Everyone climbed down. Peter could detect, rising from the trees below, the sound of the river, swollen with runoff. Their destination was the garrison, at least two days of travel in the sticky spring snow. They unloaded their gear and strapped themselves into their skis. They had learned the basics from a book they’d found in the lodge, a slender, yellowed volume called Principles of Nordic Skiing, though the words and pictures it contained made the thing itself look easier than it actually was. Greer, of all people, could barely stay upright and, even when he managed it, was always flying off helplessly into the trees. Amy did her best to help him—she had taken to it immediately, gliding and pushing off with a nimble grace—and showed him what to do. “Like this,” she’d say. “You just kind of fly along the snow. It’s easy.” It wasn’t easy, not by a long shot, and the rest of them had suffered more than their share of tumbles but, with practice, had all become at least passably proficient.

“Ready, everyone?” Peter asked, as he snapped his bindings closed. A murmured assent from the group. It was just shy of half-day, the sun high in the sky. “Amy?”

The girl nodded. “I think we’re all right.”

“Okay, everyone. All eyes.”

They crossed the river at the old iron bridge, turned west, spent one night in the open, and reached the garrison by the end of the second day. Spring was in the valley. At this lower altitude, most of the snow had melted away, and the exposed ground was thick with mud. They traded their skis for the Humvee the battalion had left behind, supplied themselves with food and fuel and weapons from the underground cache, and set out once again.

They could carry enough diesel to take them as far as the Utah line. Maybe a little farther. After that, unless they found more, they’d be on foot again. They cut south, skirting the hills, into a dry country of blood-red rocks rising around them in fantastic formations. At night they took refuge where they could—a grain elevator, the back of an empty semi-truck, a gas station shaped like a tepee.

They knew they were not safe. The ones of Babcock were dead, but there were others. The ones of Sosa. The ones of Lambright. The ones of Baffes and Morrison and Carter and all the rest. That was what they had learned. That was what Lacey had showed them when she’d exploded the bomb, and Amy, when she had stood among the Many as they lay down in the snow and died. What the Twelve were, but even more: how to set the others free.