Chapter 1
Two nights later…
Katie
I was brushing my teeth when I heard it.
A thud. Muffled, like something heavy hitting drywall. Then a scraping sound that traveled the length of the shared wall between my apartment and Mark’s.
Pulling the toothbrush from my mouth, I stood motionless, minty foam gathering at the corners of my lips.
The bathroom was small enough that the wall was within arm’s reach, and I pressed my palm flat against it.
The plaster felt cool. Normal. But there it was again, a low, dragging rasp, as if someone were running their fingernails from floor to ceiling on the other side.
I spat into the sink, wiped my mouth, and padded barefoot to my front door.
The hallway of our apartment building was the kind of place that tried hard to look charming and mostly succeeded during daylight hours.
It had clay-colored walls, wrought iron sconces, and saltillo tile, but at eleven p.m. with half the bulbs burned out it just looked like a tunnel.
I knocked on Mark’s door.
Silence.
I knocked again, harder. “Mark? You okay in there?”
Footsteps approached, slow and measured, nothing like Mark’s usual loping shuffle. The deadbolt turned, and the door opened.
Mark stood in the gap, one hand on the frame. He was dressed, which was unusual for this hour. Jeans and a flannel shirt buttoned all the way to the collar.
I’d never seen him button a shirt past the third button in the four years I’d known him.
His Lobos cap was gone and his sandy hair lay flat against his skull as though it had been smoothed down with water. Or with a hand that wasn’t his.
“Hey.” His mouth formed the word correctly, but his eyes didn’t participate.
“Hey. I heard a noise through the wall. Sounded like something fell?”
“Nothing fell.”
I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t.
He just stood there in his buttoned-to-the-throat flannel, looking like some sort of store-brand Mark that came in a bag instead of a box.
Everything was where it should be, the crooked nose from a bouldering fall in Cochiti, the faint sunburn across his cheekbones, the scar bisecting his left eyebrow, but the overall product felt off.
“You sure you’re alright?”
“I’m fine, Katie.”
He never called me Katie. It was always K, or dude, or bro.
“Okay.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Well. If you need anything…”
“I don’t need anything. Good night.”
The door closed. Not slammed, just pressed shut with a soft, definitive click. I heard the deadbolt turn.
I stood in the hallway for a while, staring at the closed door.
The sconces buzzed, and a cockroach traced a confident path along the baseboard before vanishing beneath the stairwell door.
There was a faint smell I couldn’t place.
It was acrid, like charred sage mixed with something chemical and sour, and for a disorienting moment my upper lip pulled back from my teeth in a way that felt involuntary.
That was super strange.
But this was Albuquerque, so it was probably some hippie-but-for-bros-who-go-rock-climbing-and-shop-at-REI incense shit Mark was trying out. I did my best to shake it off and went back to my place.
In bed at last, I lay on my back and listened to the wall and heard nothing, which was somehow worse than the earlier scraping.
Mark’s TV was off. There were no footsteps, no sounds of running water, nothing.
The apartment next door had gone silent in a way that felt less like a person sleeping and more like an empty room pretending to be occupied.
He’s fine. He said he’s fine. People have weird nights.
I rolled onto my stomach and pressed my face into the pillow and breathed until my heartbeat slowed. Sometime well after midnight I fell asleep.
* * *
The knock came at six forty-five.
I was already half-awake, hovering in that gray zone between sleep and alarm clock where my brain rehearses every anxiety it couldn’t get to during the previous day. My Property Law exam, for example. And the way Mark had looked last night.
Like a stringless puppet. Or a newly sentient chatbot figuring out how humans are operated.
I wrapped myself in my robe and shuffled to the front door, checking the peephole out of habit. Mark was standing in the hallway with his hands in his jacket pockets, staring straight at the peephole as though he could see me through it.
I opened the door. “Hey. Little early for a Saturday.”
“Let’s go hiking.”
No morning, K or dude, you won’t believe what happened or any of the other verbal runway Mark usually required before making a point. Just three words, delivered with the cadence of someone reading from a card.
“We just went hiking. Like three days ago.”
“Different trail. Jemez area. West of town. There’s a route I want to try.”
I leaned against the doorframe and studied him. He was wearing the same flannel, still buttoned to the throat. He had the same flattened hair. His eyes tracked my face without blinking, and I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Mark go this long without blinking.
“The Jemez? That’s like an hour and a half drive.”
“An hour forty. I already looked it up.”
“Mark, are you—”
“I’d really like you to come.”
Something in the way he said it stopped me. He sounded like a man reciting a line he’d been given, and yet beneath the recitation there was an urgency that felt almost desperate.
He’s going through something. Maybe a bad breakup? He hasn’t mentioned that Stacy girl in a while. Or maybe his parents called again.
Mark’s relationship with his family was a subject he deflected with humor and beer, and I’d always respected that boundary because I had my own version of it. Orphans and the emotionally neglected recognized each other, even when neither felt like talking about it.
“Yeah, okay.” I ran a hand through my tangled hair. “Give me twenty minutes.”
“Fifteen.”
I blinked.
Mark grinned. Or at least his mouth did. The expression arrived on his face a beat too late and departed a beat too soon, like someone who’d studied how grins work in a textbook.
“Fifteen, then. Bossy.” I closed the door, dressed quickly in leggings, trail runners, and a long-sleeve base layer, then grabbed a Nalgene and a granola bar.
I almost left my phone charging on the nightstand but shoved both it and my wallet into my pocket at the last second, driven by some impulse I didn’t examine too closely.
Mark was waiting in the hallway, standing in the exact spot I’d left him as though he hadn’t shifted his weight once in the intervening fourteen minutes. He led the way down the stairs without a word. His truck was already running in the lot, exhaust curling white in the early morning cold.
We drove west, then cut through La Bajada and picked up Highway 4 toward the Jemez. Mark, who normally drove with one knee with music blaring while gesticulating about whatever climber drama was consuming the local gym that week, kept both hands on the wheel at ten and two and the radio off.
Then it hit me.
That same acrid, charred-sage scent I’d caught in the hallway the night before.
My nose had always been sharp. Sharper than anyone else’s I’d ever met, actually, to the point where I’d learned not to mention it because people looked at me funny when I told them I could smell rain coming from forty miles out or identify which of my friends had been in a room based on the scent they’d left behind.
But the odor clinging to the inside of Mark’s truck wasn’t anything I’d smelled before.
It was organic and mineral at the same time, like something earthy mixed with rotten eggs…
Or sulfur.
“So which trail are we doing?” I asked, more to break the silence than anything.
“There’s a spur off the East Fork. Not on the trail maps.”
“How do you know about it then? A hiking forum or something?”
“I found it last week.”
I hadn’t known Mark to hike alone. He was a social creature, the friend who organized group trips and complained about how boring solo outings were. The idea of him out here alone, finding unmapped trails in the Jemez backcountry, sat wrong.
Everything about this morning sat wrong.
We left the highway and bounced along a forest road for twenty minutes before Mark pulled over at a wide spot where the shoulder met a wall of mixed conifer.
There was no trailhead marker. No sign, no other cars, just a gap in the trees that might have been a game trail or might have been nothing at all.
I climbed out of the truck and stretched, the cold mountain air filling my lungs.
We were high here, eight, maybe eight and a half thousand feet.
Ponderosa and Douglas fir gave way to spruce further up the slope, and beyond the spruce the mountains climbed toward rocky ridges still holding patches of early snow.
I could hear a creek running somewhere nearby.
“Mark, where exactly are we going?”
He was already walking toward the gap in the trees. “It’s about four miles in. Maybe five. There’s a canyon.”
“You didn’t mention a five-mile approach.”
“Didn’t I?”
“No.”
He stopped and turned, looking at me with those unblinking eyes. “You’ll like it. Trust me.”
Trust me. Two words Mark had never once said to me, because he’d never needed to.
Trust between us had always been ambient, built over four years of belaying each other on sketchy trad routes and sharing hangovers and borrowing each other’s laundry detergent.
The fact that he had to ask for it now was maybe the most unsettling thing that had happened all morning.
But I followed him. Because he was Mark, and something was clearly wrong with Mark, and I was constitutionally incapable of abandoning someone who needed help even when the help in question was dragging me into a trailless section of the Jemez Mountains on a cold Saturday morning for reasons that made no sense.