After the first fire, we began noticing the aftermath of others. Houses crisped to the ground. Trailer bones still smoking. The abandoned cars piled up, another church van. Once the wrecks were snow-covered, they seemed like they could be anything: a burial mound, the entrance to an ice cave. We passed deserted semis tilting in ditches, their trailers torn open, loads long gone. Already the trucks looked strange to me: too big, part of an ancient, earlier world, a world we no longer knew. There was never anything on the radio.

We passed houses that were little more than foundations, a twisted arm of metal or a stovepipe sticking out of the rubble like a surrender flag.

Up ahead was a charred farmhouse where only the chimney remained, a column of bricks blotched with black: a monument to the struggle of the people who had lived there, maybe died there. Maybe they had just moved on. Jamey said, “Every winter somebody goes and blows their house up trying to get a propane heater or a kerosene lamp to work.”

But this wasn’t every winter.

“I don’t know why we went back for that fucking grow light,” Dance said. “There’s no power anymore. There’s no way to plug it in.”

We had not been speaking much, Dance and I, since we ran away from the man with the sheepskin, since we had left those people there. His anger hung over me. I could sometimes sense it, sometimes not—but I knew it was there. Smoke from a distant fire.

I knew, from living with Lobo, not to meet Dance’s eyes, not to draw the burning arrow of his anger. I looked out the window when I said: “There will be power somewhere. We’ll use the light there.”

“Sure. In that magical place.”

He blamed me, but for what exactly? For leaving those people to die, though they wanted to. For the lost food and supplies—though he was the one who had fallen asleep; he was the one who had not wanted to wake me for watch. Was his anger really blaming himself? Or was he mad at me for bringing Jamey and Starla, but no others. For abandoning Ohio.

“California will have power,” I said.

“The coldest night of winter,” Jamey said. “That’s when it happens.” She, too, had lived with an angry man. She knew to soothe him, distract. “That’s when the house burns down, every time.”

Grayson was driving by the burned farm. Some of the trees around the house had survived, older trees with wide trunks and sheltering branches. I saw an old brick barn and a chicken coop. It was a quiet place, protected by the trees.

“Let stop here for the night,” I said. “There’s nobody around. We can rest. Scope out what’s left of the farm, see if there’s anything we can use.”

“So we steal now?” Dance said.

“I guess we do,” I said to the window.