By the time the minibus climbed the long road to the Aldermoor gates that evening, the whole school had read it. The tabloid story was short, and it was clever, because Conrad Ashcroft's lawyers had made sure it was. It didn't name Alex Reed. It didn't say the boy in the photograph was at Aldermoor. It simply printed the six-year-old photograph from Aspen, of Ethan Cross and a laughing twelve-year-old boy on a chairlift, and asked a series of questions below it. Why had the world's most private billionaire never once allowed his son to be photographed since? Where was the boy now? Was it true, as "a source close to a Swiss boarding school" had claimed, that Ethan Cross's heir was enrolled at an elite academy in the Alps under a false name, posing as a scholarship student? And then, at the very bottom, a second photograph. Grainy, taken from a distance, with a long lens, of a dark-haired young man in a borrowed coat walking across a snowy courtyard with a curly-haired girl beside him.

The retraction appeared on the tabloid's website at six o'clock the next morning, and by breakfast, the whole of Aldermoor had read that too.It was four sentences long, buried at the bottom of the home page under a story about a footballer's divorce. The newspaper accepted that its source had been unreliable. It accepted that the photographs it had published did not show the person it had suggested. It apologized unreservedly to Mr. Ethan Cross and his family. It would not be publishing anything further.At the same time, three different gossip sites in America were running three different long-lens photographs of three different dark-haired young men in hooded sweatshirts walking into three different university buildings in Massachusetts, California and Connecticut, each one claiming to have found the real Cross heir."Fog," Lena said, reading them over her coffee at the Iron table with a faint smile. "Your father is very good.""How do you know it was my father?""Because nobody el

The hidden door behind the screens swung open on oiled hinges, and Lena Voight stepped through it into the small stone room.She was dressed all in black, black jeans and a black turtleneck and a short black jacket, with her sleek hair tucked behind her ears, and she was holding a pistol too. It was bigger than Priya's, matte gray, with a long suppressor screwed onto the end of the barrel, and it was pointed at the center of Priya's chest. Her gold eyes were calm and completely without expression.Priya swung her own gun toward the sound, then back to Alexander, then toward Lena again, her face suddenly white."Don't," Lena said softly. "You're good, Anaya. I've watched you for four months, and you're very good. But I've been doing this since I was eleven, and you'd be dead before you finished turning."Priya froze, her gun halfway between them."How do you know that name?" she whispered."I know all the names." Lena took one step into the room, then another, moving around the edge of

Damien Ashcroft sat on the end of Theo's bed in the cramped attic room, with his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging between them, and for a long time, he didn't say anything at all.Alexander had never seen him like this. Even in the Great Hall, kneeling on the stone floor in front of six hundred people, Damien had held on to something, some scrap of arrogance or fury. Now there was nothing left. He looked like a boy who hadn't slept in a week, which, from the shadows under his eyes, was probably true. His hands were trembling. His blazer had a coffee stain on the lapel, right beside his gold pin.Zara stood by the window with her arms folded, watching him with open distrust. Theo sat on Alexander's bed, as far from Damien as he could get in a room that size. Lena had gone with Keller to look at the car tracks again. Felix was in the library, pulling every map of the Grauhorn Glacier he could find."Talk," Alexander said quietly.Damien rubbed his face with both hands."She fou

The storm reached the glacier at four o'clock in the afternoon, and within twenty minutes, Alexander couldn't see his own hand in front of his face.It came in from the west like a wall. One moment the sky was still blue overhead and the marker poles were stretching away across the snow in a clear red line. Then the gray cloud bank that had been creeping over the peaks all afternoon tumbled down the upper glacier toward them, and the wind hit, howling, flinging snow sideways so hard that it stung like sand. The light went flat and gray. The horizon disappeared. The ground and the sky became the same color, and there was nothing in any direction but white.Team Iron had just reached the top of the crevasse field when it hit. They were roped together, the way the route required on the glacier, ten meters of rope between each of them. Alexander could feel the rope tug at his harness behind him, but he couldn't see Zara at the other end of it, only a faint red smudge where her hat was."S