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She sets traps and eats whatever prey she can catch while she sleeps off the fog of fatigue. She drinks regularly and finds that her strength is not fading. Rather, she is growing stronger.

Yet, there is no triumph in it. Only failure.

She has imagined every scene of the slopes in her memory. The place where the water ran over the cliffside, the cave they sequestered Baltisse in while she recovered. The tree she pinned Ryon against when she learned he was not dead.

She has shouted Ryon’s name until her throat felt shredded, and no one has called back.

Now she cannot call to mind any other memories. Every place she knows has been drawn in her thoughts and willed into existence and she feels no closer to finding them.

“Fuck!” Dawsyn shouts and a flock of ravens disperse from their branches, fleeing the echo of her voice as it reaches their midst.

He is not dead. She feels sure of it. Whatever ties saw fit to bond the two of them would surely hurt to cut. She does not feel their severance. Ryon is not dead.

But whatever condition he might be in, it must be dire.

And she cannot find him to fix it.

Dawsyn’s jaw aches from clenching it so tightly closed. Her eyes burn from the wind. Her hands throb with chilblains, but she throws her fist into a tree trunk still. She snaps the loose bark with her knuckles and ignores the reverberations that rattle her bones.

Defeated, she slams her eyelids down and imagines the campsite where she had last parted ways with the others. Her body begins to collapse inward.

Dawsyn unfolds with a wrenching gasp into the snow. Her stomach rolls, but she has come to expect it.

Before her is the small opening to a cave against a steep cliffside.

“Dawsyn?”

She turns. Approaching her from the forest is Hector, his arms laden in stripped branches.

“You didn’t find them?”

Before she can answer, there is a clamour from within the cave, and Salem appears in its mouth.

“Dawsyn!” he calls, his face stricken. “Yer back! Thank the saints.”

Dawsyn nods, bracing for interrogation.Where are they? Where are the others?She opens her mouth to stay the questions, the band of sick dread tightening around her ribcage.

But Salem speaks again before Dawsyn can. “Come quick, lass! She’s getting worse.”

Dawsyn hesitates, her legs locking in shin-deep snow. “What?”

“It’s Abertha,” Hector tells her, reaching her side. “Her wound has fouled.”

“Wound?” Dawsyn repeats, hastening toward the cave opening. “What are you talking about?”

“A cut on her leg,” Hector answers, following. “She says she slipped in the Chasm.”

Dawsyn groans internally. Abertha hadn’t mentioned a wound. “Is she awake?”

“No,” Hector says. “Fever took her under two nights ago.”

Dawsyn’s grandmother had an adage for infection –three days to set, two days to sleep, one day to steal.Dawsyn had seen it happen in real time to a neighbour on the Ledge. Infection took three days to make itself known. By the time it did its host was not long for this world. Even the best medicine woman could not delay the death sleep.

Dawsyn crouches inside the cave.

Esra kneels beside the girl’s body. He pats her forehead with a swath of wet rags, looking horribly unsure and inept. “Dawsyn!” he says as she crawls toward him. “Where have youbeen?”

Abertha’s face resembles a corpse’s already, save for the beads of sweat at her hairline and across her upper lip. She shivers intermittently, her limbs twitching. There is, at least, a snowpack tied to her calf. It leaks onto the cave floor and wets the leg of her pants.