In the barn, there was an old jelly jar on a musty shelf. I picked up the jar and rattled it, unscrewed the top, and peered in. Corn. A few knocking, dry kernels. I put the corn in my seed pouch.

Dance kicked his boot in the dirt. “You don’t need me, Wil,” he said. “You’ve got Grayson.”

“Grayson is injured.”

“And Jamey.”

“Jamey is literally a teenage girl.”

“You don’t need anyone. You really don’t.”

He was right. I knew it. But a few feet away from us, Grayson and Jamey were working at keeping everything lit and warm in the tiny house. They were playing at being parents, and had no idea one of us was leaving. The group was breaking up. All groups did, I thought. No family lasted.

“Are you really going out there alone?” I asked. It didn’t seem right, to let him just go off.

But then he got excited. “Check this out. Look what I found.” He reached for something against the outside wall of the barn, rolling it into the light. A bicycle: ancient, strung with dust and cobwebs. “It was in the chicken coop.”

“Sure. That’s where I’d keep my bike.”

“I bet we can get this rolling again.”

“But in the cold, Dance? Are you going to ride up those roads in the snow?”

He looked at the bike, not at me. “I guess I’m going to have to figure it out.”

We spent the night at the burned farm. We would have slept well, protected by the chimney and the broken-down barn. They, along with the chicken coop and trees, formed turret walls around us in the tiny house. It did not feel dangerous. It felt sad. In a different time, this might have been a good place to settle. As Jamey said, the bad thing—the fire—had already happened here.

But Dance’s looming departure kept me awake. It felt like we were doing something wrong, to lose someone willingly. Grayson and Jamey had taken it well, barely arguing or attempting to persuade him to stay. Were we that broken down that a person’s absence didn’t faze us? Were we that used to losing things?

In the morning, Jamey made a breakfast of oatmeal and dried fruit, while Grayson watched Starla, showing her the bike. Dance and I stood alone by the truck. He checked and rechecked the straps on his pack. We’d given him what food we could spare—we had lost much of it when we had been robbed—and Dance could only pack what he could carry on his back. No heavy canned goods. Some of the deer meat and powdered milk.

I pulled the gun out. I extended it to Dance, handle first.