Wolves howled out of that rising darkness, accompanied by yipping echoes, welcoming the coming sunset. It seemed the Wolf Fang had not earned its name from its shape alone, but also from what haunted its slopes.
Beyond the forest stretched the highland meadow they had crossed earlier. It seemed impossibly far below.
Hard to believe we gained this much elevation.
Jada thought she spotted movement down there, along the edge of a patch of dark woods, but as she strained to see what it was, it vanished.
Shadows playing tricks . . .
Duncan still had his ear cocked to the chorus of the neighboring woods. “The wolves. Will they attack people?”
“Not unless provoked,” Sanjar said. “And seldom when faced by numbers such as ours. But it is the start of winter, and they are beginning to grow hungry.”
Duncan plainly did not like that answer. “Then let’s keep going before we lose any more light.”
“Why?” Sanjar pointed ahead. “We’re already here.”
Jada swung in her saddle to return her attention forward, to this last island of daylight in the sea of night. They had reached a wide plateau, a giant’s step in the side of the mountain. The snow line began another thirty or forty yards upslope, but she saw no lake.
“Where is it?” Duncan asked.
“Around that tumble of boulders to the west,” Sanjar explained and trotted his horse in that direction, dragging them all with him.
They circled past the old rockslide. It was a narrow squeeze between the pile of boulders and the edge of a steep cliff. Jada eyed the precarious stacking. It looked like an avalanche that had frozen in place, but more likely it had been there for centuries.
Clearing the rockfall, they saw the plateau spread even wider on the far side. It dropped off to sheer cliffs to the left and rose into a snowy slope to the right. Filling most of the remainder of the space was a two-acre lake, a midnight blue to match the darkening skies, reflecting the few clouds. Its shoreline ran right up to the edge of the ice, suggesting the lake was fed by snowmelt, likely swelling in the spring to pour over that ledge into a glistening waterfall.
Monk drew alongside her. “If something crashed here, it sure doesn’t look like it now.”
He was right. It looked pristine, untouched.
Khaidu had ridden ahead to the lake’s edge. She slid smoothly out of her saddle and walked her overheated horse to the water. Her mount dipped its nose as if to slake its thirst, but then tossed its head back and trotted back several steps. Khaidu steadied the mare with a firm hand on the lead, keeping it from retreating straight over the cliff.
With a furrowed brow, Sanjar hopped down and handed Khaidu the reins of his own horse. He crossed to the shore and dipped his hand in the lake. He turned and gave them a wide-eyed look.
“It’s warm . . .”
Jada remembered the story from the eyewitness, the one who saw a fireball crash here. He had said it set the lake to boiling. It certainly wasn’t now, but Jada pictured the overheated metal slowly cooling in its depths. The lake must not have had time to fully cool back down yet.
“It’s in there,” Duncan said, clearly coming to the same conclusion.
“But how can we be sure?” Jada asked.
Monk jumped off his horse and helped her down. “Looks like someone’s going to have to dive in there and take a look.”
5:12 P.M.
Duncan stood in his boxers at the edge of the lake. He shivered in the icy breeze sweeping down from the mountaintop. Having grown up mostly in the southern half of the United States, he was not a fan of cold weather.
His family had moved almost yearly, across a swath of states: Georgia, North Carolina, Mississippi, Florida. Regularly switching jobs, his father shed his skin like a snake, mostly leaving his two sons to fend for themselves. It was why Duncan and his younger brother had grown so close. After Billy died, with their mother already long out of the picture, Duncan and his father had found themselves with nothing to hold their tiny family together. Unfettered, they spun coldly out of each other’s orbit. Estranged for years now, he didn’t even know where his father lived.
“Can you hurry up?” Duncan asked, not wanting to dwell on that past.
Jada knelt by an open laptop. “I just need an extra moment to finish setting up the feed.”
Besides his boxers, Duncan also wore a headband equipped with a waterproof camera, radio, and LED light. A trailing length of antenna wire attached to a float would wirelessly transmit video back to the laptop.
“Can you hear me?” she asked.
He adjusted the radio earpiece. “Loud and clear.”
Jada knew more about the satellite than anyone. She would follow his progress topside and communicate to him in an effort to guide his salvage operation.
“Then we’re all set here,” Jada said.
Monk stood beside Duncan. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
“I think it’s too late for that.”
Duncan waded into the shallows, finding the water warm, welcomingly so. He leaped outward into a shallow dive. After the cold wind above, the water felt downright balmy. In the past, he had done some diving in Belize, where the sea was like bathwater. This was even warmer.
He set off, swimming with long strokes across the surface, kicking hard. With a lake this large, it could take hours to explore fully, going grid by grid. Duncan decided to narrow his search by playing a kid’s game of hot and cold.
Or in this case, warm and warmer.
If the crashed satellite was down there, the waters closest to it were likely to be the hottest. So as he swam, he turned away whenever the water grew cooler and explored the warmest patches by diving deep, sweeping his light along the lake’s rocky bottom. He spotted some plump trout, someone’s lost boot, and lots of sweeping moss.
Reaching a particularly hot spot in the lake, he took a big breath and dove, kicking his legs high to drive him deep. After he had gone down three meters, with his ears complaining of the water pressure, he spotted a flash below, something reflecting his light.
“Turn more left,” Jada directed him in his ear, excitement in her voice.
Following her order, he twisted and kicked himself farther in that direction. The beam lit the waters around him and speared deep to the bottom.
And there it was, resting in a crater of blasted river rock, surrounded by a halo of slag metal and charred debris.
The Eye of God.
It was in utter ruin.
5:34 P.M.
Jada felt like crying.
“There’s nothing left,” she mumbled to herself and to the others.