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* * *

By the time the storm blew in, Trixie had already lost feeling in her toes. She was nearly catatonic, lulled by the cold and the exhaust of the snow machine. At the first strike of ice against her cheek, Trixie blinked back to awareness. They were still somewhere on the river - the scenery looked no different than it had an hour ago, except that the lights in the sky had vanished, washed over by gray clouds that touched down at the line of the horizon.

Snow howled. Visibility grew even worse. Trixie began to imagine that she had fallen into one of her father's comic book panels, one filled with Kirby crackle - the burst of white bubbles that Jack Kirby, a penciler from years ago, had invented to show an energy field. The shapes in the darkness turned into villains from her father's art - twisted trees became the clawed arms of a witch; icicles were the bared fangs of a demon.

Willie slowed the snow machine to a crawl and then stopped it altogether. He shouted to Trixie over the roar of the wind. “We have to wait this out. It'll clear up by morning.” Trixie wanted to answer him, but she'd spent so long clenching her jaw shut that she couldn't pry it open wide enough for a word. Willie moved to the back of the machine, rummaging around. He handed her a blue tarp. “Tuck this under the treads,” he said. “We can use it to get out of the wind.”

He left her to her own devices and disappeared into the whorls of snow. Trixie wanted to cry. She was so cold that she couldn't even classify it as cold anymore; she had no idea what he meant by treads, and she wanted to go home. She clutched the tarp against her parka, not moving, wishing that Willie would come back. She saw him moving in and out of the beam cast by the snow machine's headlight. He seemed to be snapping off the branches of a dead tree next to the riverbank. When he saw her still sitting on the snow machine, he walked up to her. She expected him to scream about not pulling her weight, but instead his mouth tightened and he helped her off. “Get under here,” he said, and he had her sit with

her back to the snow machine before he wrapped it in the tarp and pulled it over her, an awning to cut the wind.

It wasn't perfect. There were three large slits in the tarp, and the snow and ice unerringly found those gashes. Willie crouched down at Trixie's feet and peeled some of the bark off the birch branches he'd gathered, tucking it between lengths of cottonwood and alder. He poured a little gas from the snow machine on top of the pile and ignited it with a lighter from his pocket. Only when she could feel the fire against her skin did she let herself wonder how cold it might be out here.

Trixie remembered learning that the human body was, like, sixty percent water. How many degrees below zero did it have to get before you literally froze to death?

“Come on,” Willie said. “Let's get some grass.” The last thing Trixie wanted to do right now was smoke weed. She tried to shake her head, but even that set of muscles had stopped working. When she didn't get up, he turned away, as if she wasn't even worth bothering with. “Wait,” she said, and although he didn't look at her, he stopped moving. She wanted to explain how her feet felt like blocks and her fingers stung so bad that she had to keep biting down on her lower lip. She wanted to tell him how her shoulders hurt from trying not to shiver. She wanted to tell him she was scared and that when she imagined running away, this hadn't entered into it. “I c-can't move,” Trixie said. Willie knelt beside her. “What can't you feel?” She didn't know how to answer that. Comfort? Safety?

He began unlacing Trixie's boots. Matter-of-factly, he cupped his hands around one of her feet. “I don't have a sleeping bag. I let my cousin Ernie take it, he's one of the mushers, and the officials check to see if you have one before you start the race.” Then, just when Trixie could move her toes again, just as a searing burn shot from her nails to the arch of her foot, Willie stood up and left.

He came back a few minutes later with an armful of dead grass. It was still dusted with snow; Willie had dug it out from the edge of the riverbank. He packed the grass in Trixie's boots and mittens. He told her to stuff some under her parka.

“How long will it snow?” Trixie asked.

Willie shrugged.

“How come you don't talk?”

Willie rocked back on his heels, his boots crunching in the snow. “How come you think you have to talk to say something?” He pulled off his mittens and toasted his hands over the fire.

“You've got frostnip.”

“What's that?”

“Frostbite, before it happens.”

Trixie tried to remember what she knew about frostbite. Didn't the affected body part turn black and fall off? “Where?” she panicked.

“Between your eyes. On your cheek.”

Her face was going to fall off?

Willie gestured, almost delicately, in a way that let her know he wanted to move closer to her, to place his hand on her. It was at that moment that Trixie realized she was in the company of a boy who was stronger than she was, in the middle of nowhere, a good twentyfive miles away from anyone who'd hear her scream. She leaned away from him, shaking her head, as her throat closed like a rose after dark.

His fingers caught her at the wrist, and Trixie's heart started hammering harder. She closed her eyes, expecting the worst, thinking that maybe if you'd lived a nightmare once it wasn't quite as bad the second time around.

Willie's palm, hot as a stone in the sun, pressed against her cheek. She felt his other hand touch her forehead, then sweep down the side of her face to cup her jaw.

She could feel calluses on his skin, and she wondered where they'd come from. Trixie opened her eyes and, for the first time since she'd met him, found Willie Moses looking right at her.

* * *

Skipper Johanssen, the mitochondrial DNA expert, was a woman. Bartholemew watched her pour sugar into her coffee and look over the notes on the case that he'd brought. “Unusual name,” he said.

“Mom had a Barbie thing going on.”

She was beautifuclass="underline" straight platinum hair that swept the middle of her back, green eyes hidden behind her thick-framed black glasses. When she read, sometimes her mouth formed the words.

“What do you know about mitochondrial DNA?” she asked.

“That you can hopefully use it to compare two hairs?”

“Well, yeah, you can. The real question is what you want to do with that comparison.” Skipper leaned back in her chair. “Thanks to C.S.I., everyone's heard about DNA analysis. Most of the time they're talking about nuclear DNA, the kind that comes, in equal halves, from your mother and your father. But there's another kind of DNA that's the up-and-comer in the forensic community mitochondrial DNA. And even though you may not know a lot about it, you - and the rest of the world - know the largest case in history where it was used: 9/11.”

The Tenth Circle

“To identify the remains?”

“Exactly,” Skipper said. “Traditional efforts didn't work . . . they couldn't find intact teeth, or bones that weren't crushed, or even anything to X-ray. But mtDNA can be used to profile samples that have been burned, pulverized, you name it. All scientists need is a saliva sample from a family member of the deceased in order to make a comparison.”

She picked up the hair sample that Max had scrutinized under a microscope the previous day. "The reason we can test this for DNA without a root attached is that a cell isn't made up of just a nucleus. There are many more parts - including the mitochondria, which are

basically the powerhouses that keep the cell functional. There are hundreds of mitochondria in a cell, as compared to a single nucleus. And each mitochondrion contains several copies of the mtDNA we're interested in."