Whitelodge 2.1 & 2.2

-2.1-

Sheryl took a step back, hit with a sudden sense of vertigo. The moon had been rising a few moments ago, and now had sunk below the horizon again, so the first thing her mind interpreted this to mean was that the entire landscape was tipping backward. Her hand instinctively reached out and grabbed the patio door handle. It was the only thing that kept her from falling back onto the thin but ornate rug that covered the wooden floor.

She kept looking up at where the moon had been, irrationally thinking that if she kept watching, the world would right itself. Things that made no sense had a responsibility to correct themselves, didn’t they? But it wasn’t happening. And the next thing her mind told her was that the whole top of the mountain above her was starting to turn over, preparing to throw its entire bulk down on the puny matchstick lodge below, and that she and Kerren were about to be crushed. No fanfare, no explanations, just this one, final, brutal event. And darkness.

Through the hand that rested on the cold metal of the door handle, she started to feel a vibration, starting slowly, but building with frightening speed. It was not rhythmic, but instead was the physical equivalent of static. She yanked her hand away. She didn’t want to feel it, that manifestation of chaotic motion. It felt utterly wrong. She turned back to the room, which looked blessedly stable in spite of the weird, churning motion of the world outside, and dashed over to the bed. She hopped up on it, because she had opted for the side closest to the window. Kerren was always doing that these days, she thought obliquely, ceding the more preferable option to Sheryl in every instance. Which side of the best, what restaurant do you feel like tonight, you pick the movie... Did Kerren realize she was doing that, or was it some innate sense of penance that she was still paying?

Kerren was surprisingly hard to wake, snuffling and snorting before realizing that Sheryl was shaking her bare shoulder. “Hmm? Hmm?” she kept asking, her brow furrowing, as if wanting an explanation before she decided if she was going to open her eyes or not.

“Kerren!” Sheryl whispered harshly. “Something’s happening! Wake up!”

Kerren’s eyebrows raised, although her eyes still didn’t open. “Whass?” she slurred. Then, surprisingly clearly: "She's here?"

Sheryl had no idea what she was talking about. “I don’t know, but you’ve got to wake up!” Sheryl hissed.

Instead of jerking awake, Kerren curved her back and stretched like a cat, as if she had all the time in the world. Sheryl knew there was no point in trying to impress upon her wife the urgency of the situation; at any other time she would have enjoyed looking at this feline stretch as Kerren rose up out of sleep. But there was madness going on just outside their window, and Sheryl needed to not be the only one seeing it.

“Okay,” Kerren said, smacking her dry lips a little, her eyes opening and coming into focus, “what is it that’s so--?”

Sheryl actually saw Kerren’s eyes widen as the shadow fell across them. Even though the moon had been eclipsed, there had still been some light coming in, ambience from the blanket of snow that lay over everything. But now even that was being sucked away, and Sheryl’s back was turned to whatever was causing it. Then there was a horrific locomotive sound, a crashing, and the bed skewed a few feet sideways, almost tossing her off.

Kerren, closer to the edge, was thrown off ahead of it, awkwardly twisting up in the sheet because Sheryl’s weight was still holding her part of it down. Sheryl couldn't hear Kerren thud against the floor an instant after she dropped out of sight over the edge, for all sound was drowned out by that awful static, which now was exploding the very air around her. She had seen footage of houses in earthquakes, and was familiar with how furniture would rush back and forth during them, first one way, then the other as the seismic waves passed. This wasn’t like that. This was just one-way pressure, a long, relentless push away from the window. Away from the mountain.

The darkness in the room had become almost total, and Sheryl couldn’t even pinpoint where the remaining feeble illumination was coming from. It wasn’t until she turned her head and fell over that she realized that what she could still see of their room was only an afterimage, a retinal imprint of the last instant there had been light. It remained in front of her, just as it had been, while her body went sprawling toward the edge of the bed. She managed to grab onto the sheet and keep herself from following Sheryl past the edge.

That pressure was still in the air, and she could feel the entire room continuing to shift in fits and starts, as if threatening to be blown away by whatever was bearing down on them. She could hear wooden beams in the walls, big ones, cracking, pausing, and cracking again as torque was piled on torque. It had to end soon, it just had to. Whatever this force was, as strong as it was, it couldn’t continue. But it kept going. She felt the bed sliding across the floor even further, even though it was meeting with some sort of resistance as it did.

The strangest part of the whole experience was the sheer immediacy of it. There was room for nothing in Sheryl’s mind save for the torrents of sensory input that were threatening to crush her mind. She had forgotten about Kerren almost as soon as her wife had disappeared from view, never mind that the heavy wooden bed was now sliding over the area she had fallen into. Even when Sheryl realized that they were being pushed toward the narrow hallway that led past the room’s bathroom and toward the door into the hall, she couldn’t project far enough into the future to think that she should brace herself for when the bed jammed itself diagonally against it.

So when the bulk of the bed hit the corner of that hallway, cracking both its own frame and the wall's wood beams at the corner in equal measure, Sheryl was thrown forward, and it was only because she had been on the far end of the bed that she wasn't thrown past the edge just as Kerren had been. Instead, she was thrown roughly down onto the covers, bounced slightly, and came to rest. The oncoming rush of pressure and static continued for a few seconds more, and then stopped.

For just a moment, she sighed, relieved. It was over, and she was still alive. There was no future, and the past was done. She survived, and that was all that mattered. At least, until she recognized that something was hurting her ears. She had been sensing it for several seconds, but it took reorienting herself mentally before she could parse what the sound actually was. And when she did, cognitive thought snapped back into the front of her mind, superseding the reptilian survival mode she had been in. Determining its source, her mind suddenly filled with a nuanced list of everything she still had to fear, and everything had to do next.

Because Kerren was screaming from somewhere under the broken bed.

-2.2-

Bruce, ice bucket under his arm, stumbled out into the hallway. The way he lurched around was an amazing simulation of being drunk, which he had been on the verge of anyway. All that was missing was the righteous rage that his blurred mind always had for the world around him, fully knowing that he was impaired, but frustrated that the laws of nature wouldn’t respectfully conspire to keep him solidly upright. It felt even more like an abyss was opening beneath his feet than usual, because he *knew* this time was different. The world was going wrong, and he was still sober enough to know it.

He watched as the upright rectangle of the receding hallway turned, at first imperceptibly and then more and more pronouncedly, into a parallelogram. It was remarkably similar to slipping into a dream, which was something he had been paying a lot of attention to lately, in his fruitless pursuit of Theda. As a child, he had always marveled at how the mind, no matter how alert, couldn’t determine or recall the instant that it crossed from the waking state into slumber. He had even tried experiments, playing random spoken words in his headphones, and then the next morning trying to pinpoint exactly where he stopped recalling hearing it, but he could never really find the moment it occurred. He ended up positing that waking and sleeping were parts of a continuum, and that had made it easier for him to learn how to access the places he needed to in order to meet his dream-muse.

He was feeling a similar sense of dislocation right now. There was a deep rumbling under his feet that seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, as he watched the beams and walls start to skew out of true. Had it finally happened? he wondered. Were his waking and dreaming lives merging into one? He could vividly picture the entire lodge twisting and turning itself into a new shape, like a puzzle box, as his consciousnesses appeared to collide with each other.

The lights went out, as if refusing to show him what was happening next, or offer any kind of resolution.

Fueled by pure creative desire, his mind's eye saw his Sounding Stones bursting up through the floor and walls, their pressure wrecking the mortal structure around him. They had finally come to him, he thought, which surely meant she would follow, apologizing for abandoning him, saying that she would do anything to make it up to him. She would give up the secret to the source of all the ideas she had been feeding him for the last few years, and he would spend the next months in a manic state, astounding everyone around him with his new explosion of productivity...

Somehow, he had ended up on the floor, bits of ice from the bucket spilled across him, starting to melt through his shirt. Boards in the dark walls were splitting and popping, sending chips of wood raining down on him, but there were no stones. Just more wood underneath, wreckage upon wreckage. Pieces of it were scratching and cutting him as they flew, and he began to wonder if this were really happening after all.

He thought that maybe he should just let go. Let the darkness claim him. If he had lost Theda, lost her forever, then what was the point of continuing the search? The Stones weren't her power, after all. If the last few dreams had proved anything, it was that the Stones -- an extension of himself, he suspected -- were just a cheap background for her. Just as he, Bruce, meant nothing without her, they meant nothing in and of themselves.

There was still a little light remaining, though... He could see it far ahead as his eyes adjusted. It made little sense because of the new shape the hallway had bent itself into, but there was definitely illumination there. His mental map of the building told him that it was most likely coming from the lobby, around a corner and down the hall. And from somewhere between him and that light, he could hear a woman screaming. It was close but muffled, somewhere on the other side of a wall.

Recognition flooded his system with chill. It was Theda. He knew it must be, because he had heard her scream before. In his most recent dream -- the last time he had seen her -- he had known something was wrong even before his dream-eyes had fallen across the scene. The Sounding Stones had been gray against the sky, the colors usually glowing in their depths muted with the flat gray light of the clouds that were billowing up from all sides, converging on where he stood inside the ring.

She had come out from behind one of them, her eyes wild like a roped horse, trying to look up and around in all directions at once. He reached out for her, tried to hold her arm, or at least touch the gauzy robes that floated around her like a tattered shroud. But, as always, he was not allowed to touch her. No matter where he reached, she was always just beyond his fingertips.

"What is it?" he had asked her. "What's going on?"

She didn't take her eyes off the swirling, boiling sky, but addressed him. "I don't know," she had said. "It's never been like this. It must be--" As she spoke, her gaze had finally swiveled down to him, and when she did, a look had crossed her face that he had never seen before. The way she looked at him had always, up until this moment, given him a feeling of confidence, and for just a few fleeting moments would make him feel like the kind of man who deserved the gifts she was presenting to him. This look, though, had been entirely different.

She was looking at something above and behind him, and her eyes were so wide, the stormlight so pervasive in this shadowy world, that he thought he could see in them something looming behind him, something pointed and sharp among this landscape of gentle, natural curves. He spun around to catch a glimpse of it, but could see nothing behind him but more storm clouds, rushing down toward them, their speed unnervingly rapid.

When he turned back to her, his mouth opening to ask her what she saw, he found her to be looking directly at him. The same fear was in her expression, and when he had opened his mouth to ask her what she had seen and where it had gone, she screamed. The very same scream he was hearing now. Then she turned and soared off into the forest that ringed the circle of Sounding Stones, shrieking in terror all the way. He had seen his arm extending, reaching after her, but he was just as unable to catch her as always.

And now, months later, he was hearing her again, in the real world for the first time. She was somewhere ahead of him, behind a canted, splitting wall, and in dire need of help. The sound of her screams pierced his skull just as he knew the massive splinters surrounding him could have, had he fallen down in a slightly different place. The fact that he hadn't was all the sign he needed that he was supposed to find her, to crawl through the wreckage of both worlds if necessary, and save her.

He swung the ice bucket from side to side in front of him, making sure the path was free of large debris, and began to find safe places toward which to pull himself.

Whitelodge 1.5

The trouble started in his pins, three hours ago. He could always tell an upcoming event’s degree of severity depending on how badly they ached. When it was as mild as a nearby argument, it was more like an insinuation than a real, tactile sensation. If particularly bad wind shear was about to bear down on the lodge, Harmon might actually feel the pins in his spine gently jangling his bones like windchimes, loud enough to make him start to wonder if anyone else could hear them. This time, though… this time his backbone was actually wobbling, as if his head were one of those plates spinning on the top of a long stick, like he had seen on the Ed Sullivan Show as a boy.

He had received the pins -- pure titanium, or so the doctors had told him -- courtesy of Murphy General, fifteen years ago, after Harmon had clipped the particularly springy edge of one tree's bough and skidded sidelong into another’s trunk. That had been in his off-trail days, and had been the event that ended them, even though he still liked to careen down the more informal of the paths, back away from the tourist slopes. When he did, he could at least momentarily convince himself that he was still young, blazing trails and nailing tails, as his cruder friends used to say. Well, there hadn't been much opportunity for the latter in a long time, but he could at least pretend to still do the first part. At the moment, however, he was just trying to keep his head from vibrating off his shoulders as he bent to make sure his skis were firmly attached to his boots.

He felt bad about not warning Dale, and knew the regret would grow sharper later on. The big guy had always done right by him, had understood and respected Harmon’s established relationship with the manager. But what, exactly, would Harmon have said by way of explanation? That the pins in his spine told him that something bad – gigantically, unfathomably bad – was coming? And that he had no idea exactly what it was? No, Dale would have followed protocol, because that was what it was valuable to have Dale around for, and the security head could have done nothing until he knew precisely the nature of the threat, what procedure to follow. So Harmon had decided that the only person he could save was himself.

People could call it cowardly and selfish if that suited them, but those two gals he tried to talk to in the restaurant had clinched it. That pale-skinned one, the one that didn't get immediately belligerent with him, reminded him so much of of Sara that he couldn't help it. It wasn't just the shape of her face, it was something in her eyes; he'd noticed it as they sat across the bar from him earlier in the evening. It was like looking at an old picture, but one that was moving, and talking, and laughing. He couldn't help but try to tell her, and yet she had turned him away.

It was the story of his life now. He was too old to be useful, in the eyes of everyone around him. He wasn’t able to trick himself into thinking that anyone he talked to in the bar thought he was more than just an addled old pro trying to hang onto his last scraps of glory and youth.

In his spare time at the lodge, Harmon liked to read vampire novels. It wasn’t because of the nubile virgins succumbing to the ancient man who came to them in the middle of the night, although he knew that’s what everyone who caught him with one would think. No, Harmon consumed the stories compulsively for something else entirely, the singular idea hidden behind the words that made the vampire the saddest monster there was. They were immortal, timeless, just as Harmon secretly felt he was too.

The best vampire novels addressed this; how the true curse of being a vampire is not the forced bloodletting, but the reality of staying eternally alive. Creatures like him had no choice but to stick around, to see all their mortal friends and loved ones wither and die, the world around them evolving into something new, alien and incomprehensible while they stayed the same. That’s what Harmon felt every day, whenever he wandered into the bar – as he inevitably did, despite his best intentions – and started unspooling his tales of daring and adventure to the kids (and even when they were in their forties, Harmon thought of them as kids).

That was how you thought when you were as incredibly ancient as he. Ancient enough to see the world he had grown up in, and everyone in it, fall away like autumn leaves. Only he was left hanging onto the branch, tenaciously clinging in the breeze. Until tonight, that was. Tonight, he was letting himself blow away, and it hurt.

The night wind bit his cheeks as he started down, that familiar continuous slap that he had once lived for. He didn’t know exactly what he was running from, but he felt as if he was deserting everyone left back in the lodge. Just walking out forever, with his dinner still warm on the table. He tried to tell himself that the wetness of his cheeks was because of the wind. It was far from the first time in his life he'd had to convince himself of this.

When his pins started singing to him -- and right now they were fixing to turn into a full-blown choir -- he wondered if colliding with that tree all those years ago had done something more than physical to him. What he mused to himself in his weakest moments was horrifying; that maybe it had knocked his soul right out of his body. Perhaps his ineffable essence had kept right on cruising down the mountain and was lightyears away over the hills now, leaving his aging body behind to stagnate in a fog of easy downhill runs and liquor hazes before the lodge’s stone fireplace. No matter how the snow bunnies oohed and ahhed, he never really felt like those stories were really his anymore. They seemed like someone else's victories.

Right now, though, on this midnight run, he was starting to feel the old thrill, remembering how the mountain had always provided for him. She was alive tonight, just as alive as he felt, for the first time in a long time. Maybe that was why he hadn’t told Dale (or anyone at all) of his premonition. Some part of him, long ossified, knew that it was being shaken into wakefulness, and didn't want to spoil the adventure by calling in the cavalry. This knowledge made the air's bite harder, the crunching of snow under his skis crisper. And always that premonitory feeling behind it all, like a gigantic predatory bird circling high above.

He had started out racing down the auxiliary slope that ran alongside the service road into town, which appeared as a warm blanket of lights spreading out before him as he lowered himself down to its level. But now he veered away from it, heading instead for the tree line. It was time to go back into the woods, if for no other reason that his pins were making his muscles tense, prepping him for the moment when unknown talons would sink into the back of his neck and yank him off the ground.

He skirted the edge, not quite daring to enter yet. Gravity was such a tease; she kept pulling him downhill, ever closer to her deep, hidden heart, only to throw the entire world in his way every time. He came close enough to a bough -- stuck out like a swiping hand -- to remind him of his long-ago injury. He swerved away from the edge of the forest, then swept back just as quickly. She wasn't going to deny him, not on this night. Not when he had some unnamed doom pressing down on his back, and a ringing in his bones that was sounding more and more like an alarm clock, waking up an old, sleeping hero.

He didn’t know it, but he was going downhill faster than he had in more than two dozen years.

Whitelodge 1.4

The silence between them was unbearable. He had been trying to keep it under control, but already knew he was going to lose the battle. If he was going to say something, he knew from past experience that he should do it here, in the dining room where he had to restrain himself, instead of later, when they were alone and he had given himself another half-hour to stew. Her eyes were boring into him from across the table, that pitying look as she realized that maybe she had made the wrong choice of boyfriend...

"What?!" he finally blurted out.

Kelly just looked at him innocently, as if she had no idea what she had been doing all evening. "What do you mean, what?" she repeated. "Is something wrong with the cheesecake?" she asked, her mouth full.

"No!" he said, lowering his voice so that only she could hear him, without losing the intensity. "You're giving me that look again."

She set down her fork before asking, "What look is that?" she said calmly. He hated that tone. She was like a flight attendant in that way; the calmer she got, the worse the situation was apt to be.

"You know," he fumed. "That disappointment. That wishing you were with someone else."

Kelly sighed the sigh of a long-suffering girlfriend, even though they had only been going out for shy of three months. "I never said anything like that, ‘Noj."

He shook his head, poking with his fork at his side of the single slice of cheesecake they were sharing. "I told you before, Kell, I'm just not this kind of person."

She had long stopped trying to smile and console him, instead just said, "I'm not expecting you to be someone else. I've told you a thousand times, this weekend is my way of telling you something about who *I* am."

"I saw the way you were looking at him," Manoj said, finally looking down. He didn't want to lift his head, but watched her face go blurry as he looked up at her through his eyebrows.

"Who?" Kelly asked, dumbfounded.

"That old man in the bar."

"*What*?" Kelly said, a little louder than she should have. "How could you possibly think I could be attracted to--"

Manoj shook his head again, dropped his fork so that it rang against the china. "I'm not saying you're attracted to him. You're attracted to his way of life."

She say back now, crossing her arms. "So you're jealous of--"

"Rapt." Manoj said it flatly, with as much contempt as he could cram into it. "That's what you were. He was telling these stories about being chased by bears and zipping through raw forest by moonlight, and you couldn't get enough of it."

Kelly rolled her eyes. "I thought they were great stories, yes, but it doesn't mean that's the kind of man I want to be with."

Manoj rested his elbows on the table, leaning forward to match the way she had moved back. "Of course you do. Kelly, you're an athlete, body and soul. I get that. But I'm just... not."

"And you don't have to be!" she responded, getting fed up. Manoj had to toe a bit of a line now, or she was apt to storm off. It was her secondary mode of defense. "I don't know why you can't accept the fact that I don't need you to even care about sports in order for me to find you interesting. I'm here with *you*, Manoj. I dragged you halfway up a mountain so that I could give you an introduction to who I am, what's important to me. Think about it from the other side... Do you think I'm jealous of the women at your office? That I assume you have to want them just because they're more like you than I am?"

Manoj looked up at her now, comprehension just starting to dawn. He had lost this argument before he had even started it. He should have known that. "No," he had to grumble.

"That's right," Kelly said. "I thought you and I liked each other because of our differences. You're of the brains, I'm of the body." She leaned forward again, so they were equally tilted forward over their dessert. "You find that intriguing. Don't say you don't. And I love that mind." She lifted a closely-clipped fingernail to hover tantalizingly before his third eye.

He found himself smiling, in spite of himself. "This mind can be quite stupid sometimes." He let his accent, which he had never really had but sometimes used as a charm crutch, creep the slightest bit back into his voice, knowing how she would react to it.

"It's not so bad," she said, smiling. "Now, I think we should finish our dessert, go upstairs, and see what we can come up with when your mind and my body get together."

He smiled, even though he knew she was deflecting the argument in a direction he couldn't resist. Was that the way all athletic people were, he wondered, always trying to resolve conflicts through some manner of physical achievement? At this point, he didn't even care, which sent his rational Vulcan undermind deeper into fury because it was bring ignored.

Deep down, though, he knew he was going to end up enjoying this weekend. If she continued to take these wedges he was passively-aggressively trying to drive into their relationship and turn them from log-splitters into tent pegs, they might even come down from the heights an even stronger couple than they had been coming up.

---

Manoj was lucky, and he knew it. They had met when she was hired as a sport consultant at the game company he worked for. Their first meeting had been filled with a kind of chemistry he had never experienced before. The conversation had quickly turned away from the borderline-ludicrous extreme hang-gliding game he had been doing research for into more personal territory.

She had been the one to launch the first playful volley: "You know, for a person who spends their time trying to replicate the way people move, you're a very still person."

"Still?" he asked, his pen hovering over the pad he had been taking aerodynamic notes on.

"Yeah," she said, smiling. "I tend to notice these things. You don't make a move you don't have to."

He shrugged. "That's just economy, I guess."

"Even so," she continued, "still waters..." The silence between them drew out. Finally, she said, "Are you really into sports, or are you just interested in recreating them?"

With any other consultant, he would have felt threatened by such a question, but this woman was surprisingly easy to talk to. "I like the physics of motion, I guess. It's so simple, but so complex, trying to figure out how people are thinking by the way they move."

She nodded. "Huh. So you're, like, reverse engineering the player's brain. I like that."

He smiled back at her now, which just made hers intensify. His mouth got away from him. "It all figures into what I ultimately want to do," he said.

Her eyebrows perked up. "And what's that?"

"I want to take people's gaming instinct and turn it into social good," he said. "You remember that old online game where every time you played, a grain of rice was donated to a food supply charity?"

She shook her head. "Nope. But my gaming knowledge usually doesn't go past what's currently on my phone."

He felt his voice starting speed up, which always happened when he was given license to expound on his favorite topics. "When I think about the future of games, that’s what I think of. But it should go further than just getting people to trade gameplay for charity donations. I'd like to determine how online gaming can help people make moral decisions, like whether they're going to help others, even if they don't know and will never meet those people. That's what interaction is going to be like, more and more, in the future. Or maybe I can make games for kids that kind of train them to think more altruistically toward others. I keep thinking, what if you could train kids to empathize at the same time as they're learning to read or do math?"

Kelly seemed impressed. "Or jump off cliffs on hang-gliders. That's lofty, Manoj. Very lofty. I like it."

Drinks had followed the evening after their bull session, and they ended up talking about the game at hand more then they had in their actual meeting. They debated the best way to display how the human body reacted to swinging in a harness while being buffeted by thermals (increasingly more innuendo passing between them the more they drank), and they had been dating ever since. When she had asked him to come with her for a weekend to Deertail Lodge in the mountains, he had of course agreed, admittedly thinking more about the idea of what stripping her out of multiple layers of fleecy clothing would be like than hurtling through the snow with wooden sticks strapped to his feet.

---

But here they were, and he had started feeling inadequate ever since their rental car had pulled up to the front of the lodge. It wasn't until then that he started to realize how completely out of his element he was. His grandparents had all grown up in New Delhi, which was the precisely opposite climate from where he was now. This weather was oppressive in a completely different way, and one that his very genetic makeup rebelled against. It had set him on edge, and that was probably why he had taken such offense to the way Kelly had been listening to the grizzled ski pro holding court in front of the fireplace, impressing all the noobs with his daring war stories.

As always, he stopped thinking about these things once they got back up to their room. In bed with her was the only time when he didn't feel like he was competing, or that his athletic failings meant anything. Like the sheets they fell onto, the playfield was perfectly level. His precision and attention to details met with her pure awareness of physical space, and their talents complemented each other perfectly.

She snuggled up to him afterward, and just as he was about to drift off to sleep, she said, “You know what would make this moment even more perfect?”

He muttered some sort of noncommittal negative response, already sliding toward slumber.

She sat up suddenly. “Hot fudge sundaes! Are you in?”

The incongruity of it all woke him enough to ask, “What do you mean? Room service?”

“Yeah!” she said, as if he had just made her great idea even better. She immediately leaned over to the nightstand and started rummaging around in the drawer. “Where’s that menu? I think I threw it in here, just to remove the temptation because everything’s so flipping expensive – oh, hi Gideon – but... desperate times, you know?”

Manoj sat up slowly, noticing how amazing her bare back looked in the moonlight as she hunched to hold the menu in the patch of moonlight. There were times -- and it was usually at moments like this, when his mind was blessedly clear of other, distracting things -- that he became entirely unaware of how precipitous his place in her heart must be. This lack of worry never lasted too long, though. All too soon he was thinking that all it would take would be her meeting a man taller, more muscular than him, one who could confidently join her in her snowboarding, rock climbing, and the dozen other outdoor activities she was into, and her nerdy programmer would be shown the door.

True, he had just now made her come so hard that dessert had become necessary, but wasn’t that really the only physical activity he could join her in with any degree of competency? He could conjure up an algorithm to visually replicate the mountain they were on from scratch in less than an hour, but was she ever going to convince him to actually get out there, climb to the top and go barreling down it? He still hadn’t given her a solid affirmation that he would. In the morning, she was going to expect him to get on a pair of skis and actually attempt to perform a few of the athletics that he typically spent his days replicating at his desk.

“I would like to have two hot fudge sundaes sent up, please,” Kelly was saying into the phone. Manoj noticed how she used the same tone with the anonymous person on the other end of the line as when she was speaking to him. Another crack appeared in the wall that held back his suspicions about how he was about to lose her. He should be thinking of something he could do to impress her, convince her that he was worth staying with, at least for a little while longer, but nothing came. Nothing but the idea that he had to get out on the slopes with her the next day and at least make an effort to live in the outside world she was a full resident of. Maybe when he did, he would gain some sort of insight that no one back in the office had. It might reveal to him that one extra piece of mechanics that would turn his game into a true sport simulator.

Kelly had finalized the order, hung up, turned around, and started talking to him before he realized what was happening. “Now for phase two of my plan,” she said, “phase one being dragging you up to the room and getting you to make me crave sugar. I’m going to throw on one of those fluffy bathrobes and lounge in it so the room service guy doesn’t catch me in my starkers. You want one too, or are you just that much less modest than me?”

Manoj mustered a smile, hoped the room service guy, when he arrived, would be more of an out-of-shape slob than he. “Sure, count me in,” he said. “For anything.”

Fifteen minutes later they were carefully finishing their sundaes in bed, covered in terrycloth and only halfway caring if any got on the covers. Kelly had dialed in ESPN on the TV mounted up in the corner of the room, and was watching cricket highlights from halfway around the world.

“Every time I see this,” he said absently, “it makes me wonder what my life would be like if my grandparents hadn’t left.”

“What do you think you’d be doing?” Kelly asked, leaning back and resting her spoon elbow on his ribs. She continued to shovel ice cream into her mouth.

“Quite possibly the same thing I am now,” Manoj said. He meant professionally, but as soon as it was out of his mouth he guessed she meant personally. He gave himself a tiny mental kick.

“Is there lots of skiing in India?” she asked.

Manoj smiled. “Not so near the equator, not really. Some in the northern mountains. But I meant programming. There’s probably even more job opportunities there, in fact. Nothing I’d want to do though, I bet.” Certainly not better than eating ice cream in the middle of the night with someone like you, he thought but didn’t say.

Kelly tipped her dish to scoop up the last of the melted sundae from the bottom – not that they’d given their desserts much time to produce any – and spooned it into her mouth. Manoj was looking at a smudge of chocolate just beyond the corner of her mouth.

“You’ve got a little –“ he said, motioning toward the corner of his own mouth.

She mimicked his movements. He had meant to indicate the corner of his mouth that was pointing the same way as hers, as if he were her mirror, but she reached up and dabbed at the opposite side, touching the right side of her mouth just as he was touching his right side. It wasn’t the first time this mental schism had happened. She claimed it was because she thought from others’ points of view before her own (classic extrovert, he thought). Instead of switching tactics and tapping the other corner of his mouth, he instead leaned forward and kissed the spot, removing the chocolate with a kiss and a tiny swipe of the tip of his tongue. Kelly watched him the whole way, her eyes crossing comically in surprise.

“Well now,” she said, as he sat back. She didn’t resist, either, when he reached down and began unfastening the loose knot that held her white bathrobe together. “I’m telling ya, it’s the mountain air,” she said as he parted the fabric and slid his hands into the warm envelope of air she had created between it and her skin. “It gets the blood pumping, definitely… and speaking of which…” She had by this time opened his bathrobe as well.

They kept their robes on this time, wrapping themselves up in a double-cocoon of softness that only accented the solidity of their bodies as they moved together. Being the second time, Manoj felt more in control, his body’s natural resistance to stimulation married with Kelly’s relaxed muscles. He gloried in the feeling of her, and his own prowess, feeling like he could go on forever. When the bedframe began to rattle against the wall, he assumed that it was his doing.

Kelly’s fingernails dug into his shoulders. He wasn’t stopping for anything, not now. He was master of the world, so concentrated on pleasing her, and thereby pleasing himself, that he didn’t even notice when the room when went suddenly, ultimately dark.

Their bathrobes managed to keep the worst of the flying glass shards away from their skin when the patio doors blew in.

Whitelodge 1.3

The night desk had been unusually quiet. Dale had this weird theory about how people who find themselves in the same circumstances often get their bodily cycles to line up. It was the reason the lodge sometimes had a inexplicably jam-packed, later-than-usual dinner shift, or why on some nights everyone slept like babies and no house phones rang until well into morning. The lodge tapped into some kind of collective biorhythm; that was his thought, anyway. It was funny how this uber-rhythm idea didn't seem to extend to him, though. He was always the one who would talk your ear off the most when things were quietest, the one up late when everyone else was snoozing away.

Standing at her post at the front desk, Glenda repeatedly blew her bangs up in frustration. She really needed a haircut, because they were periodically getting tangled up in her eyebrows. She could either cut the bangs or shave the eyebrows, and these seemed like equally viable options at this point. She should call home, she thought, because despite what Dale said, she imagined the lull at the front desk wouldn't last for much longer. She'd check in with Darryl, make sure the boys had gotten to bed at a reasonable hour, and then she could finish her shift with a clear conscience.

She looked at the sets of walkie-talkies Velcroed to the edge of the counter in front of her. If their black carapaces hadn't been there with their intruding modernity, she would have been able to look out across the lobby and imagine that she was looking into a space that was fifty years old. Even a hundred, maybe. At times like this, late at night, she could forget that there was a flat screen monitor posted on the overhang directly above her, cycling through the lodge's amenities and the current weather conditions, and fantasize that she was witnessing the opening season of the Deertail Lodge. The wood, of which almost everything in her view was comprised, still gleamed with polish, the upholstery relatively new but still adorned with the original, faux-Native American patterns in cool blues and greens.

She had used to be able to recall when the lodge had been built; hadn't they covered that in orientation? But even that had been years ago. All the little minutiae and theories about how the place was supposed to run had been overturned by the practical knowledge she had since learned on how to keep the desk working smoothly. Still, that half-forgotten knowledge lay over everything like a waxy film, until knowing that the ruts in the floor -- caused by wear from some of the overstuffed lobby chairs, also preventing the rearranging of the furniture for fear of exposing them -- made it less of a historical building and more a wooden arrangement of Stuff She Had To Deal With.

Sometimes if seemed her entire life was similarly constructed out of an elaborate, precarious arrangement of Stuff She Had To Deal With. Her job, Darryl, the boys, they were all parts of this vast network. She wouldn't give up any part of it, of course, but secretly she longed for a day when she could allow herself the luxury of kicking back and becoming part of Stuff Someone Else Had to Deal With. And an even deeper part, a set of dark twins, secretly acknowledged both how she would never allow that to happen, and how much she enjoyed her self-sacrifice, all in the name of making life even a little easier for those she loved.

Dale, of course, might have seen some of Glenda's secret levels if she let him. He overthought everything, and after all their night shifts together, she often wondered what would happen if she suddenly told him everything she thought, everything she dreamed. Would he be able to apply his particular brand of logic and attention to the untangling of her psyche? She kind of wanted to see if he could. Of course, she would never think of letting herself develop feelings for Dale (and true to form, that deepest part of her enjoyed the knowledge that she was actively withholding that from herself), but if there were anyone she knew who would be able to fully understand her, it would be him. He would probably be able to tell her things about herself that even she didn't know yet, but would immediately recognize.

Because she had been thinking about him, she almost jumped when he came through the lobby doors from the main entrance. Both inner and outer sets were closed at night to keep out the worst of the mountainside chill, but there was always a pocket of frigid air that drifted in alongside anyone who entered. Then Dale was scraping the snow off his boots on the wide swaths of carpet (which were replaced/cleaned three times a day, per regulations).

He looked up at her, smiling. She loved that smile. Dale dressed all in official blues when he was running perimeter checks, and seeing his face, wearing a smile that seemed different than the ones he gave anyone else, always made her night. He couldn't have been more different from Darryl, which was probably why she didn't even think to admit to herself that she had more than a passing fancy for the security guard. Tall where Darryl was almost exactly her height, strongly wide where Darryl had been farmer-scrawny his entire life, dark brown where Darryl was one of those pasty fellows who bleaches in sunlight. How could she have been attracted to this capable, confident man who was everything the one she had chosen as life partner was not?

Dale flipped his arm up, clicking his flashlight and zapping her accurately in the eyes with a double-flash, which was the sign for all-clear. Glenda half-heartedly threw up a hand to block the light. "I got it, Dale. No wolves, no storms. You've scared them all away. Good job."

He paused to scrape the snow off his boots a few more times as he crossed diagonally against the rug patterns to reach her at the desk. "No Harmon, either. Did he call in?"

Glenda shook her head. "Nope. I've been here with the walkies all along. Not a squawk."

"So we're guessing he made it down all right?" Dale had been in the lobby when Harmon had come out of the restaurant, a distracted, disturbed look on his face and his ski boots on. The racket of plastic on wood had drawn Dale's attention, because Harmon had happened to pass by in the brief interval when the rugs had been taken up, but the fresh ones hadn't been laid down yet. When it became clear that the old ski pro was intending to grab his coat and head out the front door, Dale had stopped him.

"Hey, Harmon, it's getting late, you know," the security guard had said.

Harmon had nodded without looking at Dale. His gaze was already outside with the snow. "I know, I just... I was thinking I'll go down into town, that's all."

Dale sighed in half-feigned exasperation. "Well, you won't have time to come back up tonight. You want me to call Mrs. Handy at the boarding house and let her know to expect you?" This scenario had played out enough times for Dale to know the folly of offering the elderly man a ride.

This comment actually drew Harmon's attention enough to get him to look at Dale. The ski pro was almost a full foot shorter. "Sure," he said, and tried to smile, but it looked thoroughly unconvincing.

Dale engulfed one of Harmon's shoulders with his hand. "Now, Harmon, we're not going to get reports of you trying to ski the backwoods down into town, are we?"

Harmon's brow furrowed, and he shook his head. Only a little less unconvincing, but it had been enough for Dale. It had been enough for Glenda, too, who had been watching the scene from her perpetual perch behind the front desk.

"Good," Dale said. "Enjoy your evening. But here." Dale pressed one of his walkie-talkies, which he always kept with him, into the ski pro's hand. "If you run into any trouble or need a hand, I'm right on the other end. Okay?"

This time Harmon's smile seemed genuine, if not still a little distracted. "All right, Dale. Thank you."

Dale clapped the older man on the shoulder. "No problem. Don't forget to fuck off, now."

Salty talk was guaranteed to get a chuckle out of the old man, Glenda knew, and Harmon didn't disappoint this time, laughing and shrugging as he turned to go out into the elements. Secretly, she loved hearing Dale say things like that, too.

Harmon picked up his coat -- which he must have left in one of the lobby chairs before taking care of whatever business he had in the restaurant -- and shrugged into it as he headed for the door. Neither Dale nor Glenda were really concerned about him; the man had spent the last seven years hanging around, holding his liquor admirably and bringing local character to the place. The owner had even kept a permanent room open for him. It was really just a converted maintenance closet under the massive main staircase, but it was free of charge, and this was the place Harmon seemed to want to be. The arrangement was due to the shared history the two of them had, although no one seemed to know exactly what that was.

Now, almost an hour later, Glenda said to Dale, "Yeah, he must have made it down. I tried to hail, but got nothing. He might have turned it off."

"I'll call Mrs. Handy and see if he checked in," Dale said. "I bet he just didn't want what Carlos and Benny were serving tonight. Decided to maybe have a slice of Mrs. Handy's pie instead."

Glenda couldn't help but giggle and blush, even though she knew no double entendre was intended. Mrs. Handy sold pies as a side business, along with running the town's boarding house. But something about the way Dale said it... She knew he was offering to track the old man down because he thought Glenda was overworked. He often commented about how dedicated and underappreciated she was. It was one of the many things she liked about him. "No, it's fine," she said. "I'll call down. He's probably had dinner and is all wrapped up in her warmest bed by now."

It was a half-hearted lobbing back of the innuendo, implying that Mrs. Handy and Harmon had some kind of geriatric romance going on, but Dale looked like he wanted to pounce on the desk phone, to keep her from dialing. "No, no, I'll... don't worry about..."

They had known each other far too long for her to play like she couldn't tell something was wrong. "Come on, Dale."

The big man licked his lips a bit, as if debating whether he was going to tell her, then gave up when he saw the steely look in her eye. "Okay. He didn't take the car down. I saw some boot tracks, so I followed them back to the equipment shed. He took his skis. Probably about ten minutes ago."

Glenda didn't get it right away. "He... he skied down into town? After he said he wouldn't?"

Dale nodded, leaning heavily against the front desk now that the charade was over. "Looks that way. I don't know why he did that. But then again, he was acting strangely before he left too, wasn't he?"

The thought that anyone, not to mention an elderly man, would start a trek down the mountain, away from the roads, at this late hour sent a chill through her, even if that person were as experienced as Harmon. Her only solace was that it was clear and the moon bright tonight, so it would be a relatively easy journey for a seasoned pro. "What do you think would possess him to do something like that?"

Dale shook his head. "Don't know. But I'm thinking I should hop in the car and start down the driveway, just to see." ("Driveway" was what they called the winding seven-mile long downhill road from the lodge to the tiny town below.)

"Good idea," Glenda said, too concerned about Harmon to consider that would mean she would be deprived of Dale's company during the midnight hours. It was almost eleven-thirty already, wasn't it? She had sort of hoped that it would be one of those quiet nights when they could just hang around the desk chatting for hours.

She turned to glance at the grandfather clock, whose solid presence she always turned to, even when she was constantly working on a computer that had a digital clock right in the bottom corner. In some way, the time never seemed truly defined to her if it wasn't shown on the thick, filigreed hands of the ancient upright timepiece. Now, as she looked at it, she could see that the silently sweeping second hand looked... strange. She narrowed her eyes a little, and Dale followed her confused gaze to the clock facing them from the side of the main staircase.

That second hand... it was if it had widened to double its usual thickness. It wasn't until it overtook the minute hand that she realized what was happening; it was vibrating, being shaken into buzzing back and forth so quickly that it could barely be registered by the eye. And then she heard the chandelier overhead start to rattle. The sound of crystals clattering against each other, and the metal frame of the chandelier itself, almost formed a chord so complex that her stunned ear registered it as beautiful.

She and Dale looked at each other in comprehension for just a moment before the lights went out.

Whitelodge 1.2

Bruce hadn't really needed ice; he just had to get out of his room. He feared he was not going to be able to breathe if he had stayed in there a minute longer, so he left behind his notebook and meticulously lined-up pens and moved slowly along the hall, relishing the feel of the cool, thin lodge carpet on his feet. He glided down the long space toward the end of the hall, the only sound the pieces of half-melted ice sloshing in the bucket under his arm. The sudden hush of this old-fashioned world should have been welcome relief.

He reached the little alcove, wondered obliquely if anybody in the nearby rooms was going to be awakened by the ice machine if he thumbed it on. Oh well, he reasoned, if you don't spring the few extra bucks for a suite on the highest floor, that's the risk you run. Besides, he had very faintly heard a few of the fevered sounds through the walls of his room before he left, so he doubted that the people next to him were overly concerned about getting a lot of sleep anyway.

As the ice chunked out into the bucket, amid the roar of the titanic dynamo that must have been necessary to create such a wonder, he wondered if he was going to get to sleep at all that night, and whether it would matter if he did. So far this trip had yielded zero dreams that were of any use to him, anyway. Where was Theda when he needed her? He allowed himself only a few seconds to wonder if he was going to spend the rest of his life like this, always chasing after her elusive inspiration, but never having it pay off.

He wouldn't be able to face his editor at the end of the week without something to show for it, he was certain of that much. Ger had been so accommodating and so understanding of Bruce's writer's block (even if the younger man didn't quite believe such a phenomenon existed), springing for half the tab to get Bruce up here, into the uncluttered air where, supposedly, the great writer would be able to think and get back in touch with his muse. But now the only thing that comforted him amid this wonderland of snow, wooden rafter beams, and down pillows was the white noise the ice made as it filled his dented, wooden bucket.

If Bruce hadn't been trying to work in this environment, he would really be enjoying himself. As the taxi had brought him up the long, winding ride over the foothills, the uphill slopes outweighing the downhill ones until he was high above the world, he had felt the air around him grow lighter. He could hear Ger's voice in his head -- "The best thing about writers is their capacity for self-delusion" -- and up at the Deertail Lodge, he hoped, he could find the quiet and lack of distraction he needed to get back into that self-deluding frame of mind, and back into contact with Theda. The lodge's promotional material promised a place free of connectivity of every kind, where a person could untether themselves from the computers and communication that burdened them in the world down below. It had sounded like exactly what he needed.

Bruce let the bucket overflow and the trough underneath fill a little bit with the crystalline cubes, so that the next patron likely wouldn't have to run the machine to get all they needed. It wasn't that he was an inherently thoughtful person, just that he wanted to stand in the wash of aural static for a little while longer... Contrary to the propaganda, he had found no solace in this place's silence. In fact, he found the random rush and thump of the ice machine preferable to the vast, hollow wind that had blown through that last dream. It had been horrible, a wind that he could feel slicing through him, chilling his insides as it passed. He knew that he should stop his mind from recalling it in this middle-of-the-night, half-awake trance he was still in, but could not resist...

---

It had been the same ring of towering stones he always stood inside. But now they were dull and gray, draped in dying vines, whose heart-shaped leaves withered where before they had been lush, almost bursting with greenness. The landscape outside the ring had changed, too. The first time he had come, he had been able to see a sun-sparkled, magical forest outside the ring of thirteen Sounding Stones (he had always known that was what they were called, even though he had never been told). But tonight, there was hardly a world beyond at all. It was as if whatever planet he stood on had shrunk to the size of a small city. The ground curved away on all sides from where he stood, so sharply that all he could see beyond a few hundred yards was that omnipresent atmosphere that iridesced for what seemed like light-years in all directions. He was standing on a wide pedestal in the middle of a vast nothing.

The horror of it all would have been diminished if he had appeared someplace entirely different, instead of this corrupted version of a place he had never tired of visiting in his younger years. Back then, not only had the place been beautiful, *she* had been beautiful, making his breath catch every time she stepped out of the forest; without fanfare, but commanding the attention of every living thing within it, even the plants, which all seemed to wave toward her at the direction of some unfelt wind, probably the same one that made her robes flutter and swirl in slow motion, as if she were underwater.

Theda, she had told him her name was on their heady first meeting. His mind immediately noted that this was an anagram of "death", which didn't surprise him because it was his mind that had made up her name in the first place. Or so he had thought in the beginning. Now he wasn't so sure. The name might have come from Somewhere Else, just as he grew to think that the things she told him -- the stories he would later write down in waking life and be hailed as a genius for -- all came from the same Somewhere Else. There was just no way he could have been personally responsible for them all.

But night after night he had come, and night after night she had emerged to weave tales for him, speaking into his willingly receptive ears, and almost dictated for him articles, stories, possible avenues of research... an endless font of thoughts and ideas. It was like he had been asked to write a wish list of things that a writer/blogger/journalist wants but hardly ever gets in terms of inspiration, and she was sent into his dreams to tick them off for him every night of the week. She had asked nothing in return, only a receptacle for her brilliance, which he was more than willing to provide (and benefit from).

He had loved to go to sleep back then, looked forward to that drowsy feeling that told him he was about to really start getting things done, but now it had been months since Theda had come to him among the Sounding Stones, striding out of the forest like a mystical story-telling nymph. He was starting to think she might never come back, and as he did, the surroundings seemed to be more and more infected with that attitude as well. The forest was drying up, the world it stood upon folding in on itself, and he didn't know if it was he or she that was making it happen. Would he one day close his eyes on the waking world to find himself floating alone in that limitless sky, which was no color and every color all at once? And if he did, would he ever be able to wake himself up? Would he want to?

---

Maybe he had done something to offend her. He never understood why he deserved her gifts in the first place. Now he wondered over and over what could cause her to pick up stakes and -- here he shuddered to think it -- perhaps decide to grace some other writer with her brilliance. Maybe all this decay was a symptom that she had walked away, leaving their shared dreamworld to shrink and collapse on itself. Or even worse, maybe that *thing* that had appeared the last time he saw her -- whatever it had been that came riding in on that unspeakable storm -- had frightened her away for good. Regardless, two things kept him from trying to stay awake for the rest of his life, undoubtedly driving himself crazy in the process.

First, as a writer, he still needed to produce. He had known since he was a little child that his job, his place in the world, was to take ideas from his head and shape them into words for others to read, no matter what form those words took. When he was a kid, it seemed the only avenue would be to write books, but as he got older, the world expanded and more and more forms or written art were created. He tried to follow them all. His ideas, at first his own and then more and more supplanted by Theda's (which, he could somehow argue with himself even now, were his too), grew into pieces of art, reams of factual investigation, reportage on the strange corners of existence, deep rabbit-hole dives into his own psyche that left him shivering at his own unknowability, interviews with other souls that could have gone on forever if he hadn't had a deadline to meet. He didn't care what the subject was, or what form would eventually serve them best, the main thing was the words, and the idea driving those words.

Secondly -- and this was rapidly becoming the only thing he could take solace from now -- was that while his dreamworld was shrinking, the thirteen Sounding Stones were unchanged. They still stood taller than his head, thicker than his body, in their perfect, uniform ring, dark rock veined with minerals of different colors, all pointing up toward the sky. Those veins were dark now, whereas once they had pulsed with light and life, and the vines that clung to them protectively were dying, but the Stones themselves were still whole. Lately, the world had shrunk enough that those stones weren't all pointing straight up anymore. They were starting to tip back, away from each other, like the imperceptibly slow decay of a blossom cursed with an unlucky number of petals.

This was why he still overcame his fears of what he might find and lay his head on his pillow every night. The Stones persisted, and in some unknowable way that dream-logic often worked by, Bruce knew on the most fundamental level that the Stones were *him*. Even if there were eventually not be enough real estate left for them all to stand without touching, they would still exist, as would he, and that must mean something.

The clatter of ice on the floor brought him back to the real world. In his mental absence, he had filled the trough almost to its edge with a roughly pyramidal mound of cubes. A few of them were randomly bouncing over the edge and hitting the floor, making a sound reminiscent of chattering teeth. He let go of the button that kept the machine running. It rumbled to a stop... but the trembling sensation he felt in his feet continued. The ice cubes that had fallen on the floor were vibrating, skittering around as if alive.

Whitelodge 1.1

“The mountains have personalities. They're alive, in a way. But the valleys? Once you've been up here a while, you find that they're really all the same."

Sheryl had been sitting at the circular bar, listening to the grizzled, windburned ski pro talking from his place in front of the fireplace on the far side for over twenty minutes, and that was the first thing of any substance that had come from his mouth. He had amassed a sizeable retinue of fellow skiers, all of them apple-cheeked where he was leathery, limber in their youth while he sat stiffly upright on his stool. She knew that his impeccable posture was the result of the multiple pins in his back, the origin of every last one having been outlined by him in surgical detail. Sheryl wasn't impressed, not only because she still didn't really consider herself a skier, but because she was still wondering where the hell Kerren was.

The phone call, her girlfriend had insisted, would last no more than twenty minutes, and then she would be down to meet Sheryl at the bar, they'd have a celebratory cocktail and head into the restaurant for dinner. But almost twice that amount of time had elapsed, and she had yet to see Kerren's overpriced boots coming down the rustic lacquered-logs stairway.

So Sheryl patiently kicked her crossed legs up and down, nursing her mojito and trying to soothe herself into nonchlance. There wasn't a TV nearby -- the first time she'd ever been in a bar without one -- so she had no choice but to overhear the old pro outline the times he had nearly been buried in sinkholes, menaced by black bears, and indulged in reckless downhill therapy off the marked slopes and trails, always late at night, with only the moonlight to keep him from barreling straight into trees that were huddled before him like stoic, needly monks, conspiring to step into his path and end his life.

She had to admit, it sounded a lot too much like her own experience on this trip for comfort. Every moment with Kerren these days was fraught with peril. Emotional branches could reach out and snag her at any moment. Was she really calling her mother up there? Sheryl actually shook her head a little to fling the thought off, to keep it from sinking its passive-aggressive little talons into her brain. It was her part of their bargain, after all; she would let go of her suspicions and start to trust Kerren again, and Kerren would do everything she could to start to earn it back.

The fact that this phone call was taking so long didn't do much to set her mind at ease. But there was no way that Sheryl was going to give Kerren any reason to think that she had been even the least bit suspicious. She motioned to the bartender and ordered a second mojito. If Kerren came down and saw that Sheryl had already ordered a drink for her, wouldn't that indicate a modicum of trust?

Almost as soon as the drink arrived, Sheryl saw the recognizable black-and-purple of Kerren's boots clomping down the stairs on the far side of the lodge bar. Good. Let her see just how trusting Sheryl had been that she would arrive soon, ice not even the slightest bit melted in her glass.

"Hey," Kerren said, sitting down on the stool next to her. Craning her neck to see the plate-glass view they were missing behind them, she asked, "Don't you want to sit where we can look out on the mountain?"

Sheryl only slightly forced the smile that she flashed at her wife. "I was hoping to, but..." She gestured with her half-empty glass toward the group occupying the seats with the best view, the one that had gathered around the ski pro. Dressed in an almost unbearably loud sweater, he was still letting people buy him drinks, feeding him fuel to even more deeply slur his tales of high adventures on the peaks around them.

"Eech," Kerren said, hearing just a fragment of the latest gruesome tale. "How long has that been going on?"

"Since before I got here," Sheryl responded. She hoped her voice was jovial enough. Was it?

"Thanks for ordering," Kerren breathed, getting more comfortable on her seat. She held it up, swiveled a little toward Sheryl. "Is it too late for me to make a toast?"

Sheryl shrugged a little. "Sure." She mirrored the position of Kerren's glass, suspended in the air between them. "I mean, of course not. Toast away."

"To eight wonderful years," Kerren said, cocking her elbow to lift the glass to the height of her forehead. "And I'm promising here and now to make the next eight even more wonderful."

"Me too," Sheryl said, hoping it sounded authentic, and was surprised to find that -- at least to her -- it really did. Their glasses clinked.

They sipped a moment in silence, the alcohol giving that familiar illusion of warmth to their bodies. Sheryl had heard that what booze really did was pull the heat from one's extremities, which was exactly the opposite of what you wanted to do out in the cold. It was why the myth of St. Bernards with brandy kegs around their necks was just that. She would have related this anecdote to Kerren, but it seemed completely the wrong note to strike at what was supposed to be not just their anniversary dinner, but a celebration of their reconnection as a couple.

She had meant to steer clear from the subject -- all the better to demonstrate her complete state of trust -- but it came out anyway. "How's Brandy?" Sheryl asked.

"She's good," Kerren said, averting her eyes. "Jay's being an ass, but what's new about that? They're having some big to-do about building that deck again. She's wants to contract someone, he insists he can do it himself, even though he's almost sixty... the usual."

"He means well," Sheryl said, and immediately thought that maybe she shouldn't come to Kerren's step-father's defense quite so quickly. She had just wanted to keep the negativity out of this evening so badly, she couldn't help it.

Fortunately, Kerren didn't take the bait. "I know he does, but then she overreacts, and I end up giving her a sympathetic ear, when what I really want to get downstairs to have a lovely evening with my lady."

Sheryl's smile came easily at that one. She was so stupid, even entertaining the thought that Kerren was up to something shady. On their anniversary trip! How heartless could she be? Meanwhile, across from them, the ski pro said, "Listen! You can still hear my elbow pop when I turn it this way!"

---

"I'd kind of like to be like him, I think," Kerren mused when they were both halfway through their bacon-wrapped venison medallions.

“Him who?" Sheryl asked. They had each had a full glass of wine already, and their conversation was flowing much more easily.

"That mangled old skier in the bar," Kerren said. "Not just like that, I mean, not actually scarred, but I'd like to -- I don't want to go through my life and have no wear and tear, you know what I mean?"

Sheryl grinned. "Well, in the morning we're going to run a good risk of getting some scars, aren't we?"

Kerren giggled, and Sheryl marveled, much as she had the first time, at how lovely she was, lit mostly by the lazy fire that formed the centerpiece of the restaurant. Even lovelier now than the night they had met, in some ineffable way. Sheryl had been struck dumb even then. "No," Kerren continued, "I just want to have something to show for it all. I don't want to be unblemished, like I'd breezed through life, like it didn't take anything out of me."

"Sure," Sheryl answered. "I get it. We should have some kind of physical evidence that we fought the fight and won."

"Mm-hm," Kerren said, her mouth full of the wine she had sipped while Sheryl had been talking. "I guess maybe that's why I thought about this place. When I was looking for places for us to go, I mean. It's so outside our real lives and a little dangerous. As much as I we want it to be, I guess."

"Which begs the question," Sheryl said, "how early do you want to get up in the morning to hit those slopes?"

Kerren traced her finger around the rim of her wine glass, making the liquid inside slosh slightly from side to side. "Well, it is our anniversary after all... Who knows? We might find some reason we want to sleep in late."

Sheryl arched an eyebrow at her. "Now, since when did you become a mind reader?"

They laughed together at that, and just for a moment all the uncertainty Sheryl had felt -- and wondered if Kerren was feeling -- seemed to have been shed, peeled off like ill-fitting costumes, to be discarded and left to slide down the mountain into the village below.

Someone had approached their table. Sheryl didn't notice until he was standing right there, blocking the firelight. She looked up, expecting it to be their waiter asking them about dessert, which was sure to instigate another round of double-entendre hilarity, but it wasn't him. It was the grizzled ski pro, looking as if he had just left his post in the hotel bar to walk directly over to them.

"Good evening, ladies," he said quietly, tilting his head to both Sheryl and Kerren in turn. He was leaning forward, his hands raised slightly in a don't-mind-me sort of way.

Neither of them responded immediately, because they assumed that if he were to approach them, it would be because he had something he was ready to say. But for a long moment, they all just looked at each other. After flicking her eyes at Sheryl and measuring no sense of comprehension there, Kerren said, "Hi yourself. How are you doing tonight?"

He seemed unable to speak for a moment, and Sheryl found herself returning to the thought she had about him before Kerren had joined her: how such a man could be through so many harrowing experiences and still have no visible damage. For just a moment, he seemed to have been struck mute.

"I..." he began, "I'm going to suggest that you two might want to make your way back down the mountain tonight."

Kerren, always the more defensive of the two, almost stood up, immediately assuming that she knew exactly what the old man was insinuating. "Now hold on just a damn minute--" she started.

Sheryl put out a hand, but couldn't stop her in time. Kerren was able to turn on the fury at the drop of a hat, something that had always both awed and frightened Sheryl.

"I don't know what business you think it is of yours," Kerren began, her voice starting to smolder, "but the two of us are here for a perfectly legitimate--"

The ski pro was already stepping back, his raised hands now turning their palms to the women in surrender. "No, no," he pleaded, "it's nothing like that! Believe me!"

Sheryl couldn't help but snicker at that, which was enough to stay Kerren's righteous anger; she quieted down after only getting halfway up from her seat. “Yeah, I bet you are,” she huffed.

"I just thought... look, I'm telling only so as not to cause a panic, but sometimes... Spend enough time on a mountain and sometimes you think you can hear it talking to you."

Kerren landed back in her seat, fury defused for the moment, but still holding a sarcastic knife-edge in her voice. "And exactly what is it telling you on this lovely evening?"

The old man's brow furrowed. "I don't exactly know. She's... confused somehow. There's something strange happening. I just thought you should know."

"Something strange," Kerren repeated.

"Yes," the pro said.

"So says the mountain," she said.

"Mm-hm," he nodded.

"And you think we need to leave."

"That's right."

"It has something to do with the two of us," Kerren said, both index fingers switching between pointing to herself and Sheryl.

"I can't exactly say how I know, but I think that might be right."

Kerren sat back in her seat, crossing her arms and letting out something like a "hmph". Oh God, Sheryl thought, she's only been biding her time. She's going to let him have it now. She'd start with how convenient it is that he's singled us out in the midst all the heterosexual pheromones being tossed around in this place, and move on to how if he thinks we should leave, then why is he not announcing it at the top of his lungs to the entire restaurant...

But Kerren didn't do that. Instead, she shrugged, "Well, sir, we'll have to take that under advisement, now won't we?"

The ski pro could tell that he wasn't being taken seriously. He already seemed defeated. "I'm only saying... my instincts haven't been much wrong in the past." He shrugged, then, seeing no sense of urgency from either of the women, turned to leave. Kerren's eyes burned a hole in his back all the way to the restaurant’s double doors, which opened onto the lobby.

When he was out of sight, Kerren's eyes rolled, and Sheryl was at least thankful that the source of their scorn wasn't her. "Boy," she said. "Can you believe that?"

Sheryl shook her head, but she was already distracted by the fact that she could hear the man clunking through the lobby. In exiting the restaurant, he had transitioned from carpeted floor to hard wood. And he had his ski boots on.

"It's weird," Sheryl said. "He seemed so lucid before, in the bar."

"You must have caught him at the start of his night. It didn't look like he was having any trouble funding his binge."

Sheryl didn't recall a telltale smell of alcohol on his breath, though. She reached for the small note holder against the dark-paneled wall to change the subject, assisted by a devilish wink. "Now, how about a pre-dessert dessert?"

---

True to her word, Kerren did her best to make sure their anniversary was a memorable one, even when they got back to their room, and by the time the pair were finally settling into each other's arms and nodding off to sleep, the moon had just risen over the enormous bulk of the mountain, which stood outside their room's windows, behind the lodge. The white rays just happened to hit the face of Kerren's phone, which in turn fell across one of Sheryl's eyelids, waking her.

When coincidences like this happened, her mind was always quick to run off into the wilds, contemplating the trajectory of a light particle that originated in the heart of the sun, worked its way to the boiling surface over millions of years, then escaped into space, only to ricochet off a stray moon rock, to the phone screen and thus into her eye. As if that had been its destiny all along. Then, inevitably, she began thinking of all the physical interactions of things going on around them all the time, and how they occurred even if there wasn't anyone there to notice them. The sheer volume of physics the real world was cranking out every second. By this time, she was hopelessly awake.

Rolling onto her side, then noticed how beautiful the packed snow looked outside. Kerren's arm had draped across her in their sleep; she tenderly lifted it away before getting up to take a better look out the window. Even though the room was warm, standing in front of their balcony window made her conscious of how cold a night it was. Cool air fell in invisible cascades off the face of the glass to pool around her feet. She wrapped her arms around herself protectively.

The scene outside was devastatingly still, stark, and lovely. The moonlight glanced off the snow at a low angle thanks to the upward slope, causing every tree and rock to throw exaggerated shadows. Even the slightest depressions in the snow looked like craters, black void in the midst of all that pitiless illumination.

Slowly, the events of the evening started coming back to her, and what it had all meant at the time collided with what it semeed to mean now. The overall feel of it was that she and Kerren were a fine facsimile of a relationship with no troubles. She had been very aware that if, at any point, she had really opened her mouth and talked to Kerren about how she felt, things would have gone very differently.

She sighed. She hadn't forgiven Kerren yet. There it was. She might have even convinced herself of it in the midst of the alcohol and warm fires, but here, in the small hours of the night, there was no reason to hide it, even from herself.

She knew that she should go back to bed. Standing here, turning everything over in her head would lead to nothing good, no matter how beautiful the view. And it certainly wouldn't help her get back to sleep. From somewhere beyond the room's door, she could hear the ice maker down the hall whirring to life. It gave her a small amount of comfort; at least she wasn't the only one who was having a hard time sleeping tonight. She hoped their reason was better than hers.

She looked back up at the moon, turning her mind back to the light that it was reflecting off it from the sun, currently blazing on the other the side of the world. The shadows had shortened even in the brief amount of time that she had been standing there. The moon was continuing to rise, slowly erasing the shadows that it had caused as it rose higher above the top ridge of the mountain.

And then, strangely, in a matter of moments, it had set again.

Upstream - Part 4

An hour later, after the populous had been calmed and quieted, and went back to their evening rituals of procuring dinner from the various restaurant storehouses, Kettering led Collins, Cordova, and Munoz up the long flights of stairs of the tallest building the city.

"I didn't know you were married," Cordova said over his shoulder to Marie, who was following closely behind him.

"It never came up," she said.

"Fair enough," Cordova said. he paused a while before asking, "How long does your husband think our expedition will be? I only ask because he may be able to send help sooner than expected if he thinks we're overdue."

Marie sighed. "I told him three weeks," she said, although they both had expected a two-week trip. "I didn't want him to worry. I know how these things can run longer than expected. Are you married?"

Cordova paused before shaking his head, and then kept climbing.

Collins, who they thought wouldn't be able to overhear their conversation over the echoing of footsteps in the stairwell, suddenly said, "Any chance that he'll get worried? Are you supposed to contact him regularly?" He seemed to forget that, despite their distance from the boat, Marie and Cordova were no farther from civilization than they would be if they had never seen the city.

"No," Marie said. "When I'm home, I'm home, and when I'm away... I'm away." There was something measured about her tone that Collins might have asked about, but Kettering had reached the top of the stairs and pushed open the door to the roof. The sunlight that poured in blasted their retinas, and Collins put away the flashlight he had been sweeping about to light their way. At the base of the stairs, Marie and Cordova had marveled at the way he had powered up its cool, white light by pumping a sheath of plastic around its handle a few times.

They stepped out into the stifling jungle heat again, but this time there was a little breeze, since they were above the tree canopy. The sun was lowering toward the western horizon ahead of them, just beginning to turn the vegtation below into a feverish, orange sea.

Kettering walked right up to the edge of the roof, not even looking down but knowing just where to stop, the toes of his boots less than two inches from the edge of the building. "Over there," he said before the others could fully catch up, pointing to the south. "We headed for the highest hill, see it there? And from there, we could see the second city chunk far to the south-southwest..." He swung his arm to the left a few degrees. "That would make it somewhere over there."

"Should be easy enough to find," Marie said. "We have rather detailed maps on the boat. We should go back and get them. Who knows how many people are there? And they may not be in as good a state as you all are here."

Kettering turned, looked at her, then addressed Collins. "That's exactly why we shouldn't wait any longer to send me and some of my men back, run a reconnaisance mission to see exactly what's going on over there. If they are in worse straits, they may be desperate and try something foolish when they learn we have resources."

Cordova stepped forward, closer to the edge than anyone save Kettering. "Hold on, Mr. Kettering. Let's not start out by assuming that these people are going to be a threat of any sort. From what we know at this moment, all we can infer is they're in exactly the same circumstances as you are here."

"That's my point," Kettering said, staring into the distance. "No offense to how you've been running things, Gary--" he must have been referring to Collins, " -- but we really fell ass-backward into the decent situation we have here. We just happened to have an unusual amount of tall buildings and restaurants in our chunk. From what I could see, their buildings weren't nearly as tall. Probably from a little farther out of whatever city it came from, more residential. That means less businesses, and more people who have to divide up what resources they do have. That's why I came back right away without finding out more... I knew that we had to prepare."

"Prepare for what?" Collins asked, straining his eyes out to where Kettering had been pointing.

"Whatever they're prepared to do," Kettering said. "And right now, I don't think any of us can make a more accurate guess of what that is than any other."

Collins considered this, looking from Marie to Kettering and back again, in full diplomat mode. "So what are each of your plans? I can't think of a reason we can't gather the information we need in two different ways."

Marie spoke first. "Like I said, we can get some information from the boat. We have survey and geological maps. There might be some sort of common characteristics about where these -- chunks, as you say -- have appeared. Now that we have two to compare, we might be able to figure out what those are."

Kettering pivoted and raised his finger in Marie's direction. "I think you just want to get back to your boat and get out of here." Before he had finished his statement, Cordova had stepped forward and taken hold of the big man's wrist, making him lower his hand. Kettering didn't fight against it, but his glare lost none of his intensity.

"I plan to do no such thing!" Marie snarled at him.

"She won't," Cordova told Kettering, who was still staring down Marie. "Because she wouldn't leave me behind. And I'm going to the new city with you."

"You are?" Collins asked.

"That's right," Cordova said. "What I propose is that she and one or two of your expeditionary force --" he had clearly decided upon this term carefully, " -- go to the boat to inform them of what is happening and make sure they're ready to start transporting people back to the coast. Meanwhile, you and I will take a look at this new... situation." He nodded toward the invisible city beyond the horizon.

"Someone needs to get to the boat before nightfall," Marie said. "It would be too dangerous to leave the city after that. Also, my men will be worried and might leave."

Kettering squinted at her again, as if scanning for deceit. Cordova considered affirming that she was right, but decided against it. The man was just going to have to learn to trust her on his own, sooner better than later.

Thankfully, Collins didn't step in either. Marie and Kettering just stared at each other, unblinking, for a long moment. Then Kettering said, "That's what we'll do," as if he were the one who had come up with the idea, or had the power to veto it.

"We'd better get going, then," Marie said. "I'll be waiting when your men are ready." Marie turned without waiting for a reaction and went down the stairs, leaving the remaining three to stare at each other in the reddening light.

Collins clapped his hands together enthusiastically. "God, it feels good to have a plan!" and followed her.

"You and I will leave first thing in the morning," Kettering told Cordova, who nodded solemnly. By the time the sun returned to its low position in the sky the next day, one of them would be dead by the other's hand.