“You don’t know him.”

It was the same insane conviction that Monks had heard from Glenn.

“You can’t stay here, are you kidding?” Monks said. “If he doesn’t find you, you’ll die. If he does, he’ll-God knows what he’ll do.”

She shook her head, with childlike stubbornness. “No. It’s all okay, he forgives me.”

Monks squeezed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, trying to think of a way to cut through the invisible spiderweb that Freeboot had strung around his followers.

“What about Hammerhead?” Monks said. “You think he’ll forgive you?”

“He wouldn’t dare cross Freeboot,” she said, looking up scornfully. “Besides, I can make Hammerhead do anything I want.”

“But you’ll have to start sleeping with him again. And the other maquis. Right? Anybody who wants you, isn’t that the deal?”

She bowed her head again, averting her eyes.

“But you only want Freeboot, really,” Monks said. “He uses you like a whore for his men, and he plays around with other women.”

For thirty seconds, she was silent and still. Monks was abruptly aware of the piney fragrance of the fire, the dark flush that the heat had brought to her skin, the golden-downed bumps of her spine the length of her long graceful back.

Then, in a low voice, she said, “He says he has the right to every woman he wants, because he’s the alpha male. He was fucking around tonight. I knew he was going to. I got pissed.”

“Was that the business he had to take care of?”

“He does it all the time. There’s these big parties every couple of months. Everybody from camp goes down to the flats to score dope.”

Monks had figured out by now that “the flats” referred to the rest of the world outside the camp. But while he didn’t know much about drug deals, he had never thought of them as social events.

“What kind of parties?” he said.

“People around here get permits to grow medical marijuana. It’s supposed to be for their own use, but other people come up from the cities. Bikers, black gang guys. They bring crank, crack, whatever, and everybody trades. And there’s always young girls around,” she added venomously.

So that was where Freeboot had been while his son was dying.

“Did Motherlode go, too?” Monks asked.

“Yeah,” Marguerite said, still caustic. “She kept saying that as soon as she stocked up, she was going to come back and be with Mandrake. She’s full of shit. All she cares about is her dope.”

There was no point in asking if Glenn had gone. Monks knew the answer.

“Marguerite, you did the right thing,” he said. “For Mandrake, for me, for yourself. Keep on doing it. We just have to make it a little farther, and then Freeboot can never touch you again.”

She shook her head. “I was wrong. I belong to him. You go on, I’m staying here.”

Options flashed through Monks’s frayed mind, including herding her at gunpoint. But what could he do if she refused-shoot her? He decided on one more try at reason. If that didn’t work, he could only hope to make it out himself and send back help.

“What can Freeboot do to you from far away?” he said. “How can he hurt you?”

She finally met Monks’s gaze. Her eyes were wet with frightened tears.

“It’s not even like being scared of dying,” she said. “It’s like he’ll be in your mind forever, making you live in hell.”

“Then how come he’s not doing it to me?”

She shrugged warily, her full breasts rising and falling.

“Because it’s all just something he’s made you believe,” Monks repeated emphatically. “We’ll get him out of your head for good, I promise.” He squeezed her wrist, managing one of his crocodilian smiles. “I always hate to see a pretty girl put her clothes back on, but we’ve got to move.”

She smiled back, a quick, timid twitch of her lips. Monks seized the moment.

“Here, this will jump-start us,” he said. He reached for his jacket and pulled out the little jar of meth. Mixing speed and hypothermia might be a bad idea, but at this point, he was willing to risk anything. Marguerite was slow to accept it, maybe sensing that it would goad her out of her passivity. But then she unscrewed the lid and bent over it to inhale.

Monks did the same. It occurred to him that this was, in all probability, the only time in his life that he would crouch naked beside a fire in the wilderness with a lovely young woman, doing illegal drugs.

He pressed his palm against her cheek.

“Now come on,” he said. “The kid needs you.”

She wavered for another several seconds, but then nodded. She set Mandrake down and started pulling on her clothes.

Monks closed his eyes in relief.

His feet hurt like hell. The wet, loose pull-on boots had chewed them into blistered lumps of flesh that he picked up and put down, one in front of the other, in a dull, trudging cadence without end. Marguerite slogged along silently ahead of him, so he could keep her in sight in case she weakened again. The snow had stopped, and what was on the ground had lightened to a film of slush, but the terrain was still rough. At least he could be sure now that they were traveling in a straight line.

It was just after noon. He estimated that they had made it twenty-some miles from camp, now descending a series of ridgebacks in a direction he was pretty sure was west, where Marguerite thought the nearest highway lay. The clouds had lifted enough for him to navigate by a general sense of the terrain sloping down toward the ocean, moss growing on the north side of the trees, and an occasional glimpse of faint lighter streaks behind the dark shifting tapestry of gray, indicating the path of the sun. But they still obscured any long-range vistas, and they presented the kind of threat that kept experienced outdoors people uneasy. He looked up constantly, trying to gauge what was coming. It seemed to him that the clouds were thickening again, suggesting another storm moving in. Often, several of them lined up out on the Pacific like batters in a dugout, waiting for their turn to step up to the plate and lash the countryside.

Monks knew that both he and Marguerite were getting close to collapsing again. Even if they could find shelter, he wasn’t at all sure that they would recover this time. But there had to be a road before too much longer.

There was nothing to do but keep lifting up those feet and putting them down, one after the other.

Marguerite stopped abruptly, raising her head.

Monks had heard it, too-a human voice.

He stood motionless, listening hard, trying to convince himself that the sound had been a tree branch snapping under its snow load, or a raven’s caw.

But he knew the truth, and a few seconds later, it came again-a man’s voice, shouting, as if calling to someone else.

Marguerite swung to face him. Her eyes burned with fear and accusation.

“I told you he’d find us!” she half-sobbed.

Monks shushed her angrily with a wave of his hand, and stepped close.

“Come on, keep moving,” he whispered hoarsely. “Stay in the trees. And stay quiet.”

She turned and hurried on. Monks followed, with disbelief washing through him-along with rage, the feeling of being cheated. He had started to believe that whatever their other troubles might be, they had finally eluded pursuit, that last night’s heavy snow and today’s melting had wiped out their trail. He didn’t believe for a second that Freeboot had zeroed in on Marguerite’s thoughts, like a radar beam. The maquis had probably spotted some tracks from a vantage point, as he had feared, and found enough vestiges to follow.

In this vast rugged landscape, it still seemed astounding.

There were at least two voices, maybe more. They continued to sound at intervals, no doubt following the clear line of tracks in the snow. The distance was hard to gauge-at least a mile, he guessed, and hoped to Christ farther. In a silent alpine forest, voices could carry a very long way.