She struggled to keep her breathing even. Calm. She tried to think, eyes closed. We found . . . someplace warm. And then . . . She remembered helping the rest of her diminished party through the crack in the rock, into the pleasant air of the strange valley. Alex had been saying something, something urgent, but Winter hadn’t been able to focus. Days of exhaustion and terror, too long deferred, had come to claim their due. So where am I? Carefully, she cracked one eye. Her bed was at one end of a long row of beds. The room was carved from stone, with rock walls and a rough, low ceiling. Thick wool carpets covered the floor, dyed in colorful, abstract patterns. A narrow window—more like an arrow slit—gave Winter an abbreviated view of the green valley she remembered, hemmed in on all sides by massive snowcapped peaks. Her uniform was gone, she realized. Peeking under the blanket revealed that someone had dressed her in a loose woolen shift.
