Lacey waited. Five minutes: after so many years, it seemed like nothing, because it really was.

Dawn was breaking over the mountain.

The three of them were racing toward the shots. They crested a ridge; below them, Michael saw a house, the horses outside. Sara and Alicia were waving to them from the door.

The creatures were behind them now, in the trees. They tore down the embankment and dashed inside. Greer and Hollis appeared from behind a curtain, carrying a tall chest of drawers.

“They’re right behind us,” Michael said.

They wedged the bureau against the door. A hopeless gesture, thought Michael, but it might buy them a second or two.

“What about these windows?” Alicia was saying. “Anything we can use?”

They tried to move the cupboard, but it was too heavy. “Forget it,” Alicia said. She drew a pistol from her waistband and pressed it into Michael’s hands. “Greer, you and Hollis take the window in the bedroom. Everyone else stays here. Two on the door, one on each window, front and back. Circuit, you watch the chimney. They’ll go for the horses first.”

Everyone took their positions.

From the bedroom, Hollis shouted, “Here they come!”

Something was wrong, Lacey thought. They should have been here by now. She could feel them, everywhere around her, filling her mind with their hunger, their hunger and the question.

Who am I?

Who am I?

Who am I?

She stepped into the tunnel.

Come to me, she answered. Come to me. Come to me.

She moved quickly down its length; she could make out the opening, a circle of softening gray, the elongated dawn of the mountain. The first true light of sunrise would hit them from the west, reflecting off the far side of the valley, its fields of snow and ice.

She reached the tunnel’s mouth and stepped out. She could see, below her, the tracks and debris of the virals’ ascent up the icy slope. A thousand thousand strong, and more.

They had gone right past.

Despair gripped her. Where are you, she thought, and then she said it, hearing the fury in her voice as it echoed over the valley: “Where are you?” But there was silence from heaven.

Then, from the stillness, she heard it.

I am here.

The virals hit the doors and windows at once, a furious crash of breaking glass and splintering wood. Peter, bracing the bureau with his shoulder, was blown backward, into Amy. He could hear Hollis and Greer shooting from the bedroom, Alicia and Michael and Sara and Amy, too, everyone firing.

“Fall back!” Alicia was yelling. “The door’s collapsing!”

Peter grabbed Amy by the arm and pulled her into the bedroom. Hollis was at the window. Greer was on the ground beside the bed, bleeding from a deep gash in his head.

“It’s glass!” he yelled over the report of Hollis’s weapon. “It’s just glass!”