Dance took my phone and peered at it. Grayson had told me he had run out of data weeks ago, and Dance just had a burner.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “It’s lost the signal.”

“Network overextended? Everybody trying to use their phones at once? The towers could be down.” Dance tapped the window, where fog smeared the glass. His finger made an etching sound. “The towers could have frozen. Stop the truck. I’ll see if I can get a signal somewhere away from the road.”

It was nearly dark. Night fell early and heavy. It made me want to sleep, even though we were hours from stopping. It made me want to curl up somewhere warm and safe. Where would that be? I pulled off to the side, tires crunching in ice, and turned off the engine to save fuel.

“I’ll be right back,” Dance said. He turned up the collar of his coat, and headed outside, holding the phone high as he hiked up an embankment more snow than grass. The glow of my phone screen lit his face.

I shivered. It already felt cold, like a switch had been flipped. Grayson napped on in the back seat. I was about to get out and search for another blanket, when the dome light flickered on. Dance opened the passenger door but did not get back in. “Wil, you better come here,” he said.

“What is it?”

He didn’t answer. I glanced back at Grayson, snoring slightly, then opened the door and got out.

I had parked on a stretch of rural highway that didn’t have any streetlights, or the lights were few and far between. Maybe everything had frozen and burst. The foothills made a jagged rim around the road like broken teeth. Roads had been bulldozed through the hills long ago for the heavy machinery that lumbered back and forth for logging and mining—roads that had no names. I could see zigzags of dirt running through the trees.

“It’s here,” Dance said.

“Did you get a signal?”

“No.”

I stumbled over the ground, catching myself just before I fell. There was something in the snow.

“It’s dead,” Dance said. “An animal.”

He helped me straighten up. The thing that had tripped me had fur, tipped with bronze, but it lay still. The fur didn’t ruffle in the wind. It didn’t move. It was frozen.

“There’s more.” He pointed to another form in the snow. “And there’s a deer, I think, in the pool.”

“What pool?”

He led me a little farther into the darkness. We were far from the cars that were passing on the highway. Too far from the truck, I thought.