But it wasn’t snow that waited in that sky. It was a great cloud of smoke, as wide as a storm. The town ahead was burning.

I could see smoke poured from the highest windows: a church. Flames bloomed below a steeple, which would surely fall. The smoke traveled diagonally up from the fires—five, seven, maybe more structures burning in the town: gray above and red below. Why were such terrible things so beautiful? The fires made color in our winter world.

Dance hit the recirculate button on the dashboard, which didn’t even work, and Grayson, who was driving, made a turn off the road, avoiding the town. The others pressed their faces against the windows and craned their necks to see the fires, but I didn’t.

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.”