She jams her hand back into her pocket, searching again for the key inside. There’s no room in the center that’s safe enough, no door that can’t be kicked down. But the studio is there for her. It locks tight: he can’t get in, can’t even watch her from outside. It kept her safe from a bear; it can keep her safe from a man.

Maeve shoves the last chair in Sim’s path and goes for the door.

She skids across the ice, then falls, landing hard; a layer of frozen crust forces its way down into her coat at the collar. Snow everywhere. At her neck, in her ears. Inside her sweater, her boots, her bra. A night of new weather, ice pellets and freezing rain, has made the terrain that much more hazardous. Maeve takes a long inhale. The air is so sharp it hurts; the pain gives her something to focus on. She gets back on her feet, trying to brace herself against the wind, and scrambles to a small clump of trees, the only place she can’t be seen from the building.

The photo is still in her fist, snow-covered and sodden. The other hand a bloody mess. She spreads her fingers, and the new wound softens, filling with blood, the length of her palm and running the line of her old scar almost exactly. Her head spins. Everything from her pockets now spilled out on the frozen ground. She gropes through the snow with the bloody hand, and the cold feels good.

The studio key is there, still hooked to the bear claw, a shadow against all the white.

A moment later, she hears the whine of the back door yawning open against the wind. Sim’s voice, caught and lifting away through the blowing snow. Yelling her name.

“Maeve—Maeve!” A pause. Then: “You know Dan is out there somewhere. No one knows the terrain better than him. Not you. Not me. He can survive out there, Maeve—you can’t.”

The wind comes up and it’s suddenly no different than her dream—the howl of it, the snow, all just the same. Only a crazy person would follow her through this.

Her injured hand stings and she rips a strip of duct tape off the roll and wraps the wound, but she’s bleeding freely now, the palm washed in blood, warm and copper-scented, every time she flexes. The tape won’t hold on her damp skin. She needs to get inside fast.

Another bang as the back door opens up and falls shut again. A light arcs through the blowing snow—the beam from his flashlight. Then a flicker from the woods. Maeve snaps to focus on it: a triangle, the fluorescent trailhead marker that points the way to the cabins. A beacon, a sign.

She jams the bleeding hand inside her pocket and starts running.