Nobody I knew—Lisbeth, Mama, or Lobo—talked about what the cold was, or named it. We were too busy just handling it, surviving day to day. It was like living on the farm. You didn’t question why the aphids came, you just dealt with the invasion: sprayed the bitter neem oil with its garlic scent, washing the leaves like you would bathe a child; dusted the plants with diatomaceous earth, the sharp white powder that would nick your fingers and get into your lungs unless you wore a mask. We were all just focused on making money, staying warm, staying alive—not naming things, not blaming yet.

But Dance and Mica had named it: lost spring. I wondered what the president had said in her speech. I wondered what they were saying in cities.

“Do you think this is our fault?” I asked.

Dance’s breath hung in the tent between us, a thin white bridge. My fingers hurt from the brief, frozen moments I had stripped off my gloves to untie the sleeping bag. I wondered if it was snowing again.

“Isn’t everything?” Dance said.

He fell asleep first, or pretended to. I lay in my musty sleeping bag and listened to his breathing, soft but deep. I was on the other end of the tent, nearest the side. Grayson had put his bedroll in the middle, between me and Dance: a kid between his folks. Now he leaned over to me and whispered. “Are you awake, Wil?”

“No.”

“Can I ask you a question? Why were you upset about Mica?”

I rolled over and faced him. He had his sleeping bag and whatever moth-holed blankets Mica had unearthed for him pulled up to his chin. I wouldn’t have wanted that stuff to touch my face. “I’m not upset,” I said.

“Yes, you are.”

“She has the keys to my truck.” She had asked for them, in case they had needed to move the truck in the night, she said, to deeper cover. I cursed myself for handing them over. For believing her. I was so tired my guard had slipped. I was making mistakes.

“We’ll get them back in the morning,” Grayson said. “Dance trusts her.”

“I just don’t know Dance very well, either,” I whispered. “I don’t know if I trust him.”

“Dance? He got us out of Skate State, didn’t he?”

“No,” I said. “Jamey got us out. He drove us in there. And we don’t know Mica and these people here at all.”

“I don’t know what choice we have other than to trust them, at least for tonight.”

I peered around Grayson, but Dance was buried beneath blankets and somebody’s old coat, breathing in the darkness in his cartoon bag. “I just want to keep going,” I said. “To California. I don’t want to get stuck here.”