Holden

HOLDEN

On a scale of "quiet nap" to "worst decision of his life," this one was up there.

tailed the group as he trudged up the mountain, sweat drenching his t-shirt. The sun beat down on the back of his neck and seared the top layer of his skin. Five miles back at the trailhead, the thirty-five-pound weight of his pack was uncomfortable but manageable. Now, his extra underwear crushed him alive.

But the worst of the pain wasn't in his shoulders. Instead, the belt of the pack distributed the weight to his hips. When the hell did he ever work out his hips? How was he even supposed to work out his hips? Squats?

When was the last time he did squats?

Never. He'd never done a squat in his life. Cardio? Yes. Push-ups? Sure. But squats? Kyle had invited him to the gym on so many occasions, and had turned him down every time. He'd never thought he'd ever regret not hanging out with Kyle, but now he replayed all those would-be texts in his head with pensive longing.

Wanna lift weights, bro?

Yeah, actually. I'm planning on rescuing a bunch of strangers in a few months, and I gotta be jacked so I can carry my underwear up the side of the mountain. Good looking out, Kyle.

Every breath he took needed to be accompanied by two more. How did anyone trail run above five thousand feet without an oxygen tank strapped to their back?

He was staring down at his feet when someone clapped his shoulder. Startled, his eyes darted up to the tanned and lined face of Clyde. Not a bead of sweat dotted his forehead.

"You hanging in there?"

grimaced, thankful Clyde didn't tack on " son, " which would have made feel extra incompetent. "Fine. Out of shape," he admitted with a huff. "But fine."

Clyde walked by 's side. "A couple more switchbacks and we'll be out of this gorge before you know it. Saddle Lake's only a few miles after that."

Too out of breath for words, merely nodded. Clyde stepped in front of him when the trail narrowed, and stopped for a few seconds to rest. Out of the ten hikers in the SAR group, the only one behind was a woman in her midforties. She was in much better shape than , but kept stopping to peruse their surroundings, as though she'd never seen a forest before. had already forgotten her name.

The plan was to camp for the night once they reached Saddle Lake. In the morning, the more experienced half of the group would trailblaze east through the valley toward Mount Lucille. They'd then make their way north along the ridge toward Mount Charlotte.

The other half of the team, including , would continue up to Mount Agnes. Since the first Search and Rescue team had found no evidence that the research team had even made it to the cabin, their job was to search for signs they'd veered from the trail.

Clyde had already caught back up with Diego, a SAR veteran and leader of the part of the team that would continue along Wolf Ridge to Agnes. The two chatted away like they were strolling through a sea-level park. returned his attention to his feet and the pair of boots that didn't fit quite right, wielding his borrowed trekking poles to keep himself from eating shit. Blisters had already torn his heels to shreds, and he was too ashamed to make the group stop for him to bandage them.

He needed to get it together; the last thing he wanted was to become a burden and detract from the mission. Lives were on the line.

As he struggled around the bend and up the next switchback, he caught bits of Clyde and Diego's conversation.

"Cameron changes her mind more than she changes clothes. We had her enrolled in college at eighteen... Nice school, too. A UC. She started attending, and Teresa and I never heard from her—figured she was busy with friends and studying. A couple months later, she called us from a pay phone. She had dropped out and joined up with some strangers she met online to hike the PCT. They ditched her in Humboldt, and she needed help to get home. I'd never seen Teresa so furious in my life."

"I have two in high school," Diego said. "If they ever pulled that kind of stunt with me, I'd book a three-month all-inclusive trip to Buenos Aires with the rest of their college savings."

"She still owes us money from the deposit on her dorm. I even bug her about it. Uses the excuse of being a poor academic." Clyde sighed loudly. "She's out there, safe. I know she is. Cameron's just being Cameron."

"Are the others like her?" Diego asked. "Dr. Dupont?"

"I'm not sure," Clyde said. "Met Siena twice. Lovely woman. But you don't really get to know your kids' friends once they're adults. Not like when they're little."

Diego was asking the wrong question. It didn't matter whether Siena Dupont was as impulsive as Cameron Yarrow. The real question was, why? Why deviate from the plan when they'd finally secured funding and permission to use the cabin?

They wouldn't have diverted unless they were forced to, but didn't believe that had happened, either. Siena had been at the cabin. He'd seen her on the drone footage, staring right at him. Which meant the first team had missed something crucial.

He'd need to convince both Diego and Clyde to do another sweep of the cabin. Maybe tonight, he'd have the chance.

Saddle Lake swarmed with mosquitos.

As the team set up camp, chose a flat space at the edge of the site. He fumbled with his tent poles, dropping one to smack a bug off his neck. He'd been in high school the last time he'd set up a tent, on some science field trip. Miserable then, too.

He fished a bent tent pole out of the nylon bag, threw it to the side, and tugged free several more poles, all mismatched. He glanced around at the other tents. Everyone but him had finished and moved on to the communal spaces.

This was what he deserved. He wasn't meant for the woods. He wasn't even meant to exist outside for more than ten minutes at a time.

He shouldn't have left Angel on bad terms. She was just looking out for him, and he'd been a tool. He was terrible with friends. That was what she was now—a friend. He hadn't had a good friend in a very long time, and the concept of someone just caring about him for the sake of caring was so foreign. If he could only apologize to her right now. But neither of them had cell service.

If anything happened to him up here . . .

He laughed out loud. You did this to yourself, idiot.

The Deadswitch Five had vanished into thin air, and now Siena and her team were also missing. He imagined the probability of something terrible happening to him, given all the current circumstances.

Today's Danger: Extreme. Remember, kids, only you can prevent poor decisions .

"You making progress?"

looked up. Clyde approached, his hands shoved in the pockets of his water-resistant nylon shorts, which he probably paid full price for at REI.

stood straight, pressing a hand to his aching lower back. "I think some poles are for a different tent, and a few are bent."

Clyde frowned. "I asked Teresa to see if all the parts were here. I guess she didn't know what she was looking for. Here." Clyde bent down and flipped the nylon bag so the rest of the poles tumbled out. He arranged them, grumbling to himself, and smashed two together until they fit.

Now that he knew violence was the only answer, took heed, and eventually they made two long poles out of the little poles. Clyde gestured to the rolled-out tent, and helped feed both poles through the top.

A few painful minutes later, they pitched the tent. The others had already established the kitchen, and even though fires weren't allowed, the scent of bacon wafted through the campground.

expected his stomach to rumble in anticipation, but he wasn't hungry, even though he'd hiked all day, sweating his guts out and burning half his body weight in calories.

He grabbed his water bottle and followed Clyde to the kitchen. As Diego passed out heaping bowls of bacon mac and cheese, sat on a flaking log, out of the way. The woman who'd hiked behind him all day sat on the other end of the log and offered a brief smile. Crow's feet defined the corners of her eyes, an ash blonde ponytail cascading from the back of her ball cap. She took off her hat and slid the elastic from her hair, shaking it out. Gray streaked the crown of her head.

"Quite the feast," she said.

Clyde passed a bowl and spork, and he took them hesitantly, before prodding the noodles with his utensil. Normally, he'd inhale a cholesterol-drenched meal like this.

Clyde sat across from . "Not hungry? "

smacked another mosquito off his arm, almost spilling his noodles. "Not sure why."

"You're not used to this kind of intense exercise, are you? That's your body telling you it's in shock."

"That's..." searched for the right word. "Pathetic."

"You're doing great," Clyde added cheerfully. "But you still need to eat. If you don't get enough calories, you'll really be miserable."

took a bite of the mac and forced himself to chew, even though it tasted like chalk. He gulped down water and shoveled another bite into his mouth.

Diego sauntered over. He was salt-and-peppered and stocky, skin pockmarked from teenage acne. He sat, grinning. "Hello, team!"

"So it's the four of us, then?" Clyde asked.

"Yep, us four headed up to Agnes." Diego glanced at , and then the woman. "We all know each other, right?"

It was a weird question, especially because Diego had never said a word to .

The woman piped up. "I don't know anyone."

"Okay." Diego plopped on the ground, somehow not spilling a single noodle. "Let's start with you, then."

The woman straightened. "I'm Tiffany. I—uhh—used to live here, I guess. During the summers, down in the foothills. Now I live in El Paso."

"SAR background?" Diego asked.

Tiffany stabbed at some of her noodles with her fork. "A bit in my twenties because of my dad. Nothing formal recently." She took a bite. "He was Dr. Dupont's mentor. That's why I'm here."

This surprised . "You're Dr. Feyrer's daughter?"

"You know him?" Tiffany asked.

shook his head, hyperaware of everyone's eyes shifting to him. "Just from what I read in Dr. Dupont's files. He was supposed to be on this trip with them, right?"

Tiffany nodded.

"I . . . uhh . . . I'm sorry for your loss."

"Thanks," she mumbled before pressing her lips together and looking away, and wished he'd said nothing. "I'm here because he would have wanted me here. He cared about Siena—and the others—a lot. He's probably rolling over in his grave as we speak." Her tone was flippant, but appreciated the levity.

Clyde drew a shaky breath. "Well, we're happy you're here. I'm happy. It's good to know there are people willing to help my daughter's team."

"Cameron's brilliant," Tiffany acknowledged. "Dad talked about her all the time."

Clyde swallowed and looked away. A solemn pause lingered before Diego spoke. "How about you?" He nodded at . "The untrained kid. Probably shouldn't have let you come, but Frank said he'd claim responsibility if you did something dumb."

The way Diego called him kid irked more than the insult. He also wished he'd known Frank had taken responsibility for him. He didn't want anyone to take responsibility for him. It wasn't fair to them.

batted the thought away. This was his chance to explain what he'd seen in the drone feed.

"My name's . I, uhh, work with Maidei Chari and Zaid Handal." Not necessarily a lie. "When Zaid sent the drone over Agnes, I saw someone right before the feed died."

"Someone?" Clyde leaned forward. "What did they look like?"

carefully chose his next words. "It was a brief flash, but she looked like Dr. Dupont."

"Really?" Tiffany said.

Diego frowned and crossed his arms, leaning back on his log. "Frank didn't tell me this."

"There was a lot of commotion when it happened. I was the only one who saw her," admitted.

Diego raised an eyebrow, clearly skeptical. "I see. Well, the cabin isn't on our agenda, since another team already searched it. "

"So let's search it again." Clyde clapped on the shoulder. The man sure enjoyed doing that. "You heard . If someone has been up there recently, it's worth investigating." Clyde smiled hopefully. Fingers crossed it wasn't false hope had given him.

"Let's just focus on making it up the mountain first." Diego's jab was directed at , but he didn't care. Something told him Clyde wouldn't leave this forest until the cabin had been searched again, and that was enough for to feel like he'd made a difference.

"What about you?" Clyde asked Diego, seamlessly shifting the topic back to introductions.

"I'm Diego, army vet and Search and Rescue for twenty years. I grew up in these parts—well, a backwoods community on the other side of the wilderness area. Maybe six or seven houses in a small cluster. Town called Walnut. Not even a town, really. There were four of us kids back when I was growing up. Had to take a bus two hours just to get to the nearest high school."

wasn't sure of the point to this history, other than Diego trying to prove he absolutely, definitely belonged on this team, which absolutely, definitely was overkill.

"I bet you were bored." Tiffany scraped the side of her bowl.

"We were bored all summer long. Spent too much time on the outskirts of the wilderness, meddling in stories that shouldn't have been meddled with. Folklore."

"Ah, yes." Tiffany smirked. "The cult. I know about them, too."

Diego glanced at Clyde and as if expecting a prompt to continue, but he continued regardless. "The story goes that a bunch of pioneers packed up their covered wagons and their children and traveled west from Missouri. No one really knows why they inhabited these hills. Back in the day, the snowpack was deadly. I'm sure you've heard about the Donner Party. But the snow didn't scare these folks. Doesn't make a lot of sense until you wonder if something other than fertile land and prosperity drew them to these hills."

couldn't imagine hauling a wagon up any of these mountains. He could hardly haul his underwear. And he wasn't a geology expert, but land was supposed to be fertile in the valley. He hadn't heard of anyone climbing a mountain to start a farm.

Diego continued. "The first settlers built their log cabins in the heart of Deadswitch, far away from common trails. Soon, another party arrived. Left their covered wagons at the trail and carried all their supplies on their back, certain they'd found their promised land. More settlers came, the same story. Abandoned their wagons to hike into the mountains."

Clyde took the bait. "Why would they do that?"

Diego shrugged. "There were documents—spiritual ones—found in these woods. Those pioneers worshipped an entity called The Mother. Sacrificed to her. Animals, humans."

"The Mother?" repeated, scrambling to catch the bowl that had slipped from his hands.

"A goddess with antlers," said Diego. "No, not the Deer Lady. Not a Native American spirit. The Mother is different. Not a warning, but a ruler—ruler over these lands, over her people. As kids, we loved to make up stories about her. Scare each other, dare each other to run into the woods and call for her. The Mother was our Bloody Mary. Scared ourselves silly. Our fear made us see things in the woods. Shadows, antlers, the like. Of course, we were just having fun, but I still can't get over the fact that those documents are real. Someone made them, once upon a time. A Bible of sorts."

The Mother. That card the goth girl had pulled for at that stupid party. Was The Mother the same entity? How was that possible?

Avery Mathis—Avablade—one of the Deadswitch Five. The last game she'd been playing... was remembering wrong? No, he'd looked it up. The Mother had appeared in that game too, and after Avery had disappeared in Deadswitch Wilderness, The Mother had appeared for on the card.

And now he was here. Just like Avery. And not only that, he'd already fallen into some weird-ass trance at the ranger station, where he'd hungered for a buck made of shadow. If that wasn't culty, he didn't know what was.

This connection with The Mother and Deadswitch was so specific it had to be kismet and not coincidence. had no reason to not believe in fate. Hell, he was here because of audio files from the future.

Plus, to conjure a rational explanation was way out of his poor brain's league, but there was something to Diego's story—to The Mother—that he would pocket and save for later.

choked down his entire dinner, something he was very proud of, before kitchen cleanup. When the teams turned in for the night and he entered his secondhand tent, he lingered on the lack of urgency in the camp's atmosphere, slowly rolling it over like a hard, bitter candy on his tongue.

As far as he knew, this was still a rescue—and not a recovery—mission. Diego and the team breaking off to hike toward Lucille all seemed like experts, but it felt like they could do more—at least, those who were trained and acclimated. Weren't lives at stake? Wasn't time of the essence?

He was supposed to trust the experts. Then again, if he'd listened to Maidei back in Oregon, who had told both and Angel to leave this well alone, no one would know Dupont's research team was in trouble.

The recordings, Siena in the static—his reason for being here was to get the team back up to the cabin, regardless of Diego's skepticism.

He wouldn't leave these woods until he searched that cabin himself.

The night dragged on, 's eyes snapping open with every rustle of the trees. Muscles mocking him, he tossed and turned until morning broke and he tried sitting up. His head would feel better if it was literally filled with hot cement.

Sourness hit the back of his tongue, like remnants of a cocktail made of battery acid. He blinked up at the nylon of the secondhand tent, the morning light filtering in sickly yellow.

Beyond his tent, the rest of the SAR team was already bustling about. He changed and rolled up his sleeping bag, his movements laborious. As he emerged from his tent, Diego ambled over with a bowl of grits and Spam. 's stomach revolted, and he shook his head.

Diego pushed the bowl toward him. "You need to eat."

"I'm fine," snapped. Diego's brows knitted in surprise, and then he shrugged and returned to the kitchen to pass off the grits to anyone wanting seconds, and was left alone to pack up his tent.

The Lucille team took off from camp first, and soon after, , Clyde, and Tiffany followed Diego up the trail leading to Wolf Ridge, leaving Saddle Lake behind.

lagged and eventually fell behind the others as his pseudo hangover intensified. He resisted the urge to shout out and ask for a break; he'd let himself get out of shape after breaking up with Becca. He deserved this, and wished he'd funneled his grief into something physically productive.

Tiffany fell back to walk beside him and offered a small pack of gummy bears. "Sugar can help."

He accepted with a mumbled thanks. The gummy bear was sweet but took too much energy to chew, so he let it dissolve in his mouth. A quiet dread bloomed inside him as the day crept toward noon. He felt worse than when he woke up.

The group hiked out of the confined gulch, and the sun blazed down, unrelenting as they embarked on the trail's steepest set of switchbacks yet. could do little but focus on his blistered feet in the worn leather of his boots, each step taken with gritted teeth and tunnel vision. The thin mountain air couldn't fill his lungs no matter how quickly he gasped .

Pain pulsed behind his eyes. He dared to glance up, only for his stomach to lurch as he spotted the distant specks of his team. Tiffany lagged behind Clyde and Diego. Was it genuine admiration for the wilderness that kept her back, or was she merely accommodating his pathetic pace?

stumbled. He unclipped his bag and shrugged out of it, and it hit the ground and rolled. Hopefully not all the way back down the mountain, though when he swiveled to check, he fell ass-first onto granite. Ears ringing, he cradled his head in his hands, his tongue swollen and throat too dry to call out for help.

Gravel crunched behind him as someone descended the granite switchbacks. "Hey!" Tiffany called out. "You okay?"

"Out of shape," he choked as she squatted next to him.

"Does your head hurt? Are you dizzy?"

"Yes... and yes." He raised his chin as she reached toward the water bottle clipped to his bag.

"Drink. Now." She pushed the bottle toward him, and complied, the water providing little relief. Yet, as Tiffany flew up the switchbacks to summon the others, his heart sank.

Diego's jabs last night made more sense. The SAR lead probably planned to camp at Saddle Lake for 's sake, knowing he couldn't move faster. If weren't here, the rest of the team would be halfway to Agnes by now.

As Tiffany disappeared, he lowered his gaze toward the trail they had ascended, and a dark shape coalesced at the forest's edge. A shadow rendered in three dimensions, half-concealed, both part of the landscape and apart from it. A majestic rack of antlers atop a sleek, muscular four-legged body, absorbing sunlight and destroying it.

The buck. It had found again.

He sank into an unsettling abyss, the creature whispering to the primal parts of his mind. His mouth filled with the copper tang of blood, just like before. The veins in his hands and arms hummed, the vibration infecting every nerve in his body.

Diego's rapid-fire questions bombarded him.

Tiffany, Clyde, and Diego stood around . When had they arrived? No matter—he nodded absently at their queries and took another gulp from the bottle in his hands.

Clyde touched 's shoulder. "Altitude sickness."

"We need to get you down the mountain," Diego said, his usual gruff expression a little softer.

responded only with a shake of his head, and Diego continued, "Altitude sickness is not something you can walk off or tough out. It will get worse if you push yourself. Your brain is swelling inside your skull. Headaches, dizziness, hallucinations..."

Hallucinations .

looked back down the mountain. The buck was gone.

"Have you heard of high-altitude cerebral edema? That's when things get grim," Diego said.

couldn't even muster the effort to argue.

"I'll go back down with him," Tiffany said.

"What if he gets worse? You won't be able to hike him out yourself," Clyde said, as if wasn't sitting right there. He lowered his face to his hands again.

"I went to med school for two years. I know wilderness first aid. You and Diego need to continue on. Better me than anyone else."

"Fine," Diego said. "Just . . . be careful."

"You okay with that plan, ?" Clyde asked.

finally lifted his head to the concern etched on Clyde's face. With a weak nod, he surrendered.