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Cody. This couldn’t be happening to him. Two hours ago, he was sneaking across the SkyTop airfield, looking forward to a night of heavy metal nirvana, and now, here he was in the middle of absolute nowhere, waiting to look at a dead friend. A part of Scott told him that he should be feeling some remorse for all this, some sadness for Cody’s death, and maybe that would come, but for the time being, he was just pissed. This was supposed to be a concert night, dammit, not a plane crash night. And when it was all over, he was supposed to be asleep in a warm bed, and maybe a little hung-over in the morning. Now, when it was all over…
    Actually, he didn’t want to think about that.
    He reached the body before he reached the airplane. What he saw made him gasp and turn away. Apparently, the fall through the trees had yanked the spear out of Cody’s body, because now it was gone. Where it once protruded through his parka, Scott could now see a lump of entrails about the size of his fist. Cody just lay there in the snow, steaming and staining the whiteness red.
    “Oh, my God,” he breathed.
    Until that very instant, none of it was real. Oh, the fear was real, and the cold was real and the pain was real, but not the death. Cody’s mouth gaped, and his eyes stared straight into the void. Snowflakes were already accumulating on his eyeballs. In another twenty minutes, they’d be invisible. In two hours, the body would be completely concealed.
    In a few more hours after that, if the storm continued at this pace, the entire crash site would be covered. According to his watch, they were closing in on 9:30, and the temperature seemed to be dropping as fast as the snowflakes. Scott felt his heart rate triple as he realized that of the two of them, Cody Jamieson may well have been the lucky one. Better to die quickly than to suffer the slow death of hypothermia.
    Scott recalled the mountain survival class he’d attended last year with his dad, and the words of the instructor, Sven What’s-his-name, rang clear in his head. Everybody worries about starvation in the wilderness. But in the winter wilderness, your number one priority must be shelter. Food and water are luxuries to be secured later. At night, when the temperatures hover at zero or below, death can come in hours.
    Scott remembered thinking that the class was lame—he’d gone because of the free skiing in the afternoons—but he’d taken notes anyway because there would be a test at the end, and Scott always took notes for tests. Once he’d written something down, it was burned into his brain forever. Mr. Forbes, his guidance counselor, told him that his recall was as close to a photographic memory as he’d ever seen.
    Pulling himself away from Cody Jamieson’s remains, Scott tried to organize his thoughts. It was time to listen to Sven.
    Problem was, when Scott and his dad had built their shelters in class, they’d worked in daylight on a sunny afternoon with shovels and two-person teams. Here, he faced the prospect of working alone at night in the swirling snow without tools. Just how in the hell was he supposed to do that?
     
    “S O, YOU DON’T ACTUALLY KNOW that they crashed,” Brandon summarized, grasping for anything that looked like hope. They sat in the living room, in front of the dark fireplace, Brandon in the middle of one sofa, his visitors on the sofa facing him.
    Officer Hoptman’s sigh betrayed frustration. “Mr. O’Toole, sir, I don’t know anything firsthand. All I know is what we heard from the Utah State Police. Apparently, your son and a friend took off from the ski resort to attend a concert, and they never arrived.”
    “And what was the friend’s name again?”
    Hoptman paged backward in his notes. “Jamieson. Cody Jamieson. I’m sorry that I don’t have more solid details, but this is coming to me twice filtered. Your wife filed the initial missing person’s report—”
    “My ex-wife,” Brandon corrected.
    “Okay, your