She has been at her brother’s for the past eight days: reading, writing letters and sharing walks with Bryan and Meg, but she has not been skiing, not one run. She hasn’t even looked up at the mountain; raw emotion is just too near the surface. There has been no news of Hannah since the Idaho Springs police told her the search and rescue efforts underway on Decatur Peak would be suspended until spring. ‘The snow is too deep for an effective search, Mrs Sorenson. I’m sorry,’ the detective had said, coolly, professionally sympathetic. She had not moved as the numb realisation washed over her: Hannah was lost, presumed dead.
Wrapping an arm around her shoulders, her brother says, ‘I’m sorry, Jenny, I didn’t- But stay anyway. We’ll, I don’t know, cook gourmet food and drink too much expensive wine.’
‘No.’ It’s a genuine chuckle this time as she reflects on her brother’s sometimes curious endeavours in the kitchen. She wipes her eyes. ‘Look at me. I’m a mess. You don’t need me hanging around here.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Meg says. ‘It’ll be better here than at home. The store’s finally empty, so you’re spending too much time at the house. Just take a few more days to regroup.’
They don’t understand.
‘There’s no place,’ Jennifer begins falling apart again. ‘There’s no place to hide. There’s no safe place. I can’t get away from her. She’s everywhere. Don’t you see? I can’t stand it. One minute she was there on her bike. I made her put her helmet on as if she was a ten-year-old, and then she was gone. I can’t just sit around waiting until spring for some hiker to-’ Jennifer collapses to the floor; Bryan kneels to take her in his arms.
‘Just a few more days,’ he whispers. ‘I’ll go back with you on Sunday, and we can take care of a few things there.’
‘No!’ Jennifer shouts. ‘We won’t. I won’t clean out her room. I won’t do it. She is not… she’s not gone, Bryan.’
‘Jenny, please.’
‘No,’ she shakes her head too hard, causing her vision to tunnel. ‘You tell me how they got to the trailhead, Bryan. How did they get there? All three cars were at the house. Hannah’s climbing gear was at our house. She wore running shoes up there that night. She knew it had snowed.’
Standing, Jennifer breathes deeply in an effort to calm down; it doesn’t help. ‘I’m sorry, but you climbed with her, Bryan, she wouldn’t go up there in running shoes. She isn’t on that mountain. I won’t believe it, and I won’t clean out her room. I won’t cancel her insurance. I won’t take her fucking messages off the answering machine. I’m sorry, but there is nothing like this. This would have been easier if they had just told me she was-’ Jennifer wails, a cry that breaks her brother’s heart.
‘Please don’t apologise,’ says Meg. Uncertain what to do with her hands, she alternates between clutching at the crew neck of her sweater and rubbing her palms along the outer seams of her jeans. Feeling useless, she moves into the kitchen for some water.
Bryan takes his sister by the shoulders as the Prince Marek hoists her broken transom to the Falkan night and begins sinking into the harbour. He takes a breath, bracing himself just enough to say, ‘A few more days, okay?’
Defeated, Jennifer finally nods. ‘Okay.’
‘Great.’ He makes an attempt at levity. ‘What shall we cook? Grilled elephant balls?’
‘Sounds lovely,’ Jenny can’t stifle a giggle. ‘I’ll rent Casablanca, and we’ll make an evening of it.’ She sees the relief in his face; her heart lightens. Bryan will always be her little brother.
‘Make it Victor Victoria; I’m in the mood for a cross-dressing soprano,’ he grins at her.
‘I’m afraid Meg will have to help you there, Bryan.’
‘Nah, she’s an alto,’ he whispers, and together the siblings laugh, holding one another, waiting for the comforting predictability of everyday life, absent since Hannah’s disappearance, to return.
BOOK I
The Keystone
THE JOURNEY WEST
The silver charter bus cast a tapered shadow across the concrete wall of the Morrison K-Mart. The sun was coming up behind them, and Steven turned to look out the back window in an effort to see how far above the prairie it had risen. He must have fallen asleep. It had been dark when they left the bus station downtown.
Morrison. The milk run was all he could get out of Denver at this hour. They had one more stop in town, then on to Golden; there was a stop outside City Hall, one near the brewery and then finally out Interstate 70 to Idaho Springs. He would be home in less than an hour.
‘Excuse me.’ Steven turned to the man sitting across the aisle, a thin, reedy character with a series of piercings in his ears, chin, tongue and nose. ‘Do you know what time it is?’
The emaciated stranger slid his left sleeve halfway up his forearm, exposing a tattoo of a naked woman with gargantuan breasts, no waist, and a tremendous backside. About her flying tresses were the words Born to, scripted in traditional olive drab. Steven didn’t know what the woman was born to do, because the operative verb in the phrase was covered by the heavy face of the young man’s wristwatch.
‘It’s six-thirty.’
‘Thanks.’ He needed a watch. Mark and Gilmour would have closed the portal over an hour ago. Steven hoped to get home, find Lessek’s key and to be back in Eldarn by evening: ten and a half hours. Assuming all went well, that would be plenty of time; he couldn’t check in on his parents, or on Myrna and Howard at the bank, but Hannah – he had to know; it was the only way. He would dial her house, let her answer the phone, and then hang up. No one could know he was in Colorado: they would delay him too long, maybe try to keep him here, talk him out of going back. He might peek through a window to see if his mother was there, look to see how worried she might be, or if she had moved on by now. He hoped she had; he hoped they all had.
He sighed. He and Mark hadn’t discussed how they would explain their sudden disappearance back in October. So, he would call to hear her voice, just to confirm that Malagon had been lying, that night in the Blackstones, and that Hannah had been here, safe at home all along.
The three days since the explosion at the airport were a bit of a blur; now Steven closed his eyes in an effort to forget the devastation on the tarmac. The distant hum of the bus tyres and the soothing rhythm of the highway lulled him, a momentary respite from the horrors he had faced, but all too soon his thoughts returned to Express Airlines flight 182 and his desperate race across the country.
He had known, somehow, that the young woman carrying the baby on the plane was Nerak. Maybe it was the staff’s power keeping him safe, or maybe it was just luck, but the moment he caught the woman staring dead at him despite the fact that her baby was screaming, Steven knew he had to get off that aeroplane.
He would remember her, and that baby, for the rest of his life. She had carried the infant like she was heading for a touchdown. Steven guessed that she kept her hand in her pocket to cover the dark circular wound Gilmour had told them marked Nerak’s victims. And she had not pre-boarded the plane and that was strange: a young mother with a child, travelling alone, who waited to board with the mass of fleshy businessmen and pushy suburbanites heading to DC for the weekend. Jesus, that baby was dead now.
When the plane exploded, Steven was already running up the jetway. The force of the blast threw him across the concourse and headlong into the check-in desk at the opposite gate. He suffered a serious gash across his right shoulder, and a large purple bruise welled up on his cheek. His clothes were on fire, and he had to roll around for a few seconds to smother the flames; his ears rang, and his hearing had not returned until later that evening, but otherwise, miraculously, he had been spared serious injury.