Claw Heart Mountain sat apart from everything, like a forgotten god hunkered in thought. It looked both eternal and lonely, without a friend in sight, surrounded by rolling hills dotted in sagebrush and cheatgrass, the summer sky a hazy blue above it. Nova watched the mountain through the SUV’s windshield, hypnotized by its looming presence. She was driving, while Mackenna sat in the front passenger seat, playing a game on her phone. The three dudes—Landon, Isaac, and Wyatt—were sprawled in the SUV’s two-tiered backseat. Landon and Wyatt were asleep, while Isaac listened to music on his earbuds.
The SUV was quiet except for the soft whir of the air-conditioning fans. Nova didn’t like listening to music or talk radio when she drove; she preferred to focus on driving, which she took seriously. The SUV, some kind of luxury Mercedes and probably super expensive, belonged to Mackenna’s wealthy family. At eighteen, Nova didn’t have much driving experience. She was worried she’d wreck the vehicle in a random accident, get everybody mad at her, and ruin her driving record before it had really started.
A petite five-two, Nova felt slightly ridiculous piloting such a massive beast of a vehicle, like a toad telling a dragon what to do. Still, they’d made it this far. They’d left Greenwood Village, a suburb in south Denver, later than planned, because predictably, Mackenna had shown up late. Mackenna had driven for the first two hours, through the traffic of Denver and into the mountains, before asking Nova to take over. Nova protested, hoping Landon, Mackenna’s boyfriend, or one of the other guys would take the wheel, but it turned out all three of the dudes had eaten marijuana gummies before they’d even left Greenwood Village. She should have known. This was their big end-of-summer road trip before returning to college, so naturally they’d be stoned from the get-go.
They’d all gone to the same prep academy in the Denver suburbs. Nova, a year younger than the others, had just enrolled as a freshman at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, where the others would be sophomores. Nova had told her parents she’d be spending the next three nights with Mackenna’s entire family at a cabin in Vail. This was partially true—they were going to stay at one of the Wolcotts’ cabins—but it was her family’s cabin on Claw Heart Mountain, across the state border in Wyoming, and Mackenna’s parents would not join them.
Nova didn’t like lying to her sweet, trusting parents (and this trip was by far the largest lie Nova had ever told them) but she knew they would have said no. It was the end of a long summer for Nova—a summer that had started with getting dumped by her boyfriend—and she’d grown tired of hanging around her house and her lame suburban neighborhood, going for walks and eating her dad’s overcooked barbecue. The memory of endless time on lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic still fresh (sometimes it felt like being stuck at home, bored, had been her entire teenage life), by mid-August Nova had finally reached the point where she feared she’d wither away and die if she didn’t go somewhere.
So, basically, Nova had lied to her parents to save her own life.
Kind of.
Nova glanced at Mackenna, who was still absorbed in her phone. Mackenna was a tall, tan, volleyball-smashing Nordic beauty with a mane of curly blond hair that cascaded down her shoulders. Nova, with her pale skin, brown pixie-cut hair, dark eyebrows, hazel eyes, stubby nose, and short chin, thought she resembled a woodland elf more than anything an average person would consider “sexy.” Which was fine with her. The attention Mackenna attracted, both in high school and the real world, from all kinds of people, seemed like a huge pain in the ass. Nova would much rather float under the sexiness radar, free to live her life without everyone drooling over her all the time.
Mackenna looked up from her phone. “What?”
Nova looked away and focused on the road. “Nothing.”
They weren’t far across the border into Wyoming, maybe thirty miles, but Claw Heart Mountain already seemed different from the mountains in Colorado. Its outline appeared indefinite, its edges somehow blurry. Which didn’t really make sense, because like the mountains in Colorado, Claw Heart must have been a part of the Rocky Mountains, which stretched all the way from New Mexico into Canada.
Mackenna leaned forward against her seat belt and peered through the windshield. She drummed her hands on the SUV’s dashboard.
“Huh. Claw Heart looks even more badass than I remember.”
“How long has it been since you’ve been here?”
Mackenna tilted her head, thinking. “Last summer, I guess.”
“You haven’t been to your own cabin for an entire year?”
“We used to come here more often, but that was before we got the second cabin in Vail. Now Dad mostly uses this one for hanging out with his business buddies and entertaining clients. Claw Heart Mountain’s good for hunting. Dad pays a neighbor to look after it for most of the year.”
“So why aren’t we just going to Vail?”
Mackenna wrinkled her nose. “It’s being fumigated. Mom saw a cockroach when she was there last weekend for her book-club retreat.”
“Vail cabin problems, huh?”
Mackenna sat back and sighed. “I know, right?”
Nova glanced in the rearview mirror. The dudes were all oblivious—eyes closed, ears stuffed with earbuds, minds still buzzed. Nova felt like a mom driving her kids to summer camp. For the seventh or eighth time that day, she wondered why she was even friends with these people. Or friends with Mackenna, anyway, since Nova hardly knew the dudes at all. Landon, with his good looks and blond, fake bedhead hair, was hot but sort of dumb, the kind of guy she’d normally ignore and be ignored by, the average Great White Bro. Isaac was smart but mean, a handsome Jewish kid with piercing brown eyes. Wyatt was probably the nicest of them, a genuinely sweet Black guy with a big smile. He’d moved to Colorado from Minneapolis three years earlier and didn’t seem worried about being popular, which, of course, made him super popular.
Nova swerved to avoid a dead critter in the road. It had exploded all over the place and was unrecognizable. Nova felt her heart go out to the creature, whatever it had been, and straightened in the driver’s seat, determined to avoid any further roadkill. The highway sloped sharply upward as they reached the base of the mountain and climbed the first length of a switchback highway, which appeared to zigzag all the way up the mountain.
Isaac removed his earbuds and leaned forward from the backseat. Nova could smell his cologne, a subtle musk that made her think of a dim coatroom at a cocktail party.
Isaac pointed at the windshield. “What the hell is that?”
Nova frowned and examined the road. It took her a moment to see what Isaac was pointing at because it was light blue, almost the same color as the sky. It was a brick-shaped armored van, lying upside down on the road, wheels in the air. The van’s small side windows had shattered, and its roof was crunched.
“Holy shit,” Mackenna said, lowering her phone. “Looks like an accident.”
Nova stopped twenty yards from the overturned van. She put the SUV in park, rolled down her window, and stuck her head out to look at the armored van and then up the mountain. A path of broken trees and torn earth went straight up, maybe a hundred yards, to the next switchback tract of highway. A haze of dirt hung in the air, still filtering down from above. Nova sat back and turned to Isaac and Mackenna. Landon and Wyatt were still sleeping in the backseat, oblivious.
“They fell,” Nova said.
Mackenna blinked. “What?”
“They fell down the mountain.”
“Whoa,” Isaac said, sitting back and rolling down his window. The smell of gasoline drifted into the SUV and Nova pulled to the side of the road in front of the overturned vehicle. She thought back to her excruciatingly dull driver’s ed classes and activated the SUV’s flashers. She wondered if they had a road kit. They could light some road flares and set up a warning lane. They needed to call 911. They had to check for survivors.
Nova put the SUV in park. She noticed her hands were trembling and rubbed them together, as if the conductive heat would offset the trembling. She unbuckled her seat belt and opened her door.
“What are you doing?” Mackenna asked.
“We have to help. We might need to give them first aid.”
“But this is so . . . dangerous. This road is super narrow. What if a semitruck comes along and smashes us too?”
“We’ll be fast.”
“We will?”
Nova nodded, feeling a surge of adrenaline. This was finally it. A real-life important adult-type situation. An adventure. Nova got out of the SUV and slid around on the loose rock that had been sprayed across the highway. She peered up the mountainside, checking to see if anything else was poised to come crashing down to the highway. She noticed a disturbance among the trees. Something enormous was moving through the shadows—something almost as tall as the trees themselves—but it appeared to be headed farther up the mountain, not down, and within a few seconds its shape disappeared into the trees altogether, leaving Nova wondering if she’d really seen anything at all.
Shaking off the unsettling vision, Nova ran up to the front of the overturned van. The side of the van read steel cage armored services. Gasoline was pooling around the van, its surface a hypnotic sheen of purple and blues. The smell was so strong it made her dizzy. Nova got down on her hands and knees and crawled closer, trying to get a better look inside the van. Both front seats were empty, as was the rest of the van’s cab. A steel partition wall, still intact, blocked off the rear cargo area of the van.
Nova scrambled to her feet and brushed the road grit from her pants. Isaac and Mackenna had exited the SUV along with Landon and Wyatt, who both looked dazed and confused after their edible nap. Nova went around to the back of the van. Its rear doors had buckled and one thick steel door was wedged open about two feet. Nova pulled on the door to increase the gap, but it wouldn’t budge. She shouted hello into the opening. No response. She turned on her cell phone’s LED flashlight and shined it into the darkness beyond.