The pain curled her inward on herself. It made her want to scream. She forced the pain down, away from her, and rose to her feet. If not for the strength her wolf shared with her she knew she would be unconscious, maybe even dead already.

She spun around in a circle, looking for Powell. Looking for any sign of movement—a flash in the darkness, a dull glint. Instead she saw Port Radium.

It lay beneath her, spread out at the bottom of a long, rolling hill. No one lived there, she was sure of it—what few structures remained intact had collapsed roofs or had tumbled down to fall in on themselves. There had been dozens, maybe a hundred hangars and warehouses and who knew what else, once, but the vast majority of the buildings had been burned to the ground. The roads remained, long dark ribbons sectioning the land into parcels. Long poles of stripped wood had been pounded into the earth at every crossroads and intersection. She knew what they were for—when the snow came, as it would early this far north, that would be the only way for anyone to know where a building’s foundation lay. There were streetlights as well, in some places, but the metal poles had sunk and listed as the permafrost beneath them shifted over the years until they stood at angles like the trees of the drunken forest.

Abandoned—no, more than that. There was a pall over the remains of the town, nothing visible or even tangible really but there was a wrongness about it. Chey felt like waves of regret and desolation were rolling up out of the ruins. Maybe they were haunted. A ghost town, in more ways than one.

Between Chey and the ghost town’s near edge glimmered the black mirror of a pond, a big oval pool of water. A heap of twisted metal and broken rock stood in the center of the pond like a gigantic cairn. She recognized a few outlines, of dump trucks and backhoes and cranes, but most of the metal had softened and lost its shape to rust and wind until it became a single agglomeration of bent girders and decaying engines. Hundreds of tons of forgotten equipment, left to soften like compost over a span of millennia. She could only imagine how toxic the water must be with runoff from the dead machinery. “Jesus,” she said, astounded despite herself. After spending the last few weeks in the utter natural serenity of the forest this man-made ruin startled her. “What was this place?”

Powell answered her from the shadows. “It was a mining town, once.” She didn’t turn or give any sign she’d heard him. She didn’t want to move. She didn’t want him to hit her again—her shoulder still hurt from the last time. “The rocks here are some of the oldest on Earth and they’re full of radium, cobalt, chromium. It also contained one of the biggest silver lodes ever discovered.”

“And you thought it would be a nice place to hide out,” she said, quietly.

There was nothing wrong with his hearing—or maybe he was closer to her than the sound of his voice made her think. “It was too expensive to mine the silver profitably, though. It cost more to dig it up and ship it back to civilization than it was worth.”

“So they abandoned it then?”

“Not quite,” Powell told her. His voice came from over to her left—she was sure of it. She had to be ready, had to anticipate his next attack. If she could turn his move against him—but he was still talking. “They found something else here, too. This is where the Americans got the uranium for their first a-bombs.”

She gasped in spite of herself. “Really?”

“They hired the local Dene Indians to carry it out of here in burlap sacks. They’ve always claimed they didn’t know how dangerous the stuff was, but an entire generation of Dene men died young here. You see those dark mounds down there?” he asked, and she nodded—there were piles of dark earth almost everywhere, sticking up from the empty ground like mammoth ant hills.

“Those are pitchblende tailings, what’s left of what they dug out of the ground after they refined the uranium ore. Every couple of years someone from the government comes out here to measure how radioactive they still are.”

“Radioactive—this place is radioactive,” she said, and cold sweat burst in pinpricks under her hair.

“I didn’t think your friends would follow me here. I figured they had to know how dangerous it was. Maybe you can tell them. Maybe they’ll leave, then.”

“I don’t think Bobby would listen to me now,” she said, and turned, her hands up, ready to grab him and throw him. He was so close she could smell his skin—she could smell his wolf.

She expected him to lunge forward and knock her down. He didn’t. She overbalanced and had to stagger to keep from falling. When she’d straightened again, wary, too stiff, he raised a hand toward her and she swung to block his punch. He wasn’t punching, though. He had a square black pistol in his hand. He must have gone back to Pickersgill’s corpse and recovered one of the man’s guns.

“Powell,” she had time to say, but then he shot her.

The noise barely registered in her ears. The pain blocked out almost every other sense impression she had. Her heart lurched in her chest and her lungs sagged as the breath burst out of her. The pain was immense and bitter and devastating—she couldn’t tell up from down, couldn’t even tell what part of her body had been shot. Then her arm throbbed viciously and she knew exactly where the bullet went in. She also knew that it was still inside of her.

She dropped to her knees and grabbed the bloody wound on her left forearm. Her skin was burning—literally smoldering but that didn’t bother her as much as the throbbing. It felt like every blood vessel in her arm had swollen up until they were crowding each other in there. It felt like her circulatory system was pumping undiluted agony deep into her body.

With her index finger she probed at the wound. It was narrow and round and blood leaked out of it. She dug her finger into the wound a little and a whole new kind of pain revealed itself to her.

She threw up. There wasn’t much in her stomach but she threw up acid and bile that streamed down over her chest. It actually made her feel better. Then she looked up at Powell, finally able to form a thought in her head.

“I’m not dead,” she said.

“Not yet,” he agreed. He started to put the gun in his pocket, then pulled it out again and threw it to clatter in the ruins, out of sight. “But you will die eventually. Already your body is reacting to the silver.”

“Poison,” she said. He had meant to shoot her in the arm. Somewhere non-vital, a non-lethal wound. “I’m poisoned.”

He nodded. He bent down to look into her eyes. “I don’t know how long it’ll take to kill you. You might have time to find your boyfriend and get him to cut the bullet out of you. Better hurry, though. The moon will be up sooner than you think.”

He turned around and started to walk away. He gave her one last glance—not so much a look of sympathy as curiosity, as if he expected her to say something or do something to make him stop.

“Powell,” she mewled, like a hurt kitten.

It wasn’t enough. He kept walking and soon the darkness swallowed him whole.