Dance turned back around, reaching to switch off the headlights, but then he froze.

“What?” Grayson said.

A person stood in the glare of our brights.

They were dressed all in black, almost blending against the tree fence.

“I don’t think they’re from Skate State,” I said. They looked more careful, their clothes calculated for both warmth and cover of night. Black coat, black boots, black hood, and ski mask.

“We need to get out of here,” Grayson said.

“Do you know where we are?” I turned to Jamey.

But she was struggling with a crying, thrashing Starla. “No fucking idea.”

It was like watching a tree detach from the woods and begin to walk. They came toward us, the person in the headlights. Then more shadowy figures in black came out from behind the fence. They swarmed the truck.

“What is going on?” Grayson said.

“The whole world has gone to shit because one thing has,” Dance said.

I leaned over the front seat, looking closer at the strangers along the tree fence. I had seen something, something about the shapes of the figures or the way they moved. Something was different about them. Then I knew.

They were women.

Bundled against the cold, all in dark clothes, their warm things masked them. But I felt movement gave them away: a fluid bending of their bodies around the tree wall, the dips at their waists. I thought of Lisbeth in her long sleeves and long, heavy skirts, wrapped up but unmistakably her beneath the denim and flannel and down. Maybe I wasn’t disguising myself in coveralls as well as I thought.

“They’re all women,” I said.

Dance was out the door, stepping into the headlights.

“Don’t!” I said to Dance, but it was too late.

He had left the door hanging open. I could hear the whine of the motorbikes again in the distance. Cold flooded through the cab, and Starla cried harder.

“Are you coming here to join us?” one of the women said, muffled behind her ski mask.

“Who are you?” Dance said.

“Are you being followed?”

“Yes!” Grayson leaned across the seat and shouted through the open door.

The woman looked to him, then back to Dance. “All right. Come in behind the fence. No cars. Park to the left. There’s an opening in there. We’ll hide your truck. And—” her head turned to the back of the truck and she jolted briefly but otherwise did not give much away “—your house.”

Dance got back into the truck and did what the woman asked. There was a break between the trees, barely wide enough to ease the truck through, and we drove in carefully. The forest closed up around us, dark and magic with snow.

Starla quieted, looking around. When the trailer had edged its back wheels into the woods beyond the fence, the woman held up her hands for us to stop.

“Here we go again,” Grayson said.