Read Chapter 1: First Tracks

The first pass of the shovel scraped ice, and Declan Cross felt the vibration all the way up his forearms. He planted the blade, leaned his weight in, and the crust gave with a sound like breaking glass. Snowdrift lifted, crystalline in the grey morning, and he tossed it aside with the mechanical rhythm of a man who had done this a thousand times and would rather be doing anything else.

His truck sat buried to its wheel wells in the yard—two nights of wind and lake-effect snow had seen to that. He was on his second pass along the driver's door when his phone vibrated inside his jacket, once, twice, insisting.

He pulled off a glove with his teeth and answered.

“Cross.”

“Declan, it’s Marlene.” His dispatcher. Her voice was tight, the way it got when something came in that she hadn't been trained for. “I’ve got a call off the northern Rockies. A team out of the Selkirk research station, seven souls, overdue forty-eight hours.”

Seven. The number landed in his gut like a stone. “Forty-eight hours in this weather? They know the drill up there. What does the station say?”

“Last contact was a satellite ping three days ago. Coordinates logged. Then nothing. Sponsor is frantic, RCMP is on site at the trailhead, and they’re asking for you by name.”

That made him pause, shovel resting on the ground. “By name?”

“Sergeant Nolan. Says he worked with you on the Deschamps case last winter.”

The name hit harder than the cold. Deschamps. He could still feel the weight of the girl in his arms, still see the snow falling over her face, still hear the silence when her chest stopped moving. He’d gotten there too late. Forty minutes too late, and the storm had swallowed the trail and every sign leading to her, and the one piece of evidence he’d needed—the one thing that would have told him she’d turned south instead of north—had been buried under an avalanche of wind-driven powder.

His jaw tightened. “Tell him I’m on my way.”

“You’re two hours out, Declan. Snow’s coming in hard after noon.”

“Then I stop talking and start moving.”

He ended the call, shoved the phone back into his pocket, and stared at the truck. The shovel went into the snowbank point-first, standing there like a marker. He had a spare set of tracks in the bed, chains in the toolbox, and a bag that was always packed by the door—he’d learned that lesson at Deschamps’ cost. He grabbed the bag, threw it in the cab, and fired up the engine, listening to the diesel cough and catch in the cold.

The truck clawed its way out of the yard, plumes of white spraying from the tires. The highway was a grey scar through the spruce, and he pushed the speed, the engine note a steady drone beneath the hum of the heater. The mountains grew on the horizon, pale blue and indifferent, their peaks wrapped in cloud.

Two hours and change later, he rolled into the trailhead parking lot. The lot was plowed clean, but the wind had already started to finger fresh snow across the asphalt. Three vehicles occupied the space: an RCMP cruiser, a black Suburban with government plates, and a gleaming white pickup with a logo on the door that read “Selkirk Kinetics” in angular blue letters.

A man in a heavy parka broke away from the cluster near the cruiser and walked toward him as he killed the engine. The walk was familiar—deliberate, measured, a cop’s economy. Sergeant Nolan was older than Declan remembered, grey threading through his close-cropped hair and deeper lines carved around his mouth, but his eyes were the same: flat, evaluating, holding the memory of everything they’d both seen on that mountain.

“Cross,” Nolan said, offering a hand that Declan shook briefly. “Thanks for coming.”

“You said Deschamps.”

Nolan nodded once, no elaboration needed. “I’ve got a team missing in the Selkirks, and I need someone who can read what’s left on the ground before this weather buries it.”

“What do we know?”

Nolan gestured, and they walked toward the Suburban. A woman leaned against the driver’s door, arms crossed, her face pale and drawn. She was in her late forties, sharp-featured, with a Gore-Tex jacket that looked brand new and a pair of winter boots that had never seen more than a parking lot. The sponsor, Declan guessed. Frantic was right—her eyes were red-rimmed, and she’d been chewing her lip until it was raw.

“This is Dr. Eliza Voss,” Nolan said. “Director of the Selkirk station. Her team.”

Declan nodded at her. “You last heard from them three days ago?”

Voss straightened, some professional composure reasserting itself. “Forty-eight hours past their scheduled check-in, yes. Their research site is a two-day traverse from the station. Camp sites were pre-arranged, routes were logged. They know the protocols.” She hesitated. “They’re not amateur hikers, Mr. Cross. They’re scientists. Geologists, a botanist, a glaciologist. They’ve done this season after season.”

“Seven of them?”

“Six researchers and a guide. A local man, Cole Wainwright. He’s been running groups into the northern Rockies for fifteen years.”

“And Wainwright checks in on time,” Declan said. Not a question.

Voss’s mouth tightened. “Religiously. He’s the type to file his routes days in advance and carry two sat phones as backup. He’d never go dark voluntarily unless something went wrong.”

Declan turned to Nolan. “You searched the route?”

“We put a bird up yesterday before the ceiling dropped. Thermal imaging found nothing. Ground team went in on snowmobiles from this trailhead, covered about twelve klicks of the approach before wind and whiteout turned them back.” Nolan pulled out a tablet, tapped the screen, and turned it toward Declan. It showed a topographic map, the trailhead marked in red, a series of waypoints cutting northwest along a river valley, then up into a basin below a glacier.

“Last GPS ping,” Nolan said, tapping a point about twenty-two klicks out. “Coordinates logged at 03:12 on the morning of their third day. Then nothing.”

“No emergency beacon?”

“Nothing. If they were in trouble, they didn’t hit the button. Or couldn’t.”

Declan studied the map. The basin was a dead end—steep walls on three sides, glacier above, only one way in and out through the valley. If something had gone wrong in there, the team would have been funnelled. He could see the terrain in his mind’s eye, the switchbacks climbing through treeline, the tree line giving way to open rock and snow, the wind scouring the basin clean.

“You want me to go in.”

“I want you to find them,” Nolan said. “Before the storm locks this down for a week and the ground never gets a chance to speak again.”

The snow had started falling again, small flakes at first, flirting with the wind. Declan looked at the sky. The clouds were low and grey, the kind that pressed down on the peaks like a lid. He had maybe six hours of viable light, maybe less before the whiteout set in hard.

“Who’s on my team?”

“You’re on your own, Cross.” Nolan’s voice was flat. “The ground team is being redeployed to a highway incident south of the pass, and my budget won’t cover a second flyover before tomorrow. I have you, your equipment, and whatever you can carry on a machine.”

Declan absorbed that in silence. He’d expected backup. He’d expected at least another pair of eyes, another set of tracks to help haul out survivors if he found any. But he knew the math of these situations, the way resources evaporated when there were too many fires and too few truckloads of water. He was the specialist, the one they called when the regular systems failed.

And he was the one who’d failed last time.

“Which machine is mine?”

Nolan pointed to a lone snowmobile at the edge of the lot, a Ski-Doo with a cargo sled hitched behind. “Fresh tank, spare fuel in the sled, and a gear cache. Radio coverage is intermittent beyond the first ridge, but you’ll have line-of-sight until you drop into the valley. Check in at each waypoint.”

Declan walked to the machine, ran a hand along the seat. He checked the sled—tent, stove, food enough for four days, an avalanche kit with probe and shovel, and a compact medical bag. He’d have added more, but the load was balanced. He went through the motions mechanically, hands remembering their roles.

Voss approached him while he worked. Up close, she looked older than she had by the Suburban, and more afraid. “Mr. Cross. These people—they’re colleagues. Friends. Some of them have been at the station for over a decade.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?” She held his gaze. “The valley they were working in—there have been reports from other teams. Strange tracks in the snow. Markings that don’t match any animal native to the area. It’s been written off as pareidolia, as wind scouring, but some of my people were spooked. They said it felt… watched.”

Declan paused, the snowmobile strap in his hand. He’d heard stories like that before, in every mountain town from here to the Arctic Circle. People spent too long alone in the white and their minds started making patterns out of shadows. He was a tracker, not a mystic. He read what was in front of him, and he didn’t invent what wasn’t there.

“I’ll read the ground,” he said. “Whatever’s there, I’ll read it.”

She didn’t look comforted. He didn’t have time to make her comfortable.

He suited up—layers he’d learned to move in, a shell over fleece, boots already broken in. He swung a leg over the snowmobile and pulled the starter; the engine revved, eager, vibrating through the handles.

Nolan came to the side of the machine, one hand on the cargo sled. “Cross. Last winter doesn’t define you.”

“No,” Declan said. “But it taught me. And I’m not making the same mistakes again.”

He gave the throttle a twist and the machine lunged forward, off the asphalt and onto the snow-packed trail that led into the trees. The wind picked up immediately, dry snow stinging against his goggles. He didn’t look back. The trail narrowed, spruce closing in on either side, and the world shrank to the narrow ribbon of white in front of him.

The GPS on his handlebars showed the waypoint coordinates, a red dot twenty-two klicks out in the basin.

The sky above was beginning to spit harder, and he knew that whatever he found out there, he had maybe one clean chance at it before the mountains closed their fist and buried every track, every clue, every reason to go on.

He leaned forward over the throttle and drove into the darkening white, the first flakes of the storm ticking against his helmet like the first taps of a hammer on glass.