-c- 2008 Mcgraw-hill Ryerson Limited Instant

“Wedged inside a cairn of stones. Two hundred kilometers north of Baker Lake.” August tapped the compass. “The needle doesn’t point to magnetic north, boy. It points to wherever Tivon’s last camp was. I’ve tested it.”

“I saw her,” Elias said. “The thing. It wore Mom’s face.”

He raised the rifle. His hands shook. “You’re not real.”

Elias sat down beside him. The sun was setting over the hayfield, turning the grass to gold. A normal sun. A normal field. -C- 2008 mcgraw-hill ryerson limited

Elias made a choice.

The next morning, August died in his sleep. Elias found him with a smile on his face, one hand reaching toward the nightstand where the compass used to sit.

August closed his eyes. “I know.”

That night, he didn’t sleep well. He dreamed of a man in a tweed jacket, walking ahead of him. The man never turned around. His footprints left no mark on the moss.

The first three days were easy. He took a floatplane from Cochrane to Churchill, then a rattling bush plane north to a nameless lake. The pilot, a Cree woman named Delilah, dropped him on a gravel beach. “Last plane until September,” she shouted over the engine. “You sure?”

On the eighth day, the land changed. The tundra gave way to a valley—steep, dark walls of Precambrian shield, a river at the bottom that ran black as ink. But when Elias checked his topo map, there was no valley marked. According to every satellite and survey, this place was flat. “Wedged inside a cairn of stones

The cabin was one room. A cast-iron stove, cold. A bunk with a wool blanket rotted to threads. On a pine table, a journal lay open. The handwriting was small, precise, desperately tired.

He turned.

Standing in the doorway was a woman in a blue coat, dark hair, kind eyes. She looked exactly like the photograph on his father’s dresser. The photograph of the woman who had walked out of their house when Elias was three years old and never come back. It points to wherever Tivon’s last camp was

At the bottom of the valley, beside the black river, stood a cabin. Not old—ancient. The logs had been hewn with an axe, not a saw. Moss grew thick on the roof. One window was broken. The door hung open.