Extinction Read Online Free PDF Page B

only one of her, after all, but it was enough for Anna to have become pretty incredible for an eight-year-old.
    The trips had started after the death of her husband, Patrick. He had contracted a rare form of degenerative disease at a shockingly young age, and Alyssa had nursed him for twelve painful months before – mercifully for him, agonizingly for her and Anna – he had quietly passed away one night. She had cried for hours – helpless tears, hopeless tears – but had gathered herself before Anna woke. She needed to be strong for her, and although both Alyssa’s parents and Patrick’s parents were a huge help, the fact of the matter – at least as Alyssa saw it – was that Anna was her responsibility, and nobody else’s. And she was now all that remained of Patrick.
    Anna herself had found it hard to deal with her father’s death. He had been ill for some time and had not been involved in her upbringing during that final, painful year, but the gap that he left was difficult for a young girl to deal with.
Where’s Daddy?
she would ask incessantly, especially before bedtime, when he used to read stories to her before kissing her goodnight.
When’s Daddy coming home?
It was hard for Alyssa to explain, and Anna had cried for days, for weeks, and Alyssa had cried along with her.
    It wasn’t until their first trip into the mountains, a few months after Patrick’s death, that Anna had started to come round. The magical quality of the snow, the serene peace of the valleys, the majesty of the mountains themselves had shown Anna another view of the world, perhaps of something beyond it, and given her hope; and Alyssa had felt it too, the pull of something beyond, the first faint rays of a life beyond the one that had been wrenched so terribly from them.
    Alyssa and Patrick had been winter sports addicts – skiing, snowboarding, ice climbing; anything that could be done, they would do it. They had even met on a mountain, thousands of miles from home, and when holiday romance had bloomed they were delighted to find they lived only a hundred miles from one another back home. Alyssa’s first love was climbing, and had been since she was a little girl, but Patrick’s was snowboarding, and he had shown her everything he knew. They were wonderful years, those early years, getting away whenever work let them. She was an up-and-coming journalist, cutting her teeth on the local papers but determined to break into the nationals; he was an up-and-coming public prosecutor, destined for the DA’s office. But then Anna had come along, and it wasn’t so easy to get away any more. They hadn’t regretted it, not for a second; on the contrary, their years of adventure were simply put aside as other priorities took hold.
    But when Patrick died, the first place Alyssa had thought to take Anna – after the worst of the grieving was over and behind them – was the mountains. If Patrick had loved them, she thought, maybe Anna would too. And she had, with a wild abandon, and for the first time in as long as she could remember Alyssa had felt free, the strains of her life miraculously lifted.
    Anna had wanted to ski. She was adamant about that, having watched as people shot down the slopes, leaning first one way and then the other, slicing through the snow in graceful arcs.
    Alyssa had taught her at first, and the first season had just been the basics – how to put on the equipment, how to stand, how to move, and then the first few tentative movements down the training slopes – and Anna had loved it. Alyssa had seen the excitement in her eyes, the joy of being a little girl that had been absent for so long, and had almost wept with happiness herself.
    Further visits to the slopes had shown that Anna was moving beyond her mother’s teaching limits, and so Alyssa started to arrange more expert instruction. This was what had led them here, to the special training centre in the heart of the western mountains, where Anna was undergoing