Then I hear her voice, a low wheezing rattle: “She can save him.”

She reaches down again and gently folds the edge of the towel under his chin, revealing Julian’s white face, too still and pallid for me to pretend he is still alive. I cannot look at him; I cannot bear to look away.

Clementine knows him, I realize. She remembers him, from the future.

This time, when she tries to take him from me, I do not stop her. The burden lifts from my arms, which fall with exhaustion to my sides, muscles screaming from the effort of carrying a child these many hours, and it almost hurts to unbend them. How strange that it should hurt more to finally release a burden than it does to keep holding on to it.

When I look up, Clementine is walking from the fire with Julian cradled in her arms, and for a moment I think I will not be able to push off from my knees and follow her, but I do. We don’t travel far—we are yet close enough to her shack that the fire’s glow radiates softly onto the banks of the partially frozen river, with its chunks of ice floating along in the lazy current of the black glassy water.

But the fire behind us is not the only one here.

Floating above the river are two small orange flames, disembodied, and I cannot stop staring at them even as Clementine bends down over the river, lowering Julian to meet it, then lowering him further still, into the cold black water. Briefly she holds him there, just beneath the surface, and I can see the towel floating around him, the water gently warbling that pale innocent face.

Then she lets go.

The sodden towel weighs him down, and Julian sinks.

“No—stop!” I cry out, rushing to Clementine, clawing at her, not caring that her flesh comes off in soft moist strips under my nails, not caring about the cold, clammy feel of her corpse, needing her to reach back into that frozen void and pull Julian’s body free. But it is too late. He is gone.

“Julian!” I shout, my voice ragged, as I let go of Clementine and kneel on the edge of the river, searching the dark water for a trace of him. He cannot be gone. He cannot be gone. I cannot return home without even his body to give back to Elizabeth. My heart hurts with a thousand shards of ice piercing it through, mourning not for Julian or the life he would have lived, not really, but for Elizabeth, for my sister, for what she has lost this night.

I try to reach into the water, but the cold is so profound that it shocks my fingers at once, almost like a shock of heat, the way something can be so cold that it feels hot again, confusing our nerves. I try again, but it’s no use; my hand aches dreadfully when I plunge it into the water, and Julian is nowhere besides. That is how I will lose the tip of my pinkie finger.