But Dan is glued to the survey, trying to figure out a route down, what supplies they’ll need to bring. She’s not sure he’s heard her. Karo just looks relieved.

“Fine,” Karo says, speaking only to Dan now. “Then who? Let’s get a team together.”

Maeve is jarred by her response; this is all happening too quickly.

“If we can get down there, even close to the village,” Dan says, mostly to himself. “Set off some flares. Get some attention. Something to alert the emergency crews.”

What used to be an easy hike just a few miles down the road is now going to require a different kind of travel altogether. The debris field to either side of them is bound to be unstable. Dan raps the desk with a knuckle as he thinks.

“The best plan would be to circumvent the worst of it somehow.”

“Go around?” Justin says. “Around where? Around how?” He brushes at his face, jittery.

“Go up.” Sim traces the survey with a finger, looking at the topography. “You’d have to go up and then down a different way.”

Dan shakes his head again. “That doesn’t work, either.” The issue is the instability, he says, of the slab.

The issue is that it hasn’t ever stopped snowing.

“I think we’d need to count on eight hours, maybe longer, to cut along the outer edges safely.”

“So we can’t leave until tomorrow morning anyway,” Maeve says, insisting on the we.

But the words are barely out of her mouth before Karo interrupts: “Tomorrow is too late.”

She seems to be riding an edge; she’s not her usual self but some different, urgent version.

“Okay, so we bring shelter and supplies, just in case,” Dan says. “I’d rather go now. I feel useless here.”

Sadie pulls a notebook from the desk drawer.

“I, for one, am dying to get out of here,” she says to the room at large. “What do we need? I’ll make a list.”

Maeve blinks, then looks around, trying to gauge the others’ reactions. What Dan’s proposing seems crazy to her—heading down the mountain with darkness falling and no idea what lies ahead. If Anna’s death has shown them anything, isn’t it how dangerous exposure really is?

But Karo doesn’t argue with the idea. She looks gaunt; she’s drawn her hands behind her back.

If Anna’s death has shown them anything, it’s that someone here isn’t really what they seem. Maeve is damned if she’s going to walk out into the storm with any of them. With someone who left Anna to die in the cold.

But the only alternative is to stay behind at the center. Trapped. Is that really any better?

“Devil’s advocate—” Maeve begins.

Justin sighs loudly. “Here we go.”

“I thought you were done being an asshole,” Sim says. “No? Not yet?”