“You seriously want us to drive into that?” Brecken asks, gesturing out at the snow.

“It can’t be that deep,” I say, but looking out over the blowing slopes of white, I frown. “Can it?”

“We can always back out,” Harper says. “We’ll try it. And we’ll go back if it doesn’t work.”

Harper begins to roll forward, and it’s immediately clear the snow is deeper near the guardrail side. Too deep to drive through, so Harper dutifully stays to the left.

“Put it in four-wheel drive,” Brecken says.

“It’s been in four-wheel drive,” she says, and she’s still too close to the deeper snow on the right for my comfort, but I’m sure it’s weird driving on the wrong side of the road. I’d probably drift right, too.

“Steer left,” Josh says. “Go to the other side of the road. Near the field.”

“What if a car comes around that curve?” she asks.

“Please. We are the only people desperate enough to drive through this,” Brecken says.

“What if this gets worse? We could get stuck.”

“It’s going to be okay,” Josh says.

“It’s drifting because of the field,” Brecken says. “See that tree line up ahead? It’ll be better once we get past this. Just stay left.”

He might be right about the field, and the drifting only being bad in this part. But he’s wrong about going to the other side of the road. As soon as Harper eases another few feet to the left, everything goes wrong. The car lurches through a hard ridge of snow, and then there’s an awful jolt, and the driver’s-side tires drop. Harper yelps as the car tips, following the tires in a downward, sideways slide into the ditch beside the road.

We come to a gentle stop. My center of balance shifts, and I grip the seat hard. My stomach tilts, and my vision swirls like the whole world has gone sideways. I shake my head, but my balance doesn’t settle. Because we are sideways, or, at the very least, listing to the left like a boat at the mercy of a big wave. I shift, trying to push myself away from Josh. I’m mashed against his body, and Kayla is mashed against me.

The whole car is tipped to the left. We drove off the road and directly into a ditch.

Chapter Twenty-Six

We can’t get the driver’s-side doors open at all. Harper tries, and then huffs when the door sticks. She rolls down the windows, and the smell of snow and trees rushes in. Josh pokes his head out to see the damage.

The window isn’t mashed into the snow, but I can see from here it’s close. It’s hard to process the ground at that strange diagonal angle, but it’s clear we aren’t getting out of that door.

“Holy shit,” Josh breathes.