It reminds me of Zari getting her license. She was such a wreck; she drove like an eighty-year-old woman, her hands at ten and two and her nose maybe four inches from the wheel.

For all the trouble we had, this nightmare would be ten times easier with Zari. Once upon a time, everything was easier with Zari.

I close my eyes, feeling a wave of homesickness at the thought of how things were. It wasn’t wild or movie-worthy. It was just normal. And now, I don’t know what that word means. God, I hope I can find it again.

Harper rolls to a stop a few feet behind a green street sign. She softly swears and I don’t blame her. There are no tire tracks to follow. There is a field on the left, an endless carpet of glistening white. On the right, there is a mound of snow covering what I’m guessing is a guardrail or a concrete barrier. Beyond that, the earth slopes down sharply into a valley.

Snow is drifted across the road. Plumes of white powder swirl up into the air, turning crystalline against the inky sky. It’s beautiful. Almost breathtaking. But it also looks dangerous as hell.

“How deep is that drift?” I ask, nodding toward the mound on the right side of the road. It looks taller than any guardrail I’ve ever seen.

“I have no idea,” Brecken says.

“Let’s look for another road,” Harper says. “I can’t even see this one.”

“It’s not great, but I bet it’s the field,” Brecken says. “It might be better around that bend.”

“Or it could be worse!” Harper says. “We should keep going.”

“It could take us two hours to get back at this rate. This will shave a ton of time off our trip,” Brecken says.

“If we don’t get stuck in that snowdrift,” I say.

“No,” Josh says, sounding convinced. “There might not be another one. This is where we need to turn. There’s a guardrail under that giant mound. We can use that for reference.”

“That’s great,” Brecken says. “Except we can’t see the road.”

“Yeah, but I...” Josh pauses, shaking his head. “I think I know this road.”

“Like…biblically?” Kayla asks.

“No, it just…looks familiar. Ptolemy Road. I swear I saw it earlier on my GPS. Did you see anything like this at the rest stop?”

“Maybe,” Kayla says, nodding slowly. “I can’t be sure, but it sounds familiar.”

“You studied the map on the wall in the rest stop?” I deadpan, finding it hard to believe she realized there even was a map at the rest stop. Or hell, that we were at a rest stop at all.

“Do you remember what highway it intersects with? I know I saw an intersection,” Josh says.

Kayla chews her lip thoughtfully, but eventually she shakes her head.