“What is that?” Connor shouted. “What’s that sound?”
It fell around the mountains like a trapped ancient chant, something stumbled upon in a place where humans did not belong. They had hit some invisible trip wire and now the wilderness was being called to respond to the intruders, the high hum a siren announcing their presence on the peaks.
“The corona effect,” Hannah said. She spoke slowly, and though she knew she should be in a rush, a panic even, that felt beyond her now. She was aware that the choices had already been made, and the avenues of escape already ignored.
“What is it? What does it mean?” Connor was almost screaming.
“It’s electricity,” she said. “There’s a lot of it in the air.”
But it meant more than that. It meant there was already a ground charge. It meant one of those lightning bolts had met the mountain. They were connected now, earth to sky, and Hannah and Connor between. They were almost to the rim of the glacier that lay between the peaks. Far below them the crimson and scarlet ribbons of the fire still glowed, but that wasn’t the light that concerned her anymore. There was suddenly a blue luminescence to the rocks all around them. The white of the glacier looked like glass over a Tahitian sea.
Saint Elmo’s fire. The eerie light that had haunted sailors for centuries, scaling the masts of tall ships in empty oceans. Now, far inland, it crackled on the high rocks to their left, sparked upward in a cobalt cloud that climbed and then was snuffed out in blackness, overeager in its attempt to claim the sky.
And all around them, that possessed hum. Not a static sound but dynamic, the pitch rising and falling, though the air was flat and still. Lightning flashed and vanished and flashed again and the mountain quaked from thunder. She felt a tingle then, not the kind born of panic but the kind that should create it. When she looked at Connor, she could see that the hair on the back of his neck was standing straight up, the arched fur of a defensive cat.
“Run,” she said.
But he couldn’t run. They were too high and it was too steep and all he could do was take three unsteady steps before his feet caught and sent him stumbling to his knees. The blue world boomed with thunder and then bloomed with an aggressive flash of white before fading back to blue. Hannah hadn’t moved, hadn’t taken a single step, and below her, Connor was still trying, crawling on his hands and knees now, to get back down the mountain.
She thought of the boy who’d boiled in the river trying to reach her.
Connor tried to push himself up. Braced his weight on his hiking sticks, and she fixed on them: an aluminum pole in each hand. A lightning rod in each hand.
“Connor!” she shouted, and now she was moving, finally untethered from the fog, stumbling and slipping after him. “Drop the poles! Drop the poles!”
He turned back and looked at her and then registered the instruction and shook his hands free of the wrist straps. The poles bounced down the mountain. She took a step from one rock to the next, heading toward him.
Then she was on her back.
She stared at the night sky and realized her boots were in the way of the sky. Why was she looking at her boots? Why was she upside down? She was upside down on the mountain and somehow Connor was above her when before he’d been below. He was also down. The high hum was back-had it ever been gone?-and her body ached.
You got hit, she thought in wonder. You got struck.
She tried to move, expecting that she wouldn’t be able to, but her body responded, and she saw that Connor was moving as well. They hadn’t been hit. The mountain had been hit, again, and it had absorbed the strike for them, again. It might not continue to.
She crawled toward Connor and stretched out her hand. “Come on.” When his hand met hers, the touch carried a static jolt. She tugged him toward her and they began descending the slope together, and then the crawling turned to falling and they slid down, jarring pains and jolts as they gave in to the gravity they’d fought the whole way up here. She knew that they didn’t have long to fall-one of the drainages awaited, and she was braced for the impact when they hit it.
The landing was less painful than the trip down. They smashed into a crevice of rock, and Connor took most of the impact for her. They were wedged in the rocks now some forty feet below the peaks. Connor tried to struggle upright but she held him down.
“Stay low,” she said. “Stop moving and stay low.”
They huddled there in the rocks together and above them the world boomed and bloomed, boomed and bloomed.
No rain fell.
It wasn’t a salvation storm. It was a flint-and-steel storm. Down below, the fire crews were watching it and waiting for rain, although they probably realized by now that it would not come. All that wind carried was dry lightning, the worst kind for a red-flag day. There would likely be new flare-ups now, with all these strikes around them. It was what could happen when you put your faith in a cloud.
She held on to Connor and pressed them both into the rocks and watched the electric storm pass and felt true hatred. She’d trusted in it and it had turned on her and become an enemy. She’d met enough enemies along the way. They chased behind and loomed ahead, and she did not need them to fall out of the sky above as well.
“We got hit,” Connor said. He’d been silent for some time, watching. The worst of the storm was moving on, it seemed, though Hannah knew you couldn’t count on that, not when the skies could throw something deadly at you that was an inch wide and five miles long.
“No, we didn’t. The mountain got hit.”
“But I felt it.”
“I know. I did too. You okay?”
“I can move. You?”
“I can move.”
She looked at him in the darkness and then looked at the scarlet snakes of fires below. There was a hotshot crew down there. They might have reached them before daylight if she’d just committed to it. Instead, she’d stayed high to avoid the fire and nearly killed them both.
“If we can both move,” she said, “we should. It’s time to get you out of here, Connor.”
“We’re going down here?”
“Yeah.”
“The drainages are tough walking,” he said, but he didn’t continue arguing for once, even though it was true.
“I know they are. But we’ve done some tough walking to get here. I know you can make it. You do too, right?” When he didn’t answer she said, “Connor?”
“I can keep going. We’ll be walking straight down into the fire, though.”
“Yes.”
“To find the firefighters?”
“To find the firefighters. They’ll get us out fast.”
She pushed herself up on the heels of her hands and considered the long, winding drainage ahead of them. It was the worst kind of climbing, steep and filled with windfall. But it led straight down too. It was the sort of path you could follow even in the darkness.
“We’ll have to get close to it.”
“Yes.”
“I can smell it so strong from here. Is it even safe? Is it safe to get that close?”
A crimson tree flowered in the darkness and then faded. Spot fires flaring in the burned-out area, trailing the main blaze, as if they’d been separated from the herd and were starving fast because they could not share in the meals.
“There’s a risk to everything,” Hannah said. “I know something about what’s in that direction. The men behind you, I don’t know anything about.”
“I do.”
“There you go. And you think they’ll kill us.”
“They will kill me. I don’t know about you.”
“There’s no you or me anymore, Connor. Not at this point. Just us. It would seem like the best chance for us is to walk toward that fire.”
He might have nodded. In the darkness she wasn’t sure. He didn’t speak, though.
“We’ll make it, Connor,” she said. “Listen to me: I promise you, we’re going to make it down there, and you’re going to get out of this place and never see it again. Not unless you want to. You ready to get out of these mountains?”