the color of old rust, more brown than red. The bed was strewn with dirt and dead leaves and organic debris and the passenger’s side window had been replaced with yellowing plastic. When Dzo turned the old screwdriver jammed into the ignition the engine started up, however, and once they were under way the truck’s chained tires grabbed the snowy ground just fine.

They rolled down the path doing no more than fifteen, Dzo keeping one easy hand on the wheel while the other drummed slowly and rhythmically on the outside of his door as if he were keeping time. The trail wound back and forth and seemed to cut back across itself. To Chey it constantly looked as if the trees would close in and cut off their forward progress altogether but there was always more path ahead of them. Dzo never spoke and Chey didn’t have much to say herself. Before she knew it she had put her head back and collapsed into sleep.

When the truck braked for a stop her head flew forward and she snapped back to consciousness. The light had changed—she must have been asleep for hours. The plastic in her window warped what she could see outside but it looked like more of the same, trees pointing up at strange angles, ground choked with underbrush. On the other side, to the left, though, the trees had been cut back to make a neat little patch of open ground. A wood-framed house with red shutters stood in the middle of the clearing, with an outhouse to one side and a pair of low sheds on the other. Bluish smoke reefed up out of one of the sheds, dribbling out of its poorly-sealed eaves, and she thought it might be on fire but Dzo didn’t seem alarmed so she guessed it was supposed to do that. Maybe it was a smokehouse or a sweat lodge or something.

Dzo jumped out of the truck without a word to Chey and pulled his white mask across his face before running up to the door of the house. His furs swung back and forth as he pushed open the door and popped his head inside. He shouted “Hello” a couple of times, and then, “Hey, Monty, you around?” No answer was forthcoming.

She studied the roof of the house. The shingles looked immaculate, as if the roof had just been repaired. She did not find what she was looking for—satellite dishes, radio masts, shortwave antennae, anything of the kind—which made sense. If she was where she thought she was, there would be no direct connection with the outside world at all.

She eased her door open and then jumped down onto the packed earth of the clearing. She smelled wood smoke and pollen, and somewhere nearby another smell, a musky animal odor. She heard a footstep crunch on fallen pine needles and she gasped as she spun around. There was someone behind her.

He was a slender young man dressed in a grey cotton work shirt, jeans, and a pair of undecorated cowboy boots. His hands, which she saw first, were rough and dirty but the fingers were thin and sensitive. He had a pale face and coal black hair. His cheeks and forehead were smooth—he couldn’t be over forty, she thought—but deep cobwebs of wrinkles surrounded his eyes as if they were much older than the rest of him. The eyes were clear and inquisitive and in color they were an icy green she had seen before. Oh yes, she would never forget that color.

Bingo, she thought to herself. She kept a tight rein on her emotions and let nothing show in her face.