be struggling with my presence there, and I realized that while he had asked me to come to him in the mountains, and had showed me the path to take, he hadn’t ever really believed I would do it.
Aki climbed down the promontory of rock until he stood before me. I showed him the leather pack. He glanced at my offering and thanked me.
“Come,” he said, motioning up the mountain. “The village isn’t far.”
My leg was aching, and I had no idea how I would climb another step, but I was determined to see the village. I braced myself and followed. Aki slipped behind a boulder and back onto the steep path. His pace was quick. I couldn’t keep up.
Finally, he turned around, annoyed. I had fallen far behind.
“You must go faster,” he said.
“I’ll try. It’s just that—”
He must have realized that I was in pain, because he asked, “You are hurt?”
I explained the gunshot wound, the botched surgery, my slow and incomplete recovery.
“But why?” he asked, confused.
“I was running away,” I said. “Sal wanted to stop me.”
This answer didn’t make sense to Aki. He thought it over, his brow furrowed. “But this weapon,” he said. “I have seen men use it to kill animals. Do you kill your own people with this weapon, too?”
“Sometimes,” I said. “Sometimes we do.”
“We do not,” he said, looking at me. “Never. There are not enough of us for that.” He walked back to me. “Show me,” he said.
I slipped my jeans over my hips, easing them down past the gunshot wound, revealing the pink scar on my thigh. Aki bent close to look at my leg, his gaze settling on my bare skin. He touched the scar, his thumb tracing the damaged skin, and a shiver went through me. When our eyes met, I could not look away, and for a moment, I thought something had passed between us, a moment of attraction and complicity.
It was a long way up and I wasn’t going to make it without help. Sensing this, Aki squatted down and told me to climb on his back. I wrapped my arms around his neck and hoisted myself up. He glanced over his shoulder, asked if I was ready, and, with that, began to climb up the mountain.
Aki was strong and quick and adept. I held tight to him as he launched from rock to rock, his fingers pushing into cracks and crevices, his legs propelling us up. He moved with the energy and power of someone inured to the terrain, without hesitation, without reflection, pushing through banks of trees, scaling slopes, traversing the solid rise of each new plateau. I was so caught up in the sensation of weightlessness, the pure terror of clinging to him, I could hardly breathe. I buried my head in his neck, afraid to look, but when I got the courage to lift my eyes, I saw the mountain as I had never seen it before. The mineral-stained, striated surfaces, so close that I could have skimmed my nails against them as we passed. Fat rock crystal formations hung like opalescent beehives. Above, the mountain peaks rose like giants, their long, spiked ridges stretching as far as I could see. Snow glinted in the sun, too bright, too brilliant to look at without blinking. At the highest reach of my vision, a misty powder swirled in a solution of air, thick as yeast in beer. And below—pure vertigo. The earth fell away, dropping into a sheer, chiseled chasm of bottomless, formless space. This, I realized, was how a bird must feel riding the air to the top of the world.
At last, we reached a plateau. Aki dropped me to the ground and I fell onto a flat of granite. Although Aki had done all the work, I was out of breath, hot and trembling from fatigue. My leg burned from the effort of clinging to his body, the dull throb of pain pounding through my thigh. At that altitude, the air was cool and thin. I had lost all sense of equilibrium. I leaned against a boulder to get my balance and looked around.
There it was, the arcade of caves Justine had described, the very one she had discovered tracking footprints in the snow. Long and dark and crusted with ice, the passage had the appearance of a tunnel to another world. I hardly saw a thing as I walked inside. What light filtered down left only a weak, green haze that pooled