Cameron

Cam jerked awake, a decaying Naomi burned into her brain, as if she'd been beneath the tree on Wolf Ridge seconds before.

Dawn leached into the cold blue morning; it couldn't have been later than five. She sat up in her bottom bunk and caught her breath quietly, wiping a bead of sweat from the back of her neck and hoping she had woken no one else.

She grabbed her headlamp and Without a Trace from beneath her sleeping bag and snuck from the bunks to the common room. On the lumpy couch, Cam stretched out and opened the book to the flyleaves. She flipped to the collage on the last page and peeled away the Post-It note atop the last photo.

In her dorm room at San José State, Avery Mathis sat cross-legged in her computer chair, her messy blonde hair falling past her shoulders. She wore star-spangled boxers and a Dead Space tank top. Makeupless. Midlaugh. Happy.

Cam knew she'd been happy, because Cam had taken that photo.

She'd spent so long building a wall around those memories, until she'd convinced herself that Avery Mathis was just another pretty face, a tragedy fit for an HBO docuseries. Cam never knew her, not really. Avery was an acquaintance, the kind you forgot about until you stumbled across their social media profile five years later, half-drunk and lonely.

Cam had actually tricked herself into believing this. And for what? To soften the pain of knowing Avery was deader than that corpse on Wolf Ridge?

"Don't," Cam hissed at herself with a wince. "Don't go there."

She had told no one she'd known Avery. Not Frank the ranger when he listed off the names of the missing women to the Search and Rescue team and Cam's heart had dropped to the pit of her stomach. Not Siena, though there was a lot Cam needed to tell Siena.

Not John Lawson when she anonymously mailed him the photo of Avery. Lawson had hungered for Cam's identity more than once.

Cam shut the book and lifted it so her eyes were level with John Lawson's name. She sneered.

"It was yogurt-covered raisins, dumbass."

Early morning sun grazed the mountain ridge across the valley. The four of them stood on the south-facing ridge, the jagged slope of the mountain stretching another few miles to the top of the peak. But they didn't have to summit the mountain to reach the cirque a couple hundred feet above them. They were still too far away to see the glacier.

"If there's a tarn, maybe we'll get to go swimming," said Isaac.

Cam dragged her aviators from the top of her head to her face. "Thirty new viruses were discovered in a Tibetan tarn just last week, but go for it."

"You're no fun," he muttered back, sounding genuinely disappointed as he continued hiking upward.

Cam fell back, hoping for a private moment with Siena. But just like at the Wolf Ridge camp, Siena looked like she hadn't slept at all.

"Something obviously kept you up last night," Cam said.

The corners of Siena's mouth perked up. "Emmett told me I looked ill and tossed me a bottle of vitamin C."

"That's because he has the intuition of a dead raccoon." Cam elbowed her.

"It's dumb."

"Try me."

"The radio picked up a broadcast last night. A weird song..." Siena tugged on the straps of her pack. "Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night and had this terrible feeling someone was in the room with you? And then you're like, knocking things over trying to find the lamp switch and are positive your throat is going to get slit, or a demon is going to possess you at any second?"

Cam failed at suppressing her laugh. "Sure."

"That's how it felt when I heard that song. It was wrong in the way that nightmares feel wrong. And now that I'm saying this out loud, I can't believe I let it upset me so much. God, I feel like I'm already losing my mind." Siena rubbed one of her temples. "I thought I had at least two weeks until the isolated wilderness got to me," she joked.

"Look, we've already been through a lot on this trip, and all of us are a little sleep deprived. Don't be hard on yourself." Cam hesitated, but it was time to spill the beans to Siena. "I mean, when I saw that dead woman in the tree, I was convinced up and down that she was Naomi Vo." She laughed. "So if you're losing your mind, then so am I."

Cam turned to face Siena, who'd stopped.

Siena stared up at her with a look of shock. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because I was clearly having a moment. The woman couldn't have been Naomi."

The surprise on Siena's face didn't dissipate.

"Right?" Cam pressed, her pulse quickening.

"No." Siena shook her head, almost as though she were leaving a trance. "Of course it wasn't Naomi. It's just..."

Emmett yelled something unintelligible at them, his tone urgent.

"Come on," said Cam, turning back toward the incline and wishing she'd kept her mouth shut. The exchange hadn't played out how she had hoped. Siena wasn't supposed to take Cam's admission seriously. She was supposed to laugh. Cam needed her to laugh.

And if Siena couldn't laugh it off, then Cam needed to do it herself. She needed to forget about Naomi Vo, and stop dreaming about her, for fuck's sakes.

"Hey!" Siena called. Cam stopped and waited for her to catch up, and when she did, Siena breathlessly held out her pinkie finger.

"Let's not forget to check in on each other, okay? Mental health and whatnot. Sometimes I forget talking to someone helps... and I'd rather not go to Emmett."

Cam's shoulders wilted. It was a mistake, keeping secrets from Siena. Maybe with enough "check-ins," Cam could finally tell her about Avery.

Cam hooked her pinkie with Siena's. "Deal." She nodded uphill. "Let's go."

They hurried to catch up with Isaac and Emmett, who'd both already reached the cirque. As Emmett looked back at them, Cam caught his bewildered expression.

"Something's wrong," Siena gasped.

As the ground leveled out and Cam gazed upon the cirque's headwall, she almost fell over.

Siena threw her bag to the ground. "What... the fuck?"

Cam steadied herself, peeling off her sunglasses and dropping her bag.

The glacier was gone.

In its place, beneath the mountain's shadow, a tarn glowed ice blue. Water trickled musically from the cliffside into the glacial lake.

Feyrer always used a nauseating amount of hyperbole when talking of Deadswitch, but maybe he hadn't always been exaggerating. This was the most beautiful thing Cam had ever seen.

"Looks like copper," said Emmett, gesturing to the colors of the headwall.

Cam stupidly nodded.

It was copper. A gorgeous amalgamation of teal, sea green, and umber painted the headwall. The tarn—a glacial lake filled with sediment—nestled at the headwall's base. Normally the sediment transformed glacial waters into a shock of turquoise on its own, but against the copper—even with the entire lake in the mountain's shadow—the water seemed to glow.

"It's melted." Siena wiped the hair from her face. "All of it. I thought you said you saw it!"

"I did." Cam gaped at the water. It must have been two or three weeks ago that she had checked the satellite images and the acres of Alpenglow ice still left on this rock. For all of it to melt since then was impossible. Either that, or a discovery larger than she'd ever expected.

As if she could read Cam's mind, Siena uttered, "This is going to be bigger for us than a little bit of PI credit."

Cam's ear rang at the same time something shifted beneath the water near the cliff's base. Not an animal—the lake's surface was far too placid.

Something else.

A shadow drew toward the surface, bleeding out darkness, pluming like ink. It infectiously leached into the aqua blue water, rumbling a question to her.

It could speak.

But Cam couldn't understand its language, nor interpret its urgency. The darkness pled with her, as though Cam's answer was the only thing that mattered. The only thing that had ever mattered.

"Cam!"

Cam blinked. The shadow was gone, and her legs... her legs were cold.

She tried to move and didn't expect the resistance around her feet, almost falling over in thigh-high turquoise water.

"What the hell are you doing?" said Emmett.

She glanced behind her. The others were still on the shore.

What the hell was she doing?

Cam trudged from the water as if she'd planned on entering it. "We need to get the soil cored and enough sediment for an analysis with the Chittick. Collect some water samples, but check the pH of the lake itself before we leave. And I want some of that copper... I don't know how we'll get it, but we will need to figure it out. Lake measurements, too."

Siena got to work right away, dropping her pack and digging through it for the right gear. But Emmett hesitated, his distrusting eyes still on Cam.

"Did I stutter?"

Emmett frowned and dropped his pack.

"And you..." She turned to Isaac, pushed back her hair, and frowned.

Sweat dotted his forehead, his complexion pale. He looked sick.

"That was close," he said.

"Close? To what, puking? You gonna puke?"

Isaac shook his head.

"Good. Go get me a coffee or something."

He mopped his forehead with the back of his hand. "I'm not an intern. I want to do something helpful. That's why I'm here, right?"

Cam dismissed him with a wave of her hand. "Don't be so sensitive. I need you to take a video of the lake. Hike up the ridge for a top-down view. Don't forget photos. And don't drop your phone in the water."

Isaac seemed satisfied enough with the task. As soon as he got busy, Cam returned to her bag and grabbed her field notebook and a pencil. She flipped the book open and pressed the tip of the lead to the page, but couldn't write anything.

Her hand was trembling too much.