The logging road appeared through the snow like a scar.
Brown against white, the gravel surface already dusted with the thin, dry flakes that had been falling since midday. The road was wider than the one south of the ridge — two lanes, crowned for drainage, the ditches on either side clogged with years of debris but still recognizable as engineered features. Someone had maintained this road more recently than the southern sections. The gravel was packed, the worst ruts filled with crushed stone. Drivable by something heavier than feet.
Lena pointed north. "Eleven miles. We'll hit the outer markers in about eight — Marsh puts stone cairns along the road every mile for the last three. When you see the cairns, you're close."
Petra said nothing. She'd been quiet since they left the canyon — not picking her words, just watching. Her eyes swept the landscape with the practiced habit of seven years alone, reading terrain the way Thorne read Network records. Cataloging. Looking for what didn't belong.
They walked.
The snow thickened. The flakes grew larger, wet now, heavy, the temperature sliding toward the line where snow stopped being weather and became a problem. River pulled Grandmother's coat tighter. The torn fabric did what it could. The wind found every gap. Her side ached under the iodine-stiff bandage. Her hands were numb. Her boots were wet from the canyon creek, the moisture turning cold in the mountain air, the leather going stiff.
Thorne walked. The compression wrap held. Each breath was shallow, controlled, the cotton strips doing their work, the rib pinned against the lung it wanted to puncture. He moved like a man carrying a cracked glass across a room — every step measured, every impact absorbed.
Cal walked behind Lena. He hadn't said anything since the canyon, but his silence had a weight to it. The machete was on his hip, his hand near the hilt but not on it. Ready to be ready.
Mile one. Mile two. Mile three. The road ran northwest through a valley that narrowed as the mountains pressed in from both sides. The creek followed the road on the left, wider and faster now than it had been at the canyon mouth, carrying snowmelt from the peaks above.
At mile four, Lena stopped.
"We should rest. There's a —"
"We don't rest." Petra's voice cut through the snow. Sharp. Final. "Seven miles to the Post. We walk them."
Lena looked at her. Something passed between them — not a conversation, not even a real look. Something underneath. The frequency of two people who understood something the others didn't. Lena's jaw tightened, then released.
"Fine," she said. "We walk."
They walked.
At mile six, River saw the first cairn — a stack of flat stones, knee-high, placed at the road's edge with the deliberate balance of a person who knew the difference between a random rock pile and an intentional one. The stones were lichen-covered but the arrangement was human: largest on the bottom, smallest on top, a pointed capstone on the stack.
"Five miles," Lena said. "The cairns are every mile."
At mile seven, the second cairn. At mile eight, the third. The road was easier here — better maintained, the gravel fresher, the ruts shallower. Someone was keeping this road functional. Someone with labor and tools and the expectation of visitors.
Petra stopped at the third cairn.
"River."
River turned.
The mountain woman was standing beside the cairn, her stick planted, her bad leg at the angle that minimized pain. Snow was in her hair, on her shoulders, on the pack she'd carried through the canyon and up the trail without a word. She looked smaller out here. In the canyon, the walls had framed her, given her the presence of someone who belonged. On the road, she was just a woman with a ruined knee and a walking stick and seven years of solitude worn into every line of her face.
"When we get to the Post," Petra said. "Stay close to me."
"Why?"
Petra's mouth almost moved. The hint of expression. "Because I've been to settlements before. And the ones that are expecting you are the ones you should worry about."
"Marsh is expecting us," Lena said. She'd stopped ahead and turned back. "That's the whole point. She knows you're coming. She has medical supplies for —" she gestured at Thorne "— for your friend."
"That's what worries me." Petra started walking again. The stick tapped the road. "The Sanctuary sends medical supplies to the Post twice a year. You said that. Supplies that nobody else in these mountains has. Antibiotics. Painkillers. Real medicine."
"Yes."
"And in exchange, Marsh does what? Sends herbs? Preserved food?"
"She sends —" Lena paused. Barely a beat. "She sends herbs, food, trail reports. Information about the routes."
"Information." Petra nodded. "About the routes. About who's traveling them. About who's coming north."
Snow and wind and Thorne's breathing and the crunch of boots on gravel.
"She reports on travelers," Cal said. Quiet, from behind River. No inflection. Just fact.
"She's a waypoint keeper," Lena said. "That's what waypoint keepers do. They track movement. They share information."
"With who?"
"With the network. With everyone."
"Including the Sanctuary." Cal's voice hadn't changed. Still flat. Still factual. But the fact had an edge now. "Marsh reports every traveler who comes through Cutler's Post to the Sanctuary. Names, numbers, direction of travel. And the Sanctuary trades medicine for that information."
"It's not —" Lena stopped walking. Turned to face them. The snow fell between them, the flakes large and slow, drifting through the gray air. "It's not sinister. It's how the network works. Every waypoint reports. Every keeper shares information. That's the system."
"The system serves the Sanctuary," Thorne said. His thin voice cutting through the weather. "The network was designed to move information north. Every report, every relay, every message — it all flows uphill. To the Sanctuary. They're not just monitoring the routes. They're monitoring the people on them."
Lena's face was still. The young, unbattered face that River had noticed in the canyon — a face that had grown up behind walls. But behind the stillness, something was working. A calculation. A reassessment.
"Marsh is a good person," Lena said.
"Nobody said she wasn't," Petra replied. "Good people do bad things when the people paying them ask nicely enough."
---
Mile nine. Mile ten. The cairns counted down. The snow was heavier now, accumulating on the road, on their shoulders, on Thorne's compression wrap. The world was going white. The mountains were disappearing behind curtains of falling snow, the peaks invisible, the ridges fading. The road was the only certain thing — brown beneath the white, a line through a landscape that was erasing itself.
At mile ten, Lena moved ahead. "I'll go first. Let Marsh know you're coming. She'll have the building warm. She'll have the medical supplies ready."
"No," Cal said.
Lena stopped.
"We arrive together." Cal moved to the front. Beside Lena. Not blocking her — standing with her. Wanting to see what was ahead at the same time the guide saw it. "Nobody goes ahead. Nobody announces us."
"She already knows —"
"Then she can wait ten more minutes." Cal looked at Lena with the steady, measuring gaze River had learned to read: the trader evaluating a deal, looking for the gap between what was offered and what was real. "We arrive together. We see the Post together. We meet Marsh together."
Lena looked at River. The appeal was in her eyes — *tell him I'm not a threat, tell him Marsh is good and the Post is safe and I came here to help.*
River said nothing.
They arrived together.
---
Cutler's Post was everything Lena had described and nothing she'd prepared them for.
The ranger station sat in a clearing at the junction of two creeks, the building low and dark under the snow, its log walls weathered to the gray of old bone. A second building — smaller, newer, the logs not yet fully gray — stood thirty feet from the first. Between them, a courtyard of packed earth, now white. A well with a wooden cover. The greenhouse Lena had mentioned: salvaged glass and wood, the panes foggy with condensation, green visible behind the moisture. A wall of logs and rocks surrounded the compound, chest-high, topped with a rough palisade of sharpened stakes.
The gate was open.
Not just unlocked — open. Wide open. The log-and-rope gate that should have been the compound's throat was thrown back against the palisade wall, the opening a twelve-foot gap that anyone could walk through. In the snow, in the approaching storm, with the wind pushing through the mountains, the gate was open.
"That's wrong," Petra said.
"Marsh sometimes —"
"The gate is open." Petra's voice was ice. "In a storm. With travelers coming. The gate should be closed and someone should be at it. That's how settlements work. You close the gate and you open it for the people you choose. You don't leave it open like an invitation."
River looked at the compound. The buildings were dark — no lamplight in the windows, no smoke from the chimney. The greenhouse was lit by the gray daylight filtering through the glass, but the buildings themselves were lightless. A settlement of twenty-three people, in a snowstorm, early afternoon, and no one had lit a lamp.
"Where is everyone?" Cal asked.
Lena didn't answer immediately. She was looking at the open gate with an expression River couldn't pin down — not surprise, not alarm. Something between the two. The face of someone seeing what they'd expected but hoped not to see.
"Maybe they're in the root cellar," Lena said. "Marsh does that sometimes — calls everyone below when a storm hits. The cellar's warmer."
"All twenty-three people."
"It's a big cellar."
Cal looked at Petra. Petra looked at Cal. The two of them reaching the same conclusion at the same moment, their faces saying the same word.
*Trap.*
"We need the medical supplies," River said. Her voice was steady. She'd built that steadiness over ten days of hard truth and harder travel — afraid and moving anyway. "Thorne won't last until the Sanctuary without them. If the supplies are in the root cellar, we go to the root cellar."
"And if the root cellar is why the gate's open?" Cal asked.
"Then we go carefully."
They entered the compound. Cal first, machete drawn, the blade catching snowflakes. River beside him, weaponless but watchful. Petra behind, her stick in one hand, the other hand free. Lena walked with them — not leading now, not guiding. Walking among them with the uncertain posture of someone whose certainties were coming apart.
Thorne came last. Slow. The compression wrap holding, the breathing controlled, the body running on will and the need to reach a place where the will could rest.
The compound was empty.
Not abandoned — empty. The distinction was in the details. The courtyard had fresh tracks — boot prints in the thin snow, multiple sizes, going in multiple directions. The well cover was off, the bucket sitting on the stone rim with water still in it. The greenhouse door was ajar, warm air leaking out in a visible plume. Someone had been here. Recently. The tracks were filling with snow but not filled — minutes old. Maybe an hour.
Cal approached the main building. The door was heavy — thick logs, reinforced with iron bands, the kind of door that could stop a battering ram. Closed but not locked. He pushed it open with his shoulder, the machete up, and stepped inside.
Dark. Cold. A single large room — the ranger station's original layout, modified with partitions of hung blankets and salvaged plywood. A stone fireplace dominated the far wall, the hearth cold, the ashes gray. A long table in the center, scarred with use. Shelves along the walls holding supplies — canned goods, dried herbs, tools, the accumulated necessities of a settlement that had been running for eight years.
The shelves were half-empty. Not ransacked — selectively emptied. The canned goods were gone. The dried herbs were gone. The tools were reduced to the ones too heavy to carry quickly.
"They left," Cal said. He was moving through the room, checking behind the partitions, the machete tracking his eyes. "Not fled — left. Packed and walked out."
"In a storm," Petra said from the doorway.
"In a storm." Cal looked at the cold fireplace. "They didn't take time to light a fire. They didn't close the gate. They packed what they could carry and they went. Recently."
River looked at Lena. The young woman was standing in the doorway beside Petra, her arms wrapped around herself — the cold, the missing shirt, the reality hitting her all at once. Her face was pale. Not performing pale. Genuinely pale.
"I didn't know," Lena said.
"Didn't know what?"
"I didn't know they were going to leave." Lena's voice was smaller than it had been. The confidence from the canyon — the singing, the easy answers, the detailed knowledge of Cutler's Post — had contracted into something younger and rawer. "Marsh sent me to find you. She said bring them here. She said the supplies would be ready."
"And instead the Post is empty." Cal's voice had that knife-edge it got when facts lined up in patterns he didn't like. "Marsh sent you south. While you were gone, everyone packed and left. Gate open. Supplies gone. Us with nothing."
"The root cellar," Lena said. "The medical supplies are in the root cellar. Marsh wouldn't take those. Those are for — she wouldn't take those."
Petra was already moving. The root cellar entrance was outside, around the back of the main building — a sloped door set into the ground, wood and iron, heavy, latched from the outside.
Petra unlatched it. Pulled the door open. Stone steps led down into darkness.
"Wait here," she said, and went down.
River counted the seconds. Twenty. Thirty. Forty. Snow fell into the cellar entrance, the flakes disappearing into the dark.
Petra came back up. Her face told the story before her mouth did.
"Empty," she said. "Cleaned out. Every shelf. Marsh took the medical supplies with her."
---
The silence in the compound was different from the canyon's silence. The canyon had been alive — a breathing, humming thing that turned sound into something strange. This silence was dead. The silence of a place where people had been and weren't anymore.
River stood in the courtyard. The snow was falling harder now, the flakes thick, the sky a uniform gray pressing down on the mountains. The buildings were dark. The root cellar was empty. The gate was open. Twenty-three people had packed their lives and walked out into a snowstorm, and they'd done it while Lena was in the canyon, and they'd done it after sending Lena south to collect the exact group of travelers they were supposed to be helping.
"Explain," Cal said. He was standing in front of Lena, the machete sheathed — not because the threat was gone but because the threat wasn't physical. The threat was information, and machetes didn't help with that. "Explain why Marsh sent you to find us and then left before we arrived."
"I don't know." Lena's voice was thin. She was standing in the snow in her wool jacket and leather vest, no shirt underneath, her arms crossed, shivering. "She said to bring you here. She said the supplies would be ready. She said —"
"What else did she say?"
"She said —" Lena stopped. Closed her eyes. When she opened them, something had changed. Not confession — recognition. Pieces fitting together that she'd been carrying separately. "She said to take the canyon. She said to go through the Quiet, not over the ridge. She said it would take two days."
"Two days," Petra repeated. "The time she needed to pack and leave."
"I didn't know."
"Maybe." Petra's voice was the flattest River had heard it. "Maybe you didn't know she was going to leave. But you knew something. You were singing in that canyon. In a canyon you'd never been in. At midnight. Alone." She stepped closer to Lena. The bad leg didn't slow her. "Why were you singing?"
Lena's jaw worked. The composure that had held through the canyon and the trail was cracking at the edges, and what was underneath was more honest and less pretty.
"Because I was scared," she said. "I was scared in the canyon and I sing when I'm scared and I didn't know you were that close because the echoes made everything —"
"That part I believe." Petra's voice softened one degree. One. "Now tell me the part I won't believe."
Lena looked at River. Not at Cal, not at Petra, not at Thorne. At River. And the look was the one River had seen in the canyon beside the fire — the look that was harder to name than deception or friendliness. The look of a person who had something to say and knew the saying would cost her.
"Marsh got a second message," Lena said. "Two days ago. Not on the network frequency. On a private channel — one the Sanctuary uses for urgent communications. I was in the radio room when it came in. Marsh sent me out, but the walls are thin. I heard."
The snow fell. The wind pushed.
"The message was from the Sanctuary. From the Director. It said —" Lena swallowed. "It said the Riders had sent scouts north. Into the mountains. Three days behind your group. The Director told Marsh to evacuate the Post. Move everyone to the Sanctuary for safety. Take the supplies. Leave nothing for the Riders to find."
"And us?" River asked. "What did the Director say about us?"
Lena's eyes were wet. Not crying — the kind of wet that came from wind and cold and the strain of telling a truth that made you smaller. "The Director said to slow you down. Keep you on the road. The Sanctuary would send a retrieval team to meet you between the Post and the compound."
"A retrieval team." Thorne's voice from behind them. Thin as paper, sharp as wire. "Not a rescue team. A retrieval team."
"That's the word she used. Retrieval."
The word hung there in the snow-filled air. Retrieval. You retrieved packages. Cargo. Samples. You retrieved things you owned or things you needed.
"Marsh sent you to guide us here." Cal's voice was controlled. The trader working it out: cost, benefit, the angle. "To the empty Post. Where the retrieval team would find us. On the road. Slowed down. Waiting for supplies that were already gone."
"She said the team would help —"
"She said what she was told to say." Petra took a step back from Lena. Not away — back to the wider view. "The Sanctuary wants River. The Director sent a message. Marsh followed orders. She sent Lena to collect River and deliver her to an empty waypoint where the Sanctuary's people would find her." She looked at River. "This is what I told you. On the ridge. The research comes first. It always comes first."
River stood in the snow. The flakes landed on her hair, her shoulders, the torn coat that had been her grandmother's. The courtyard was white. The buildings were dark. The gate was open. She understood what the empty rooms and abandoned walls were telling her: she was not a person here. She was a resource. And resources got delivered.
"How far behind are the Riders?" she asked.
Lena blinked. The question was tactical, not emotional, and it took her a moment to shift. "Three days behind you. That was two days ago when the message came."
"So one day behind us now."
"Maybe less. The Riders move fast in mountains. They know the terrain."
River looked at Cal. At Petra. At Thorne, who was leaning against the wall of the main building, his compression wrap white against the dark logs, his breathing controlled, his face the color of old snow.
"The Sanctuary is forty miles north," River said. "The Riders are a day behind us. The Post is empty. The supplies are gone." She listed the facts the way Thorne would — one after the other, flat. "We have no medical supplies for Thorne's rib. We have no food beyond what's in our packs. We're in a snowstorm."
"We can shelter here," Lena said. "The buildings are solid. There's a fireplace. The well —"
"And when the retrieval team arrives?" Cal asked. "We sit here and wait to be collected?"
"Or when the Riders arrive," Petra added. "A day behind you, she said. Maybe less. And they're looking for —" She nodded at River. "If they reach the Post before we leave, it's not a retrieval. It's a fight."
"Then we leave." River's voice was steady. Not calm — she couldn't afford calm. Just functional. Somebody had to decide, and the somebody was her. "We leave now. Before the storm gets worse. Before the Riders close the gap. Before the retrieval team arrives."
"Leave to where?" Cal asked. "The Sanctuary?"
"The Sanctuary." River heard herself say it and heard what it meant — walking toward the people who'd sent a retrieval team for her, who'd evacuated a waypoint and stripped the medical supplies and left them with nothing. Walking toward them. On purpose. "Forty miles. On our terms. Not theirs."
"On our terms means not on their road." Petra was thinking. River could see it — the mountain woman processing terrain and distance and threat. "If the Sanctuary sent a retrieval team, they'll send them on the logging road. The road from the Post to the Sanctuary is the obvious route. If we take the road, we meet them."
"Then we don't take the road."
Petra's eyes sharpened. "There's a ridge route. Northwest of here. Through the high passes. It's harder — much harder, especially in snow. But it's off the road. Off the routes the Sanctuary monitors." She paused. "I know parts of it. Not all. But enough to get us through the first two days."
"Two days of ridge walking with a man who has a broken rib pressing against his lung," Cal said. "In a snowstorm."
"Two days of ridge walking versus getting picked up by a retrieval team on a road." Petra looked at Thorne. "Your call, keeper. Ridge or road?"
Thorne pushed himself off the wall. The motion was slow, careful, the compression wrap creaking as his torso shifted. He looked at River with his one good eye — bright, focused, the keeper's mind still running even as the body failed.
"The Sanctuary's founding charter guarantees informed consent," he said. "Mara Nakamura-Blake wrote that provision herself. If we walk in on their terms, they control the narrative. If we walk in on ours —" He coughed. Short. Dry. No blood. "— we have leverage. The charter is leverage. But only if we arrive as people, not as packages."
"Ridge," River said.
Cal sheathed the machete. "Ridge."
Petra nodded. "We take what we can from the Post. There might be things Marsh left behind — too heavy to carry or too minor to bother with. Check the buildings. Five minutes. Then we go."
---
Five minutes. River went through the main building while Cal took the smaller one and Petra checked the greenhouse.
The main building had been stripped efficiently. Eight years of running a waypoint station had taught Marsh how to pack quickly and leave cleanly. But cleanly wasn't completely. River found things in the corners and under the furniture that the evacuation had missed or dismissed.
A half-empty bottle of rubbing alcohol. Not iodine — alcohol. Different uses. Useful.
Two cans of food — dented, labels gone, orphan cans that had ended up behind shelves and stayed there. River shook them. Liquid. Soup or stew.
A blanket. Thin, wool, moth-eaten at one corner but whole enough to help. River folded it and stuffed it into her pack.
Under a cot in the farthest partition, a knife. Small — a paring knife, wooden handle, four-inch blade. Not a weapon. A tool. But tools became weapons when weapons were absent, and River had been without a blade since the gully. The simple, centered weight of steel with an edge in her hand was the first thing that had felt like recovery in days.
She slid the knife into her belt. It wasn't the heavy-handled knife she'd lost. It wasn't Grandmother's butchering blade, the one sharpened so many times the spine curved. It was a paring knife from an abandoned ranger station, and it was hers, and having it meant she wasn't entirely defenseless.
Cal found rope. Fifty feet of good hemp, coiled and hung on a nail in the smaller building. He found a tarp — oiled canvas, small enough to fold, waterproof. He found a tin cup and a fire striker and a handful of dried jerky behind a loose board in the wall.
Petra found nothing useful in the greenhouse — the medicinal herbs Marsh cultivated had been harvested before the evacuation. Roots pulled. Leaves stripped. The plants still growing were the decorative ones. Beautiful but useless.
They gathered in the courtyard. Five minutes. The snow was thick now, the compound white, their footprints filling behind them. Lena stood near the gate, her arms wrapped around herself, watching them prepare to leave the place she'd led them to.
"I can come with you," she said. "I know the area. I can —"
"No." Cal's voice was final.
Lena flinched.
"You didn't know the Post would be empty," Cal continued. "I believe that. But you were Marsh's messenger. You were the delay. Whether you knew it or not, you were part of the plan, and I'm not walking forty miles of mountain ridge with a part of someone else's plan."
"Cal —" River started.
"She can stay at the Post. She can follow the road north. She can do whatever she wants." Cal looked at Lena without hostility but without warmth. The look of a man closing a deal that hadn't worked out. "But she doesn't come with us."
Lena looked at River. The appeal again — the eyes that had been warm in the firelight, that had given a shirt for Thorne's wrap, that had described Room 14 in the Sanctuary with a detail that was either genuine knowledge or a masterful performance.
"He's right," River said. The words were hard. Not because she was sure Lena was dangerous — she wasn't sure what she believed. But trust in the Wastes was something you spent carefully, and they'd just seen what happened when you spent it wrong. "Stay here. Wait out the storm. Go back to wherever Marsh took the others."
Lena's face crumpled. Not theatrically — the way real faces crumpled, the muscles losing their hold, the underneath showing through. She was young. She was cold. She was standing in an abandoned settlement watching the people she'd guided through a canyon leave her behind.
"The Sanctuary isn't what you think," Lena said. Her voice was stripped now — no confidence, no ease, no warmth from the canyon. Something thinner underneath. More honest. "It's not evil. The Director isn't a villain. She's a woman trying to save what's left of humanity, and she's running out of time, and your blood — your blood is the best chance she's got."
"I know," River said. "That's why I'm going. On my terms."
She turned away. Petra was already at the gate, the walking stick planted, the bad leg braced, the pack on her shoulders. Cal was beside her. Thorne was between them, held up by the compression wrap and his own refusal to stop.
River walked through the open gate of Cutler's Post and into the snow.
Behind her, Lena stood in the courtyard of the empty settlement, her arms wrapped around herself, watching them disappear into the white. She didn't call after them. She didn't sing.
---
The ridge route began a mile north of the Post.
Petra found the trailhead — invisible in the snow, a gap between two boulders that led to a narrow path climbing the western slope. Not a road. Not even a deer trail. A route made by feet that had walked it a few times a year for seven years, the ground worn just enough to distinguish itself from the slope around it.
"This goes up," Petra said. "Two thousand feet to the ridge crest. From there, we follow the ridgeline northwest. The route stays high — above the tree line for most of it. Exposed. Cold. But invisible from the roads below."
"In a snowstorm," Cal said. "On a ridge. Above the tree line."
"I said it was harder." Petra started climbing. The stick leading, the bad leg following, each step negotiated with the terrain the way it always was — carefully, stubbornly, without asking for help. "Nobody said saving yourself was comfortable."
They climbed.
The snow fell. The trail rose. The Post disappeared behind them — first the buildings, then the wall, then the clearing itself, swallowed by the storm. Cutler's Post, waypoint eight on the Sanctuary's network, became a ghost behind them. A place that had promised safety and delivered something else.
River climbed. Her legs found the familiar rhythm of ascent — the rhythm the deer trails had taught her, the switchbacks had reinforced, the mountains had been drilling into her body for a week. Step, breathe, step, breathe. The knife on her belt. The pack on her back. The wound in her side. Petra ahead. Cal beside her. Thorne behind, falling further back with every switchback.
Forty miles to the Sanctuary. Two days on the ridge. The Riders a day behind. The retrieval team somewhere on the road below. A snowstorm closing the mountains.
She was seventeen. She was injured. She was walking toward a place that wanted her blood and away from a place that had sold her trust for a radio message and a crate of antibiotics.
Her grandmother had said: *Go north. Find the Sanctuary.*
Her grandmother had not said what to do when the Sanctuary found her first.
The snow thickened. The trail climbed. Petra's stick tapped stone, the sound swallowed by the storm before it could echo. Thorne's breathing was a thin, controlled whistle. Cal walked in silence, the machete on his hip, the rope over his shoulder, his eyes scanning a landscape the snow was erasing.
River climbed, and the mountains closed around them, and somewhere behind them — a day away, maybe less — the Crimson Riders were moving north through the same storm, following the same roads, looking for the same girl. And somewhere ahead, in a compound built by her parents in the bones of a dead world, the Director of the Last Sanctuary was waiting for a blood sample that had taken seventeen years to arrive.
The snow fell.
They climbed.
