The sheep were crying. Several developed infections because they’d gone too long with overfull udders. Others were drying up. I loved them, but I couldn’t take good care of them alone. And they trusted me so much; they were so patient. I couldn’t bear to look at their long-pupiled eyes.

Twenty were sick one morning. Only Sara remained in the dairy. I milked the cows and came to the long house, exhausted. My hands could barely grip. We were running out of wood, and our generator in the creek had frozen in place. Rainer had been desperately trying to wire up the solar panels before he, too, took ill—but solar panels aren’t much use in the winter mountains. We needed wood, but we didn’t have the power to chop it.

Dice was alone in the kitchen. He was dipping towels in boiling water and squeezing them out, to bring to the sick. The steam was so thick in the room it was like a cumulus cloud.

“Dice,” I said.

“What do you want, Harmony?” he said, not bothering to look up from his work. The steam flowed up around him and spilled across the ceiling.

I wanted him to notice how hard I’d been working. “What if I went to town to buy some kind of medicine?”

He stopped. He turned, with a hand over his heart. His eyes looked dead, because he was so tired. “It’s a virus,” he said. “There’s nothing to do but wait.”

“We’re in danger,” I said.

Dice stepped toward me. In a flash he reached out around me and yanked me against him. I’d noticed how thin he’d looked since the last action, but his frailty was an illusion; he’d only gotten stronger: being held against him was like being caught against a mountain laurel, all steely cords, a bramble. I writhed against him, but I could not free myself. He’d never held me this way, no one had, but it felt familiar. I seemed to remember being held this way the way an animal knows to sense a forest fire: by instinct.

“The family always survives,” he whispered into my ear. “These are the rules.”

He released me. I stumbled away, gasping.

Dice turned back to his work. The steam in the air between us was like words.

* * *

That afternoon I found I couldn’t even pick up the milk pail to bring it to the dairy, where Sara was trying her best to keep up with the endless flow of milk. I was worn out. I lay on the iron-cold dung-strewn floor and cried. No one, not even Josiah, had recovered yet. The only way we could keep going like this, unless Bay returned with a crowd, was if the sick began to heal. While I sobbed on the milking parlor floor, I noticed, curiously, that no tears were coming out of my eyes.