Holden

Holden lay atop his quilt, staring at the morning light filtering through the greasy window. He'd been awake in bed for hours, volleying between nausea and dread.

He'd accumulated the odd collection of mental episodes over his life, but the thing with the shadow buck was the most fucked up.

Shadow buck—he had no other word for it. He hadn't shared his episode with anyone, not even Angel, who'd told him Maidei had been so freaked out by his four-hour absence that she radioed Frank to find him.

Instead of divulging his mental breakdown to everyone at the Fort, Holden had claimed he spent those hours calling around to figure out why Lauren's phone wasn't working.

Mental breakdown. Whatever had happened to him felt like so much more than just a mental breakdown. Angel was right: he needed meds. He needed to see a therapist regularly, too.

And he needed to leave. Go back to his life and get his shit together. He'd done everything he could here, now only taking up space.

The stairs creaked. Holden lifted himself onto his elbows as Angel climbed into the room and meandered about, pretending to study the mostly empty space before finally sitting at the end of his bed.

He waited for her to speak since she was obviously here for a reason, but wasn't expecting her to say, "Went to the station and called my ex this morning. My divorce is finalized."

Holden sat up. "I thought you were still disputing the settlement."

Angel shrugged. "I don't have money for a lawyer. The total worth of disputed stuff isn't even worth the cost of court."

Anger flared in Holden's chest. "So he just gets to keep it all?"

Angel's shoulders wilted. This was the saddest—and the smallest—that Holden had ever seen her.

"Maybe it's better this way," she said. "Starting over."

"With nothing? I mean, I get the whole starting over thing, but you were contributing financially. It's not like all your things were gifts from him."

"It's not about the finances, it's about..." Angel shook her head. "Never mind. I don't want to talk about him anymore. But me... It's kind of like I have to figure out who I am all over again, you know?"

Holden nodded. The same thing had happened when Becca left him. Hell, it had been almost a year, and he still hadn't figured out who he was without her.

Angel glanced solemnly out the dusty window. "I feel old."

"You aren't old." Holden yanked the quilt off and swung his feet over the side of the bed. "I'm older than you. Am I old?"

"I just thought I would have figured out my divine purpose by now. I'm the universe's dead weight."

He wished she'd stop for the sake of his own discomfort. Not like she owed him that. He'd been miserable enough times in front of her, after all.

"Don't you ever feel you missed your chance to be someone?" she asked.

His response was quick. "You sound like my parents."

She gave him a look, which he returned with an awkward laugh.

"No," he continued. "I've never felt that way. I used to be content with what I had. When I was with Becc—" He stopped himself. "When I still had a partner."

"So your entire self worth was wrapped up in your girlfriend?" Angel asked with pointed disgust, the way she used to talk to him all the time, before they found the files.

Holden shook his head. "It wasn't like that. I had enough. Food, a place to live, money to pay my bills, someone I cared about. I didn't need a better job, or anything, really. I just existed and was happy and enjoyed making my girlfriend happy. And that was that."

"Well, when you put it like that, it sounds pretty nice." Angel sighed. "Alright, fine. You're not as big of a loser as I thought you were."

He chuckled. "And maybe you don't sound like my parents."

"Doctors? Lawyers?" she pried.

"Mom was a marketer until she became an exec. Dad was an exec until he became a life coach."

Angel groaned and fell back onto his bed. "They sound absolutely insufferable."

Holden cast a grin that Angel returned.

"Maybe we will be okay, you and I," she said. "Just existing. Purposeless."

For a moment, Holden really believed she could be right, until he remembered the shadow buck, and the false memories. Maybe reaccepting his purposelessness was enough to keep him from suffering from these bizarre episodes, which were only getting worse.

He caught a whiff of burning bacon. "Who's cooking?"

Angel rolled her eyes. "Zaid. He was in the city before dawn this morning and just came back, excited about..." Angel shot up. "Oh, yeah! That's what I came up here to tell you."

Holden raised an eyebrow. "To tell me Zaid is burning bacon?"

"No, that he got in contact with one of his old research buds, or whatever, who now works at some fancy-shmancy Silicon Valley corp."

"Doing what?"

"Making drones, baby. The good kind that runs on biofuel. Zaid rolled up with one in the back of his truck."

Drones. Drones that actually worked. This news should make him feel hopeful. If the SAR team found nothing on the mountain, and the rangers stationed in Deadswitch were nowhere to be found, then their trail was completely cold. Drones were the only way to cover enough ground before it was too late.

Angel held out her hand, palm out. "I know, I know. I'm dubious too. But we've got nothing to lose."

Holden looked down at his sweats. "I guess I should change."

"I hope I don't break it," Zaid said. "This thing costs more than my left nut."

"Just your left one?" Angel muttered.

Maidei and Frank sat on the porch steps drinking coffee. Angel hovered over Zaid like a fly as Zaid tweaked different mechanisms on the drone.

Holden stood between the two groups, awkwardly scratching his head.

The drone was as big as Francis and stood erect on a set of pronged legs. Four motionless propellers topped the cross frame. The fuel cell, tank, and camera filled its belly.

Maidei shook her head. "To this day, I have no idea how you procure the things you do."

Zaid groaned as he knelt, the drone chiming as he powered up the fuel cell. "It's my special skill. Probably my only skill, to be fair."

Frank rubbed his brow. "I can't believe I'm letting you do this."

"I can't either!" Zaid exclaimed delightedly.

"Oh boy." Angel stepped back from Zaid. "I feel like I'm minutes away from witnessing an incredible disaster. At least we all tried our best, right?"

She shot Holden an ironic thumbs-up, which he returned, feeling a little guilty for not being completely honest with her this morning.

After he had dreamt of Siena back in Corvallis, he'd thought for a moment that driving down here and saving the research team had been his divine purpose. But even if they could be rescued, he wouldn't be the one doing the rescuing. Holden had done what he came here to do. It was time to go back to Oregon. Maybe get a better job. Find a therapist. Download a dating app.

He was so caught up in his own head that he hardly noticed Zaid picking up the drone remote. "Back up, back up."

Everyone fell back to the porch, and the drone ascended with a whine.

"I plugged in the Agnes coordinates, so as soon as this thing is up in the air..." Zaid made a show of lifting his fingers off the controller. Once the drone was high enough, it veered and took off over the treetops.

Zaid gave a satisfied sigh. "And there she goes. Now we wait."

When they'd all filed back into the Hub, Zaid sat at the table, removed a chip from the drone remote, and popped it into the side of his laptop. The screens around the mantel flickered on, displaying the HD video footage from the drone.

"How long will it take to reach the cabin?" Holden asked.

"A little over two hours, probably," Zaid said.

The drone zipped past a road and a dense grove of evergreens before ascending once more as it entered a valley. Holden's stomach twisted the way it did when he was due for his yearly employee review, or when he had to speak on stage in front of a large group. Anticipatory dread. He didn't know why. The drone would only tell them what they already knew: the research team had never made it to the cabin. It wouldn't tell them why or provide any insight on how to stop Isaac Perez from dying.

They didn't even know where Isaac Perez was.

The drone veered around a smaller mountain, and the valley spilled outward into a massive divide.

"Whoa," Angel whispered.

The footage looked like a nature documentary, three peaks jutting from the wraparound mountain range far off in the distance. Holden didn't have a word to describe what he was seeing other than majestic. Unreal, perhaps. He'd only seen places like this when he streamed The Discovery Channel on sleepless nights.

Yet at the same time, the drone's footage felt achingly familiar, and made Holden nauseous.

"Anyone need anything? Coffee? Food?" he asked. When no one responded, he started wandering toward the hall. "I'll... uhh... make something."

In the kitchen, Holden pressed his palms to the rim of the sink and stared out the window. He felt like he hadn't slept in weeks and had way too much caffeine to compensate, his body unable to overcome the stress of this rescue mission. Now he was seeing shadow creatures in the woods. He needed to pull his shit together.

"I don't enjoy looking at it, either."

Holden glanced over his shoulder.

Maidei crossed her arms and leaned against the cracked yellowing fridge. "There's something I haven't told you."

Holden turned and pushed his back against the sink.

Maidei nodded toward the kitchen window. "Last time I was here, my team's research trailers were right around these parts, about a couple of miles from the ranger station. One day I walked from the trailers to the station to make a call, and got lost."

Holden furrowed his brow. "Lost?"

"For days." Maidei lifted her hand, wrapping a few of her braids around her finger. "I don't know what happened. I was on a familiar trail, and then completely disoriented. The forest didn't look like Deadswitch. It didn't even look like California."

Why didn't you tell me this before I took a walk to the fucking ranger station? Holden wanted to blurt. But he was too curious to let his anger get the best of him. "What happened?"

"I survived and made it back to familiar ground. Frank found me. There was a whole SAR party out looking for me." Her eyes glazed over. She curled her finger and tugged on her braids. "I wish I could just forget it ever happened, but it still haunts me. Something—or someone—stalked me when I was lost. All I can remember is a dark silhouette." Maidei dropped her hand. "But nothing else. Either I was high from the mushrooms I foraged, or my mind is trying to protect me from what I actually saw."

Suddenly, Holden was back at the station, staring out the window at a buck made of shadows.

Francis wandered into the kitchen, his tail flopping back and forth. He sniffed beneath a cabinet and licked something off the floor.

That night was still blurry to Holden, but bits of memory were filtering through. Francis, growling. Francis wouldn't have growled if the thing Holden had seen wasn't real and only in his head.

"I think I saw it," Holden said. "The other day, at the ranger station."

Maidei frowned. "Saw what?"

He swallowed. "Your stalker."

Maidei and Holden sat near each other at the table in The Hub as they watched the drone's live footage of Deadswitch. Their brief conversation silently filled the space between them. They needed time to compare their stories, but Maidei wasn't in the right headspace today. Holden didn't blame her. As long as the drone was in the air, he was also distracted, brain overloaded like a maxed-out CPU.

But they would talk eventually, and when they did, Holden would have to tell her about losing time, and the insatiable hunger that had filled him until he felt like some kind of primal monster.

He didn't know if he would ever be ready for that conversation.

"We're getting close to the cabin," Zaid announced. Frank stood from his seat. Holden returned his attention to the monitors.

The drone hovered over the jagged top of Mount Agnes. Near the top of the peak was a large hollow filled with snow, which Zaid pointed to. "If they're geomorphologists, that's probably the glacier they're studying."

"Wait." Angel leaned forward in her armchair seat near the window. "What's the name of the glacier?"

Zaid shrugged, turning to Frank, who also shrugged.

"Alpenglow, I think," Maidei finally said.

Angel's eyes widened, and she looked at Holden, expecting him to share her epiphany. "In one of her recordings, Dr. Dupont said Alpenglow had been lost."

"That makes little sense," said Maidei. "Maybe she misspoke."

"There's the cabin." Zaid walked toward the monitor and pointed at the corner of the screen. He held the drone remote in his other hand and began fiddling with the controls. The drone swayed.

"The lower you go, the more likely you'll get stuck," Frank warned. "That's a fifty-seven-mile hike in."

"Yeah, yeah." Zaid poked his tongue out of the corner of his mouth as he focused.

The cabin was the size of a quarter and barely visible beneath the surrounding trees. It grew larger as the drone descended, the roof bleached and covered in dead pine needles.

Holden stood, the monitors drawing him in like a magnet.

He knew this place.

The stench of rotted wood from a dense forest, the smoke and venison from the fire pit. The slide of parchment against his fingers as he unrolled a map across a barren tabletop.

Two cards beneath a lantern's orange flame: The Ranger, The Mother.

Those you protect—they are your identity.

The woman at the college party had pulled these cards for him and spun him a fortune, but he knew them from somewhere else. From this cabin.

How was that possible?

"Keep your eyes peeled for anything SAR may have missed," Zaid said. "I'll dip a little lower just to have a peek around and then lift her back up. We'll circle the mountain a bit..."

The screens flashed white before filling with dark grain. Holden blinked.

"Shit," Zaid hissed. "Shit!"

Frank sighed. "What did I tell you?"

"Could it be the cable?" Angel asked. "One bad cable can kill everything. Holden, can you check the HDMI ports?"

Holden wasn't listening.

On the dark monitor, behind the confetti flecks of noise, a woman made of static reached toward him.