‘This is a book that sticks in your head long after the last page’
LISA JEWELL
WARNING SIGNS
ALSO BY TRACY SIERRA
Nightwatching
WARNING SIGNS
TRACY SIERRA
VIKING
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Copyright © Tracy Sierra, 2026
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To my father, Robert, and his father, Louis, who taught me not only to respect the wilderness but that true respect is born of love
Lord save little children! Because with every child ever born of woman’s womb there is a time of running through a shadowed place, an alley with no doors, and a hunter whose footsteps ring brightly along the bricks behind him.
—DAVIS
GRUBB, THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER
CHAPTER 1 2021
Are you scared, Mama?”
She didn’t look back at the children, eyes searching the slope ahead. “Do I seem scared?”
“Yes.”
“Hm. Well, in a way I am. But sometimes it’s smart to be afraid. You see that?” She pointed uphill with a ski pole to where windblown snow at the mountain’s ridge formed a lightly undulating overhang. “Traveling below cornices is risky. And what do you think made this clearing?”
“An avalanche,” Bonnie said, then under her breath added, “obviously.”
“All right, little miss. Let’s think it through. Does it look like it slid a long time ago? Recently?”
Zach rolled his eyes, thwacking his pole into the powder at the foot of the tree beside him again and again. He’d recognized the other car at the trailhead, the one that meant those were Jack, Sam, and their mom’s tracks going straight ahead through the steep
meadow. Which meant Jack and Sam were probably already at the hut, playing, eating, having fun. Not waiting like timid rabbits at the edge of the tree cover. The other mothers and their children could be on the way by now, too, might even catch up, which meant Zach wouldn’t get to be one of the fi rst to arrive at the hut, wouldn’t get to choose the bunk he wanted, a spot with the bigger kids instead of with his sister and the other children who were seven, or even younger.
“I guess an old avalanche did that,” Bonnie said.
“You guess?”
Zach threw an arm out toward the trail. “It’s no big deal, Mom. It’s safe. Look! They already crossed.”
His mother’s smile changed to a tense line. “When you want something to be true, Zakky, that’s when it’s most difficult to actually see what’s there.” She pressed a mittened hand slow and hard along her brow bone, the same way she did when she woke with a headache and asked for quiet, please, just a little quiet this morning.
Of course, that was almost every morning.
“Jack and Sam already tested it, Mom. You can see that literally nothing bad happened. It’s not even all that deep!”
“That doesn’t mean it’s safe. A slide isn’t always triggered by the fi rst person on the snow. The pressure, the tension, can build, until—” She clapped her mittened hands together in a woomph, then scanned the meadow. “Appearances are more deceiving than anyone likes to admit. So. Look again. Tell me what you see.”
“Seriously?”
“Yep. Seriously. You, me, and Bonnie? We’re responsible for each other.”
Their mother crossed her arms. Maybe her exasperation was genuine, maybe she was just trying to appear commanding, but to Zach the gesture seemed silly, uncoordinated, her ski poles sticking
out at awkward angles. When Zach met Bonnie’s eyes, his sister’s dismissive shrug, the lift of her lip, said of course Zach was right, of course their mother was overreacting, wasn’t an authority, not a real one, and they eased together into the familiar groove that classified her as embarrassing and illogical.
Zach’s expression darkened. “You’re so dramatic, Mom.”
Grace recoiled slightly, her stern expression splintering into hurt. He turned away as if he might be able to hide from his immediate regret over this petty cruelty. But Zach felt the strange power of the word, too, the way it pinned her, cut her down until she was so small he felt he could pluck her away, throw her aside easy as a stray hair. Why was it that his mother, the person he loved most aside from Bonnie, frustrated him more, made him lash out more, than anyone else? Even her pained softness scratched at him like a frayed wire, leaving a patch of red irritation behind in a way her anger never could.
It was her fault. She was so annoying. And she didn’t fi ght back. Didn’t stand up for herself.
Zach peeked back at her stricken face and felt his shame return. He didn’t want to fi ght, not really. Didn’t want to be another person who made his mother look that way. He forced himself to focus on the vast, open expanse of snow, peaceful and clean, touched only by the line of tracks. Although the triangular shape of the meadow meant that the space had been cracked open by an avalanche, his sister had been wrong to think it was old damage. The crunched remnants of broken trees, branches, and roots littered the bottom of the slope, their innards still yellow at the breaks. Only a few thin, young trees poked up through the meadow’s cover; the ones that had been small enough to bend without breaking under the avalanche’s assault. Though not even the saplings had survived intact; their uphill sides had been stripped of branches.
“There’s been a slide pretty recently,” Zach offered without looking at his mother. “Maybe there was even more than one avalanche with the way the little trees have their branches gone? And it looks like the wind has blown some snow. To make the cornices?”
His mother accepted this change in him with a thoughtful nod. “What does that tell you about its safety?”
Zach cleared his throat to clear away the self-reproach that rose like bile as he looked past his own impatience to see the latent threats in the cornices, the steepness, the fresh avalanche path. What had he expected? That his mother insist they were too special for the rules of nature to apply? For her to somehow change the facts of the trail ahead as if she were all powerful?
No. She was only his mother. She never pretended to be anything else.
“When we checked the avalanche report this morning, it said low risk. So that’s good. And there hasn’t been a bunch of freezing and thawing. No big storms lately, either. So it probably slid earlier this winter. And the snow has built up slowly.”
“That’s well thought out, Zakky.”
He straightened at the grown-up feeling swelling through his eleven-year- old self at the acknowledgment, at her treating him like a peer.
“Bon-Bon, would you say there’s a lot of snow piled up or a little?” Grace again pointed at the cornices above.
Bonnie squinted uphill. “Not so much.”
“Yeah, I agree. What do you think our next steps should be?”
Zach and Bonnie looked to each other. The girl shrugged, so it was Zach who spoke.
“Well, um. There’s still some danger with the cornices? And the steepness. So I guess we could dig a pit, maybe, to check on the snow layers. Then if that’s okay, maybe we go one at a time?”
Their mother nodded. “Smart. Take a little peek at what the mountain might be hiding, huh? Won’t take long. The snow’s not deep, but you’re right, Zakky, at this pitch there’s always a risk. Obviously”— Grace winked at Bonnie as she imitated her tone, then jutted her chin toward the tangle of shattered trees downhill—“given we can see it already slid. I’ll show you a trick.” Grace lay a ski pole down in the snow at her feet, leaving behind its impression, then put the tip of one pole at the uphill point of the mark, the tip of the second pole at the downhill point, and brought the poles’ handles together. “You see this? How it makes a triangle? Each side the same length? And you see how this downhill pole, here, leans out away from the mountain a little? That means the steepness is more than thirty degrees. And between thirty and forty-five degrees is where most avalanches happen. Not all, but most. And if I let this pole here kind of hang”— she held its handle lightly, letting gravity pull it plumb—“see how the tip goes past the mark in the snow? I’d say it’s probably around . . . thirty-five degrees? So, worth doing a pit. Like Zach said. Let’s fi nd a safe spot to dig. And Bonnie, how about you try practicing the triangle trick while Zakky and I make the pit?”
Zach and his mother assembled the shovels strapped to the sides of their packs, Grace talking Bonnie through equilateral triangles, what an angle was, how the technique only gauged a small part of the slope, so it was important to make sure you chose a representative spot to measure, the difference between “degree” as in slope, and “degree” as in temperature. When they reached dirt about two feet down, Grace had Zach run his mittens over the shovel- cut side of it, polishing the snow smooth and fl at to reveal the layers of different storms, which she traced with a fi nger, explaining the cycles of the weather, the way snowfalls could knit together peacefully, how a line of hidden weakness could grow the tension, erupt in violence, sweep everything back to begin the cycle anew.
In the pit, she tapped her shovel blade on a column of snow with the butt of her hand, compressing it.
“About as good as you could hope for,” she said. “See how it’s staying in place? Solid?”
“Does that mean we can cross?” Bonnie asked as their mother stepped out of the small pit.
“Yep.”
Bonnie whooped, and Grace pulled the girl close in a one-armed squeeze. “I’m happy, too. But it’s always best to be sure. And the very hardest thing is when it isn’t okay. When it isn’t safe. Or at least isn’t as clearly a safe result. You have to be willing to throw away all the work you’ve done and walk away. And that—having to leave it all behind, all you thought you were going to do, just to be safe, without knowing if anything bad would’ve happened at all, that’s very difficult, that’s very . . . brave, that’s . . .”
Words trailing off, their mother’s eyes went distant, as if focused on something beyond the mountains, through them. And whatever she saw there caused her shoulders to slump, pulled down the corners of her mouth, the edges of her eyes, rounded her back, signs of a gravity Zach wasn’t used to seeing in her out here.
“So we can go?” Bonnie asked. “Since you aren’t afraid now?”
“I’m always afraid,” Grace said, her arm tightening around Bonnie, and she wasn’t speaking to her children, not really, still looking away, looking beyond them.
Bonnie squirmed. “Ugh, no more hugging, Mama.”
Grace released Bonnie, dazed. “Sorry, was that too much? Sorry, I was . . . zoning out.” She bit down hard on a lip, making Zach cringe, because he did the same, didn’t he? Bit the inside of his cheek, tore and picked at his cuticles, pulled the fi ne hairs at his nape, letting his anxious mind make its mark on his skin until the hurt of it focused him away from more difficult things.
Bonnie narrowed her eyes at their mother. “Mama, can I ask you a question?”
Zach saw a familiar, resolute mischief fl it through his sister, and felt an anticipatory lift. He admired it, even envied it, Bonnie’s power to instantly assess a mood, her ability to diff use things, to knock them onto an altogether unexpected track you never knew you needed.
But Bonnie’s tone was serious enough that Grace’s attention snapped to her daughter. “You can ask me anything. Always.”
“What’s the difference between broccoli and”—the girl paused to be sure her fi nal word, heavy with earnestness, hit just right— “boogers?”
Their mother coughed out a surprised laugh, pulled back from wherever she’d gone, pulled back fully to her children. “Oh no! Do I even want to know?”
“The difference is”—Bonnie pointed to her brother—“Zach’ll eat a booger.”
“Eeew,” he snorted, giggling, grateful. “You are so gross.”
“I’m not the one in a joke about booger eating. That makes you the gross one.”
Zach affectionately shoved Bonnie with an elbow.
“All right, all right,” their mother said, smile so bright now it warmed them, both children leaning toward her like growing things tracking the sun. “Let’s do a beacon check before we go.”
They unzipped their coats, fi shed out the avalanche beacons clipped to their waists, verified that all were transmitting the signal that would allow them to be found if buried, had enough battery, before zipping back up again.
“Can I be fi rst?” Bonnie asked, knowing you always crossed an avalanche path one by one, so that if you were taken there’d be someone left to fi nd you.
A hitch of hesitation, but seeing the way Bonnie’s need to prove
herself shone in her large, pleading eyes, their mother said, “Sure, Bon. Go ahead, big kid.”
Zach and Grace stood side by side in the trees, watching Bonnie’s little fi gure steadily make her way.
“She’s so small,” Zach said.
His mother’s brows were knit, eyes fi xed on Bonnie. “Mmm. A big personality in a tiny package all right.”
“You look—are you—worried?”
“A little bit.”
“But we checked everything.”
His mother shrugged, still watching Bonnie cross. “The guy who taught my avalanche courses way back when had a saying. ‘You take the fi rst avy course, it convinces you to do the second. You take the second, you know enough about the dangers you decide to take the third. And if you take the third, you never go into the backcountry again.’ ”
“Why?”
“Because by then you’ve learned you can do everything right, and things can still go wrong.”
“But you’ve done all those classes. And you still come out here. With us.”
“Well, that’s true. But—I have to come here, Zakky.” She put a gentle hand on his shoulder, as if steadying herself. “There’s things you can control here, more than other places. And when it comes to what you love . . . it’s worth some risk, don’t you think?”
Bonnie had reached the other side, and waved a pole to signal it was Zach’s turn.
Zach thought about all his mother loved, about risk. He slouched out from under her touch and said, “Maybe it’d be better. Safer. To just—not.”
“Oh,” she said, and he felt her eyes on him, felt her concern,
heard her voice wilt. “I hope that’s not what you think, Zakky. I hope—I hope that’s not the lesson. Though maybe you’re right. If you love someone who doesn’t love you back, I mean.”
He didn’t answer, didn’t look at her, just began skiing across the meadow. Zach tried not to focus on the cornices above, the knowledge that no matter how cautious he was, how good and right he might be, all these things he loved might fracture, might suffocate him. Might suffocate all of them.
When Zach glanced over his shoulder, his mother stared from what seemed very far away. On her beautiful face he read helpless worry, but there was pride there, too, at witnessing her children capably travel forward through a dangerous world without her.
Zach turned ahead, and kept moving.
CHAPTER 2
ONE YEAR LATER
The elk lay curled on the snow, its light brown back facing the boy. Zach stared through the haze of his frozen breath at the antlers extending above the animal’s bulk. He had never seen an elk asleep before. Had never stumbled across any wild animal asleep. Though of course he knew animals must sleep. Must spend much of their time, just like he did, vulnerable.
Zach glanced over his shoulder toward the trail where his father waited just out of sight for him to do his business in private. The sun hit his eyes and he sneezed, whipping back to see the elk’s response. Nothing. It might be hurt. Or dead.
Driving over Independence Pass in the fall, his mother had spotted a distant elk herd and pulled over. They’d passed the binoculars she always kept in the car back and forth between them, watching two bull elk clash as the cows and calves they fought over either disinterestedly grazed, or were forced to hurry out of the way to protect themselves.
Thinking on that violence, Zach pictured the elk rising, tossing
its head. But as he edged in front of it, what he saw was so distant from all he knew that all previous experience was whisked from his mind, useless, and he blinked slack-jawed at what lay there, trying to understand.
From shoulders to snout, there was only bone. The elk’s spine lay neatly on the snow, extending out from mottled red and brown muscle where the neck had met the chest, bloodlessly cut as though cauterized. The vertebrae rested in a precise and graceful arc that ended at the animal’s stripped skull. The boy’s eyes tripped over the seven points on each antler, their weathered brown contrasting jarringly with the whiteness of the peeled skull. All the exposed bone— from the rungs of the spine to the inside of the head visible through the vacant cavity of the one-time nose—appeared almost antiseptically clean. Slick square teeth sat secure and yellowed in matte, pale jaws, interlocking into a tidy rictus smile.
Together with the contradiction of bright scrubbed bone protruding from intact muscle, Zach immediately saw other paradoxes that made his breath shorten, his stomach twist. There was no blood. No tracks traced around the animal’s head and neck, not even its own. The body, the bones, rested as if on display. A fresh earth smell, similar to the scent of the atmosphere before an electrical storm, fl ared then faded as the wind blew the body’s scent toward him, its appeal disorienting.
Everything about the elk was foreign and unfamiliar, except for the fact of its deadness. The absence of life was so universal in its natural unnaturalness that Zach immediately thought of his mother. The eye sockets stared so evenly past him, so reminded him of the way his mother’s eyes had gazed through and beyond him, that he instinctively covered his face to hide the unsettling sight of the overclean bones.
“Daddy?”
He cringed at the childlike word, but there was only silence. He tried again, correcting himself. “Dad?”
The angle of the wind, the odd acoustics of the winter forest, let Zach hear his father mutter low, “Son of a bitch, what now?”
For Christmas two years ago, someone had given his sister a stuffed octopus that could be fl ipped inside out. Flip one way, pink, fuzzy, and smiling. Flip the other way, green, slick, and glowering. As he changed the octopus back and forth, switching Outerself to Underself, Zach had thought only of his father. Impossible to know which was the true face, which was the inside- out one. Did it even matter if it usually smiled, soft and comforting, when you were aware of the furious, slippery thing forming its innards?
“What is it?” Bram called out.
“Can you come here? Please?”
Zach clenched his hands into fi sts in his mittens, fi ngernail tearing at the cuticle of his thumb.
“Just has to make me come to him,” Bram said, talking to himself again.
Zach heard his father leave the trail they were following to the backcountry hut, the sound of his inexperienced wallow through the powder distinctive. He winced at Bram’s stream of muttered irritations over the way Zach was interrupting his progress uphill toward his all-important goals.
Maybe the absence of elk brain, the winding away of veins, the plucked eyeballs, the vanished heft of scraggly neck mane, the evaporation of flesh and sinew and life itself, would be enough to prevent his father going to Underself, crossing arms and squinting down at the boy with an exhalation of disappointment.
“Now what is the big—”
Bram paused where Zach had fi rst spotted the elk, not yet positioned to see the strangeness.
“Dead?”
Zach nodded.
“Did you touch it?”
Zach opened his mouth but instead of speaking he shook his head. He saw himself as a fi sh thrown on a bank, mouth silently opening and closing. He was sure he appeared as stupid as his classmates did when they imitated him trying to say something, anything, when he was nervous.
“You gotta be able to speak up, kid, or else people will walk all over you.”
Zach kept his eyes on the elk as his father approached. The plates of its skull fit together like puzzle pieces, the thin lines between them like the rivers tracing through the topographic maps his mother had taught him to read.
He balled his hand inside his mitten, the nail of his index fi nger ripping the corner of the cuticle from his thumb. He folded its bloodied stickiness into his palm. Squeezed.
Bram stopped short, shocked to momentary stillness at the sight of the full body. “Holy shit,” he said fl atly, then moved closer.
Zach’s shoulders relaxed as his father’s taut irritation dissipated into interest. Bram squatted down and poked at a piece of the whitened spine with the metal tip of his ski pole, knocking a vertebrae askew, then prodding the furred body, the skull. Zach backed away at seeing the perfection of the bones’ alignment set off-kilter, recoiling at his father’s interference for reasons he couldn’t quite assemble.
“The hell?” Bram said as he jabbed, his sharp gaze now judging and evaluating only the elk, in a way that allowed Zach to speak with no hitches or hesitation.
“What could have killed it? Done all”—Zach looked over the split body, the precision of the cut chest muscles—“this?”
Bram stood. “Maybe the back was under snow, but the head and
neck got eaten by something? It’s been warmer last month or so. Could’ve melted, I guess?”
“There’s no tracks,” Zach said.
Bram’s gaze swept over the snow, then up to the sway of the pine branches and aspens rimming the clearing. “Birds must’ve picked it clean.”
Zach frowned. Could birds have fi shed out brain and tongue and meat? No trees cast shadows across the elk that would have led to uneven melting. And how could anything, even birds, have left the snow bloodless?
“It doesn’t smell bad.”
“True.” Bram agreed. “Probably still frozen.” He jutted his chin toward the animal’s tail. “The back leg’s different. Something was at it for sure.”
Zach had been too occupied with the bright white bones, the strangely surgical appearance of the sliced neck, to notice the leg. But as he moved next to Bram, he saw that his father was right. The back right leg lay askew, its skin and muscle torn and gnawed. Yet despite the leg’s more visceral appearance, it struck Zach as somehow less disturbing, but more explicable; the expected signs of a carrion scavenger. Near the tail there were even depressions that might have been prints, windblown or melted at the edges beyond recognition.
“But the head, and the neck? It’s— don’t you think it’s—not right?” Zach asked.
They stared down at the meticulousness of the cut chest muscles, the scrubbed vertebrae, the way even the pin-width lines between the skull’s plates were scoured clean and bloodless.
“Doesn’t really matter what happened,” Bram said. “But it’ll be a great story to tell the guys— outdoor danger and all that. And tell you what, on the way down we’ll take the skull and antlers with us.
I bet someone’d pay a couple grand for it. Great fi nd.” Zach straightened with pride as Bram slapped a hand on his shoulder, gave a crooked smile. “You might not even need to ask that tightwad aunt of yours for the cash to get your sister a birthday present.”
Zach acknowledged the indictment of Aunt Felicity with a noncommittal bob of his head.
“I’m kidding,” Bram said. “But we’ll see what we can get for it, huh?” He pointed at the body. “It all comes down to eat or be eaten. You’re stronger, better, you win the game.”
Zach nodded, as if his father was saying something new, something profound. But it was comforting, Bram’s return to his confident baseline, the way he transformed the elk from frighteningly wonderous to a thing monetized, his neat appropriation of the scene as simply more evidence that things worked the way he already thought they did.
“Most people would be bothered, seeing this,” his father said. “Don’t like facing how things really are, what the meat they eat looks like before they pretty it up. Not us though.”
“Not us,” Zach echoed.
“Your sister, though?” Bram chuckled. “She’d probably puke.”
Zach kept his face smooth. Bonnie caught the slugs and spiders that disgusted him with her bare hands, popped them into jars, sketched them before setting them free, each time a little closer to the illustrations in her favorite science books. The art teacher had even pinned to the classroom corkboard his sister’s pencil drawing of a sparrow killed by striking a school window. Bonnie’s labels of the bird’s broken parts hung over the students like a cautionary tale: Bent wing. Soft neck. White eyes.
No, it was Zach who felt nauseous.
“Okay.” Bram clapped his hands, Zach startling at the ricochet of the sound around the clearing. “Let’s get this show on the road.
See if Ginny has managed to clean and prep the place. Everything’s gotta be perfect for these guys— perfect! Arlo’s the one to impress. Firm handshake, strong ‘hello,’ and then you be seen but not heard, right? Except with this Russ kid, Dave’s son. Make sure he likes you. Keep him entertained and out of the way. And since Dave’s the one who insisted this be a father-son thing, your line is ‘Wow, Mister Dowling, this boys’ trip is the best thing ever, what a great idea, so glad to be included, blah, blah, blah,’ got it?”
Zach nodded enthusiastically, familiar with this lecture by now, aware of the excitement he was supposed to show. Because there were stakes his father was nervous over, but it was important to pretend his father could never be nervous about anything at all.
As Bram turned toward the trail, Zach averted his eyes from the awkward way his father’s skis lapped, nearly causing him to fall before he managed to disentangle himself and move away. Despite himself Zach stared toward the elk again, then shook his head as if to shake off the influx of grotesque imaginings—yellow slit pupils, dripping teeth, surgically sharp curled claws peeling back the elk’s layers.
Zach deftly oriented his own skis and hurried after Bram. Skin crawling with the sense that something watched him from the trees, gut creeping with fear over the residual presence of a predator, Zach paused to shoulder his heavy pack where he’d left it at the side of the trail. He pawed distractedly at his pockets, unable to shed the sense he’d left something important behind. Bram came into sight above, wearing his own pack and pulling the sled full of supplies he’d restrapped to his waist. His father traveled inefficiently but quickly, strength making up for his inexperience. Although the trail was obvious, well packed by previous skiers over the course of two nearly snowless months, Bram paused to look for the blue plastic diamonds nailed into trees marking the route to Pantheon Hut. Without turning
to check on Zach, he went around a bend and vanished. Zach lowered his head to let the crown of his skull take the brunt of his father’s indifference before following up the trail.
In motion, discomfort in his abdomen reminded him what he’d forgotten. He’d never relieved himself. But he didn’t dare ask Bram to stop and wait for him again. Didn’t dare pause and fall farther behind. And together with the frigid air he gulped down the elk’s uncanniness, its meticulous dissection, and felt the indelible image of it lodge somewhere at the base of his throat.
CHAPTER 3
Zach stopped where the trail split at the edge of a huge, snow- covered meadow, the air over eleven thousand feet shortening his breaths. Despite being two stories high, despite its sharply sloped roof, Pantheon Hut was nearly invisible at the end of the path branching to his right, heavily buttressed on one side by blown snow. Bram had gone in the wrong direction, moving left up the trail leading to Mariah Bowl, its peak hidden behind a ridge.
It might be a test. He might fail by questioning his father. Or fail for not speaking up.
Zach scratched again at the torn cuticle of his thumb.
It didn’t matter. The longer he waited, the bigger either mistake would grow.
“Dad?”
Wind whipped the word downhill. Zach knocked his ski poles together, cling! cling! cling! Bram turned and Zach pointed toward the hut, exaggeratedly moving in its direction. His father frowned, saw the hut, then with a lift of his pole in acknowledgment, he cut offtrail and skied downhill toward Pantheon.
Bram caught up to Zach taking off his skis at the hut’s stairs. “I was so focused on mentally rehearsing my pitch, I got distracted. Eye on the prize and all. But hey, at least you inherited my sense of direction.”
His father entered the door combination, and together they stepped inside. Zach felt a taut line snap when the door closed, a welcome barrier between him and the unsettling watchfulness of the forest and its unknown predators.
“Ginny?” Bram called out for his assistant. “Where are you?”
Every surface shone with varnish, giving the log walls and knotty pine floor a clean, golden glow. Tall picture windows fi lled the hut with winter sunlight and provided an expansive view of the Elk Range serrating a cloudless blue sky. Out the side window they could now see the pinnacle of Mount Mariah, wind spinning snow from its tip at over twelve thousand feet. A clutch of soft cobweb at the ceiling’s peak some twenty feet above moved as if the hut itself exhaled delicate breaths. Under the lower ceiling opposite the stairs in back, propane burners and wood counters with an inset plastic bucket acting as a sink made up the kitchen. A massive woodstove crouched on a stone slab in the middle of the room, fl anked on one side by two long picnic tables, and on the other by boxy couches and lounge chairs topped with plastic cushions. A tall metal pot with a spout at its base sat on the woodstove.
It all looked the same. Everything looked the same even though anyplace his mother had been should, ought to— shouldn’t it?— look different.
“What the hell?” Bram said. “It’s colder in here than outside. Where is she?” Raising his voice, he yelled, “Ginny?”
Zach stayed quiet as he hung up his coat, his hat. After removing his mittens he furtively tucked his bloodied thumb into his fi st to hide the damage.
Bram stalked through the hut. Pounded up the stairs, rumbled above, then reappeared.
“Goddamn it. Goddamn it, Ginny! Takes the whole week off for some avalanche safety course. Confi rmed she’d be here yesterday to set up. And look!” He flung an arm out. “No sign of her. There’s a couple of packs upstairs. But I checked ’em out and it’s all men’s stuff. Probably a couple of the guys got here early and decided to hike up and take a run. But— she was supposed to carry up my laptop. The PowerPoint printouts explaining the offering terms! Thank God I wouldn’t let her handle the checks, so at least I have those. And she said she was going to clean up, try and make it, I dunno, luxurious up here! But look!” Bram threw a derisive hand out at the hut.
Zach obediently took in the space around him. And though he saw nothing wrong, he shook his head, made a “mmm” sound, as if the state of the place offended him, too.
“At least it’s a good size. Why the hell do they call them ‘huts’ if they’re this big? More like a ‘lodge.’ They’d be able to charge a lot more if ‘hut’ didn’t make it sound like you’d be crammed into a shack.” Bram checked his phone. “No service. I mean, they said. But damn it.”
“There was a car at the trailhead, though?” Zach offered.
“Right but, now that I think about it—that wasn’t an orange Wrangler, right? A Jeep Wrangler?”
“No.”
“Shit. I was so focused on getting here before the group, I didn’t even think about it. But her car would’ve been down there if she’d come yesterday like she promised.”
There was a long pause, Bram scowling as his eyes roamed the hut, Zach as still as a rabbit blending into grass. Despite his efforts to stay invisible, his father fi xed on him. “We’re gonna have to do it all ourselves. What did that school of yours teach you?”
Zach blinked at his father. He’d done backcountry trips with school, sure, but the huts were his mother’s refuge, bundling him and his sister into the mountains as often as she was able since they were toddlers. Up rushed all those beautiful days where they had been different versions of themselves, free.
Free for a little while, anyway.
Anger fi shhooked his throat. Because his dad was big, was strong, because the ski up hadn’t been difficult for him, he thought he knew things. “My wife isn’t your average girl,” Bram would brag when it suited him. “She can handle herself in the wilderness.” And yet he’d never shown any interest in coming along with his family. When no one but his wife and children was there to hear him, Bram dismissed these trips as unchallenging, frivolous wastes of time.
No, his father didn’t know anything about the backcountry. Zach was vicariously embarrassed by the newness of Bram’s gear; the way the stylish priciness broadcast his underlying inexperience. Up here, as everywhere else, his father looked like a man who had stepped out of an advertisement. Always the best dressed, the most casually casual, the man with the things people in the know knew. But also always a little artificial, a little off, a little much.
Maybe when the others arrived they’d see through him, too.
His father snapped his fi ngers in front of Zach’s nose. The closeness of it, the way Bram’s blue eyes were turning to the dark cold of the Underself, frightened Zach into swallowing the spark of his sullen spite to land somewhere deep and neglected.
“Anyone home? What do we need to do fi rst?” Bram asked, as if it were a quiz, as if he knew the answer.
“Um, f-fi re?”
“You sound like a little girl when everything you say comes out like a question. That what you want?”
Zach shook his head vigorously, knowing the correct answer.
When would his voice deepen and remove some of the sting of truth from this insult?
“Right. Then what’s fi rst?”
Zach forced himself to keep his eyes on his father’s, to not shy away from Bram’s raised eyebrow, the way his father managed to squeeze the air between them tight. Because any sign of disobedience, of falling short, might escalate his irritation.
“We need to build a fi re. And melt snow in the pot for water.”
“Fine. Good. I’ll handle the fi re, and you deal with the rest.”
Zach took up the bucket sitting next to the woodstove. Outside the hut’s front door he broke the snow’s crust and fi lled the bucket from the few inches of sugary powder below, shuttling between the snow and the pot on the stove, careful to put on then remove his boots to avoid getting the floor wet.
Bram stalked through the hut, muttering to himself. “She . . . goddamn it . . . the disrespect . . . why can’t anyone ever?”
Then from the kitchen Bram called out, “Come here and look at this!”
Zach went to his father’s side. Crusted dishes and a pan locked together in an inch of dirty water lightly iced over at the bottom of the sink bucket. Nothing that couldn’t be easily taken care of, once they had warm water.
“What a pain in the ass,” Bram huffed, glaring down his nose at the mess. “I’m gonna have to fi re that girl.”
Things were always better when his father was focused on someone else’s failings, so Zach mirrored Bram’s pose, fi sts on hips, and shook his head to demonstrate how correct his father was; them against the world.
“Once you fi nish what you started and get water done we’ll have to deal with this,” Bram said.
Zach went back to work.
Bram loaded fi rewood into the woodstove. “Ginny was chomping at the bit to help when she knew Shane’d be here. Of course she was! Still deluding herself.”
Shane, son of Bram’s biggest investor, Arlo Oliver.
“She must’ve found out Pike was coming along after all.”
Pike, the only one coming who didn’t have a son to bring along. Pike, whose investment was less than his dad thought it should be.
Investments were never as big as his father thought they should be.
“This is exactly why I didn’t tell her. Last thing I needed was her bailing if she found out Pike was tagging along. The second he heard Ginny’d be here, he was all”—Bram imitated Pike’s voice in a highpitched singsong—“ ‘Oh a ski trip? I wouldn’t miss it!’ As if I’d invited him. Pathetic.” Bram tossed kindling and balled-up newspaper into the woodstove. “But what was I supposed to say? ‘You don’t even have a kid to bring along?’ Or, ‘Get over it, girl thinks you’re a loser, and I agree?’ Hell no. He’s a dunce of a trust-fund kid with money to burn. Figured if he came along, maybe he’d commit more money to impress her. Hell, maybe Shane’d invest to shut me up about Ginny in front of his dad. But now? If Ginny doesn’t show, that’s all ruined. Girl is impossible.”
Zach tried to decipher the ins and outs of this, translating it to his own experience. Pike had a crush on Ginny so he’d wanted to come on the trip, but Ginny didn’t like him. She had a crush on Shane. But Shane was embarrassed about that for some reason, and didn’t want his dad, Arlo, to know. This made sense, given Zach would never want Bram to know who he had a crush on. The thought of his father fi nding evidence of any of Zach’s soft feelings made his heart clench with anticipatory humiliation.
Bram fl icked a lighter inside the stove. Swore when the paper quickly fi zzled out. He went outside, returned holding a bag from the sled, and pulled out a small, red plastic container of lighter fluid.
He squirted the fluid over the wood and kindling, set a fl ame to it, and was forced to leap back as the thing went instantly to inferno, fi re spitting out of the stove then retreating inside.
Zach’s mother would never have started a fi re that way. Would have thought lighter fluid not only too heavy to haul up but dangerous and unnecessary. And while that made the sudden burst of fl ame feel wrong and rough, Zach still watched with excited awe. The lighter fluid was not only temptingly efficient but thrilling in its showy destructiveness.
Bram gave an approving nod and slammed the stove door shut before slinging his pack over a shoulder and heading upstairs. By the time he came back down Zach had fi lled the enormous meltpot with snow.
“That stuff upstairs better not be the guide’s. He’s supposed to wait down at the trailhead to bring the others up. But”—Bram wagged a fi nger at Zach—“if it is the guide’s junk and he comes back while I’m out, you tell him he’s in the hallway bunk, got it?”
Zach froze, stomach knotting. There was no world in which he would be capable of telling an adult stranger to sleep in the hallway bunk, the worst spot in the hut. The Pantheon reservation had been his mother’s, rolled over preferentially from year to year, and would normally house her group of up to sixteen mothers and children. This weekend there would be only nine people. More than enough room to allow the guide a better bunk.
Bram didn’t seem to register his son’s discomfort. If anything, the prospect of future confrontation had cheered him, and he whistled as he put on his coat and boots.
“I’m gonna head downhill and see if I can catch a signal to call Ginny,” Bram said. “Don’t start daydreaming like you do. Bring the rest of the stuff inside. Unpack. And remember those dishes, yeah? I don’t want any disrespect.”
A woosh of air and his father was gone, leaving behind an ominously undefi ned obligation to groom the hut into whatever Bram expected. Zach breathed deep. Calmed himself by counting the way his mom had taught him— one- one-thousand, two- one-thousand. He pulled on boots and hurried out the back door to the outhouse, at last able to use the bathroom without having to admit to his father he’d forgotten to go in the woods, or risking a lecture about how he needed to learn to hold it better, he went more often than Bonnie!
Back in the hut, the woodstove’s window had gone dark. Despite his self-satisfaction at shortcutting his way to completing the fi re, Bram hadn’t opened the vent on the bottom of the stove, nearly suffocating it. Zach cranked the vent open and watched the fl ames spring up.
No, his father didn’t know much about the outdoors at all.
“There’s so little oxygen up here, you need to let as much air as possible sneak in,” his mother said in memory, after showing him how to operate that vent. He’d laughed as she walked two sneaky, tickling fi ngers along his arm.
She had been like a real mother on these trips.
Don’t start daydreaming like you do.
Zach shuttled the bags indoors, and added more snow to the meltpot. A brush and dustpan caught his eye and he went to his knees to sweep up the scrim of ash, bark fragments, and kindling splinters Bram had left around the stove.
He paused. Tipped his head.
Something glittered from between the pine planks of the floor.
CHAPTER 4
Zach tried to pluck the shining thing from where it was wedged, but it was stuck tight. After a moment’s thought he grabbed a narrow stick from the depleted kindling pile and carefully levered it between the floorboards and underneath the bright object until it popped out onto the floor.
It was an earring, a jewel the size of his pinkie nail. Despite being dirty, it scattered oblong rainbows in the sunlight. Could it be a diamond? Zach looked furtively around the empty room, picturing a pirate’s ghost snatching away this prize of buried treasure. He laid his cheek on the floor to examine the floorboard seam, then the ones fl anking it. No matching earring. Nothing but grime. What if he took the stone into one of the jewelry shops in town? Sold it for— something. Did they let kids buy plane tickets? He and Bonnie could fly to Michigan, to Aunt Felicity. Even though the last trip hadn’t gone well, and Bram didn’t like her, Zach found himself desperately wanting to see her; see a face that looked so much like his mother’s.
He placed the earring in his palm. Wrinkled his nose, distracted from his fantasy by the crusted tangle of hairs that came up from the
floorboard crack with the earring, raveled scabby through its backing and thin gold post. A small chunk of something swung from them below his upturned hand.
Zach instinctively recoiled. But as it often did, as it had at seeing the elk on the hike up, revulsion bred curiosity. He examined the dangling thing closer. What was it? Some kind of dull brown matter about the size of the diamond, thin but tightly curled, and wrinkled in a way that made it seem organic. A piece of old apple peel? A moldy wood shaving?
It all reminded Zach of a fi shing lure; a sparkle of bait hiding something unknown, maybe deadly.
Ever since the world had broken, he’d skidded out of a groove he hadn’t even known existed, sensing a rot lurked below things. The way the earring interlaced with something repulsive was only more proof.
He drifted into memories of that other life. His mother pulling a toddler Bonnie up the trail in a sled. His mother jumping off the hut’s porch into powder screeching with joy, snow strung through her hair. Her approving nod as he switched on the hut’s solar power. Her earnest expression as she and the other mothers demonstrated building a snow shelter in case of emergency, how to light a onematch fi re— survival drills he and the other kids participated in with the deep seriousness universal to children who understand they are learning important, grown-up things.
But looking back now, his eyes snagged on the darkness twisting through the bright past. His mother wearing earrings that looked similar to this one, and when he asked her what a diamond cost she said, “These? They’re fake. It all is. You can’t tell unless you test.” A rounding of her shoulders, a folding into herself. “Or at least I couldn’t.”
Last year, Zach sitting hidden on the stairs, those ones right over