Andrew untied the rope from his waist and let it drop to the ground where Evan lay panting. The climb had exhausted them both. Even though sweat had drenched his shirt, Andrew felt chilled from the light breeze. Tendrils of pain had moved up his waist into his armpits and down his hips into his thighs. He was in good shape but trying to shield himself from the pain in his waist and his ankle had taken its toll.

He reached into his pack for the water bottle. Like Evan's, it was nearly empty and when the last of the water dripped into his open mouth, he knew they would soon need to find more. Or the place where the soldiers had come from.

The recent storms would have left water in shallow basins but much of that would have evaporated in the bright sun and it would take time to find. It was more important to make it over the apex, and he didn't think it was far when he looked ahead.

With the water bottle shoved back into the pack, he pulled out his phone. No bars still. And the battery was almost dead. They needed to keep moving.

The map fell to the ground when he shoved the phone into a netted pocket on his bag, and he leaned over to pick it up. Based on his most recent pencil marks and how far he had come since last making them, he thought it might be a couple more hours. He looked at Evan. "It's not going to get any closer if we just sit here."

Evan sat up and shifted his pack around on his shoulders. "Rest a minute. I'll go scout that ridge."

"I don't think that's a–"

"C'mon, Andrew. You need the rest," he pleaded. "I can go check the top, make sure there's no ambush, and see what I can see. Unless you're afraid I'm going to see the aliens first."

Evan's eye's took on a darker hue when he was calm and sure. Usually blue like the sky after a summer storm, they now looked like twin orbs of twilight.

"Be careful."

Evan began walking.

"Hey, Evan?" Andrew asked softly.

"Yeah?"

"No matter what happens, I love you."

Evan snorted. "Way to make me feel better about doing the right thing."

Andrew pulled some leaves from a bush and crushed them between his fingers. The pungent scent of fresh sage filled the air. It was almost reinvigorating. Except that it wasn't. His boot felt tighter and the pain had dulled to a throb. He was tempted to take the boot off to rub away the pain, but he'd be done if he couldn't put it back on.

With the last of the sage blown from his fingertips, he reached back and extracted the carabiner from the loop on his bag. He clicked it as he watched Evan maneuver around the brush and boulders in his path to the top of the mountain. Opening and closing the latch with a click helped him keep his mind off the aches of his body.

"You remind me of him, did you know that?"

Andrew shook his head.

"You do! You are brave and smart and–"

"And a good climber."

"And a good climber. Just like your daddy."

"But I won't fall off of a mountain."

"Nope. I don't fall off of mountains. I just get myself shot in them."

"Andrew!"

He looked up in alarm. Evan was racing back down the mountain. Andrew grabbed his pack and hauled himself to his feet.

"What is it?"

"You aren't going to believe this!" Evan's face was lit up. His eyes were the color of stone washed denim and his smile crinkled at their corners.

"What's going on? What is it?"

"Come on! I don't want to ruin the surprise." Evan took Andrew's bag and shrugged it over his shoulder, then put his arm out so Andrew could use it to limp beside him. "It's unbelievable. I don't know how they did this without anybody knowing."

As they came in line with the apex, Andrew's line of vision extended beyond the rock before him, and what he saw made him stop and stare. For once, Evan was quiet.

Without thinking about it, his hand moved the carabiner to his belt and snapped it in place. He didn't know what he had been expecting to find in the mountains, but he knew they had found it.

It was a dome. A very large dome.

Cast across two mountains and descending on an arc to the ground, a honeycomb grid spliced a reflection of the mountains and sky. Andrew was reminded of how his face appeared when he looked at it in a spoon. The mountains reflected in the dome had the same distorted curve.

They were too far away to see themselves mirrored in the glass, but he wondered whether anyone inside might look out and, if they did, whether they would see them.

"Get down, Evan." He squatted to be less obvious against the horizon and groaned when the weight transferred to his ankle and pain shot up his calf.

Andrew held his thumb at arm's length and turned it on its side to estimate the size of the structure. His mother had taught him the trick of measuring distance and size when she had started taking him on hikes. She had said every hike has its dangers and that it would be important to learn to judge distance and size. He could determine how far away things were and decide about how far to travel before dark if it were late in the day.

Estimating the number of steps to reach a landmark had become a game. The winner not only earned bragging rights, but didn't have to count the next set of steps when they played again. Andrew had counted a lot of steps. As he got older, the steps translated to feet and miles.

"It's about a mile and a half away...that arc at the top has to be close to a hundred feet higher than the mountain."

"It's big, right?"

"Yeah, it's pretty big. Bigger than a football field for sure."

"So, we saw it. Now what?"

"Now what? Now we go see what's inside."

"Wait. What happened to 'sneak in, take a look, and sneak out?'"

Andrew looked directly into Evan's eyes. "We're out of water, Evan. I'm shot. We need help."

Evan threw his hands up and pointed at the dome. "They're the ones that shot you! Are you crazy? No. We are not going up there. We are turning around and go–"

"Evan."

"What?"

"I don't think I can make it back."

Evan stared at him. "Are you saying that because you want to see what's in there?"

"No."

"Okay." He kicked at a stone until it dislodged from where it had lain for a millennium. "Okay. Then we better get going."

Andrew let Evan scout a route down. He thought they could walk part of the way but then would need to rappel to the valley floor. He reported to Andrew that the drop was an easy twenty feet, and when Andrew came up to it, he agreed the smooth face didn't offer an easy solution.

As he limped to the drop, Andrew retrieved a spike and thought about what to tell Evan. The mountain was full of fractures. The trick was finding a place to set the spike in a way that the rock would not splinter and break away under his weight. And that was the easy part. Telling Evan to stay was not going to go over well.

"You have to stay here."

"What?! No! No, no, no." Evan's hair shook with his anger. "No, you don't."

"Evan, look. We don't know what they are going to do. I'm already shot."

"Exactly. You're already shot. You won't have a chance if they shoot again."

"But if you are up here, you will. You can hide in the mountain. You can hike back out and get my mom. If I stay here and you get shot, I can't make it back to the car."

Evan collapsed to the ground, his head between his knees. "I knew this wasn't a good idea. As soon as I saw the fence."

Andrew set a spike, then knotted a rope and looped on a descender. With the rope tied above the bullet wounds, he edged out over the side and tested the spike with his weight. The spike held firm.

"You should leave your pack."

Andrew thought about that. "I don't want them coming back for it, and it will be too much for you to carry out. If I take it, I might be able to convince them that we split up. And if they think you got out, then maybe they'll have a reason to keep me alive."

"So they can torture you to give up my address."

"Probably."

"Be careful," Evan said mournfully.

"I'll be as careful as I was with your mom last Friday night."

"That explains Johnny Double Quest in the dishwasher."

"You win."

"Haaa! The crowd goes wild!" Evan pumped his fists in the air. "Reigning world champion!"

"I'll be right back, Champ."

Andrew shook his head as he lay at the edge of the drop. He thought about how much better it felt to have his weight off his ankle. But his breath caught when he let himself over the lip of the cliff and the weight of his body stretched his waist long. He had to wait for a wave of anxiety to pass before he could continue. It wasn't a long drop to the valley floor, but bones could still be broken if he didn't hold his weight during the descent.

"Come on up here." His father swung him up onto his broad shoulders as if Andrew were weightless. There was so much to see!

"Don't drop me, Daddy!"

"Never!" But he dipped his shoulder and pretended. Four-year-old Andrew laughed, exhilarated by the fear of falling, yet knowing his father would never drop him, until the cacophony of loud laughter, ringing bells, and shouting carneys drew him into the chaos of the fair.

His mom was passing him cotton candy and laughing about his turquoise tongue while he gripped his father's head tightly and pointed out a tattooed man with piercings covering his face.

He struggled to see his father's face more clearly as his father pulled him around the front of his body and swung him back to the ground.

Andrew felt himself falling. The ground rushed up to meet him and his legs buckled when his feet abruptly came in contact with the hard earth. He lay stunned by the jolt, his back arched over his pack, and slowly realized that he had made a critical error. He had let go of his lifeline. It was a rookie mistake. People died when they let go of their ropes. It was exactly how his dad had died.

A wave of nausea rolled through his stomach, and he closed his eyes until the moment passed. When he opened them, he found Evan on the cliff above him, silhouetted against the cloudless blue sky. It was too bright and he looked away. His eyes found the rope on the face of the wall and moved up to the lip at the top.

"Are you okay?" Evan called down.

Slowly he moved his arms and legs like a turtle rolled over onto its shell. Nothing was broken, but his ankle was throbbing again. He held his thumb up.

"Please don't make me climb back up that rope again today," he groaned quietly.

From his new vantage point, he could see the top half of the dome. The lower half was hidden by a field of corn. When he stood up, he could see the corn had been parceled out into small plots. Each plot looked slightly different from the plot it was next to. Some were greener in color, some shorter in stature. One plot appeared so dried out, it may have been dead.

As he picked his way around the bushes and boulders leading to the corn, he stumbled. The rocky surface rose up and scraped his palms and a large droplet of blood hit the ground unnoticed. A dizzy spell washed over him as he stood and he waited for it to pass.

The pack on Andrew's back was too heavy. He dropped it next to a bush and bent enough to shove it under the lower branches. He could get it later. What he needed right now was water. He'd come back for his pack after hydrating. If he came back for it at all.

Though the path between the plots of corn was easier to walk, he stayed close to the rows, recovering when his feet faltered on the uneven furrows. Heavy foot traffic had packed the ground down and as Andrew got closer, he wondered again if anyone was looking out at him.

The dome was not as reflective as he had thought when looking at it from the higher plateau. It had some sort of semitransparent filter that kept fooling his eyes. One moment he thought he could see boulders and corn inside, the next he wondered if it reflected the outside.

He ducked behind a row of corn close to the perimeter of the glass wall, and he waited for his heart to quit pounding. He had seen someone walking toward him. He was sure of it.

He took a deep breath and listened for the sound of approaching footsteps. Nothing. Just the quiet swish of corn stalks brushing against one another and the pounding of his heartbeat.

Taking a cautious step out of the corn, he looked toward the glass again. The man in the glass was staring back.

"Nice. You're an idiot," he berated his reflection.

He slowly walked closer to the dome. He found his eyes were working hard to clarify the shadowy shape of what looked like a person on the other side of the glass.

He stumbled and fell to one knee. Exhausted, he let his head rest against the glass. Unbidden, his hand reached around to his back where a bolt of pain had fired down his leg. Blood had oozed its way over the lip of the tape and soaked through his shirt again. He was so tired. Water.

He reached up to the glass and implored, "Help me."