He had to make it.
The snow sucked at his boots. He yanked them free, fighting for balance. He would not go down. His teeth chattered. He couldn’t feel his arm.
It occurred to him that he was going to die. And yet all he could see was the—
— paroxysm of pain racking Jack’s body. Jack fights out the words. “Listen to me. This is not your fault. I made the decision to meet you. I did. Go. Leave me. Go.”
Evan thinks he is choking, but then he feels the wet on his cheeks and realizes what is happening to his face. “No,” he says. “I won’t go. I won’t—”
Jack’s good hand drops to his belt, and there is a clank, and then his service pistol is up between them. He aims it at Evan. “Go.”
“You wouldn’t.”
Jack’s gaze is steady, focused. “Have I ever lied to you?”
Evan stands up, stumbles back a step. It dawns on him that Jack’s flannel shirt is still mopped around his hand. His fist tightens around it, moisture spreading between his fingers. Somewhere above them in the structure, tires screech. Boots pound concrete.
“Son,” Jack says gently. “It’s time to go.” He rotates the barrel beneath his own chin.
Backing up, Evan arms the tears from his face. He takes another step back, and another, and then finally he turns.
Running away, he hears the gunshot.
Jack’s words echo in his head. It’s time to go. It’s—
— time to go.
“Goddamn it,” Evan said. “Damn it. Damn it. Stupid fucking way to die.”
The blood-crusted fingers of his left hand had gone numb, making it harder to hold the seal on the slick flesh of his shoulder. He lost his center of gravity, tilting into a soft white bank. He tried to right himself, but the snow gave way beneath his weight, delivering him gently to the ground. His hand was too weak to hold back the blood anymore. The warm current trickled through his fingers. He breathed into the cold earth. Blinked ice crystals off his eyelashes.
Since Jack he had let no one into his life, and so there would be no one to miss him.
“Stupid,” he said.
He felt himself fading away, the Nowhere Man blurring into the whiteness. A lifetime spent blending in, leaving no traces. Which also meant leaving no mark. He’d built his armor, ring by ring, but now he felt himself crushed under the weight of it, sinking into oblivion. So this was how it would end? The proverbial whimper?
His entire body was shuddering. A more intense vibration near his hip differentiated itself, and it took him a moment to identify it.
The RoamZone.
The kid.
The ringing phone called his thoughts to Alison Siegler as well. It occurred to him that when he died, instead of the customary tunnel of light, he was going to see the Horizon Express steaming relentlessly for the Jacksonville Port Authority.
Evan squeezed his eyes shut.
Son. It’s time to go.
He released his shoulder, the blood flowing freely now, and dug for the phone in his pocket. He lifted the battered RoamZone to his face. His hand, a uniform crimson. His knuckles, tacky against his cheek.
He thought of how he usually answered the phone—Do you need my help? — and wanted to laugh.
He said, “I … I can’t…”
The boy’s voice, hushed and fierce. “You forgot.”
“No. I didn’t. I just can’t…” A wave of pain swept away Evan’s breath. He grimaced, bit his lip, waited for it to pass. “I can’t help you, okay? Can’t … help you.” The ground tilted around him, a roller-coaster loop through space and time, and he was talking to the kid and to Alison Siegler, to Jack on the floor of Parking Level 3 and to himself, trapped hopelessly in a valley fifteen meters from the summit.
“I can’t … help any of you … anymore.…”
It’s time to go.
Every breath brought pain. Evan said, “There’ll be … someone else.…”
“No.” The boy’s words faded in and out of static. “It has to be you.”
Evan felt himself seeping into the cold ground.
Some long-buried part inside him split open, a flood of emotion sweeping him down, down, plunging him into deep, freezing waters. A tear cut through the snowflakes, crusting his cheek, a single warm track across his skin and—
— a straw-thin spray squirts between Jack’s fingers—
— he was crying but felt something instead of sadness, something like liberation.
Time to go.
“… sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.…”
The phone died. Evan tilted it to see the screen, his hand trembling violently. No bars left.
“… sorry,” he told the ground. “I’m sorry.…”
Go. Leave me. Go.
“Okay, Jack,” he said. “Okay.”
He breathed wetly for a moment. Stared between the last tree trunks at that bare patch of earth just within reach ahead. The setting sun caught the rise of powder in all its creamy glory. Fifteen meters to the peak. He deserved at least that.
“I want to make it,” he told himself hoarsely. “I want to see the top.”
He shoved the phone into his jacket pocket — this piece of the kid he would not let go of — and placed his hand back over his shoulder. His grip was still loose, so he used his chin to pin his hand more tightly over the wound. Somehow he wiggled to his knees. Leaning into a pine, he found his feet.
His first step broke him through the tree line. The sudden openness made his breath catch. The pain ebbed, draining out of him. As he forged up the unmarred blanket of white, the world came into vivid focus. The saw-toothed edges of snowflakes. The violet spill of the sunset through puffy clouds. The air, so fresh it stung his throat, telling him that right now, in this moment, he was still alive.
A golden glow limned the mountaintop. His last steps would carry him there.
At once the horizon seemed to bubble up in one spot, the bulge taking shape as a human form — someone coming over the peak from the far side. The figure stood atop the crest, backlit. Evan squinted into the light, noted the silhouette of the rifle held across the man’s chest.
A .338 Lapua Mag.
The north sniper.
You deserve it, Evan told him, though the words didn’t make it out. You were better.
He could no longer feel his legs. Now that he’d halted, he wouldn’t be able to start up again. He stared wistfully at the apex just a few strides away.
His blistered lips moved. “At least I tried,” he said.
The sniper’s features were cloaked in black. He raised the rifle.
Evan felt a deep thrumming in his bones and the blissful release of having no options left.
He could stop fighting.
The scope glinted in the day’s dying light, and Evan sensed the crack of a shot.
He pitched forward, holding his eyes on the brim of the valley. He wanted his last view to be of the summit.
The thrumming turned to thunder, the beating of giant wings. The sniper was jerking around as if yanked by strings, laced through with bullets. A strange calm descended over Evan as he grasped what this was: a dying fantasy played out in his mind’s eye.
Well, then he might as well enjoy it.
The thunder took on a rhythm, the whomping of some great beast. And then a Black Hawk broke majestically over the wall of the valley, sunlight gleaming off the blades. A door gunner leaned out over the skid, peering down over a machine gun, assessing his work.