Maeve startles to see her there, remembering, all at once, finding her crouched in the dark earlier the same night. Anna’s voice, her soft moan from beyond the door. Did that really happen? She tries to put herself back there, but it feels a million miles away.

Just another dream? A stress dream. It seems a little too gothic to be anything else.

There’s a weird silence, cut only when the back door swings open and Sim walks into the room, snow clinging to his jeans and boots. Dan steps up to him.

“Where the hell have you been?”

As the door closes, Sim moves in so Maeve can feel the cold on him.

“The elk are moving down the valley,” he says. He turns to Maeve specifically. “You can hear it. They’re running away.”

She cannot seem to break his stare. She’s still standing there, held in place, when the ground starts to move.

The sound rushes in louder than any train, louder than anything in her dream.

“Everybody get down!”

She can hear Dan’s voice, but barely, yelling over the noise—he reaches for Karo to steady her, then pushes her into a chair. It’s possible that Anna begins to scream. Sim grabs for the desk. Outside, Maeve can hear the crack and groan of the forest coming apart. She drops to her knees, covers her head: earthquake training.

But it’s not an earthquake. It’s the western ridge, the very nearest tip, collapsing down the slope to where forest meets road.

Closing them in.

Day 4

Day 4

No one leaves the room again until it’s light.

For safety, Dan insists. But dawn is hours away. In the meantime, the temperature in the building begins to drop, and Maeve is itching to get back to her room to see if her cell phone works. In her confusion, she left it behind. Anna sits on one end of the couch, a blanket around her shoulders, staring out the window. Karo surreptitiously checks her own phone but says nothing.

Unable to keep still, Dan hauls new wood in from the pile outside the door, then stacks it into another pile near the fireplace, repeating a list of assurances as he works: There’s a generator in an outbuilding. The fact that it hasn’t kicked in automatically is troubling, but not a disaster—he’s not sure which areas of the center are considered priority. It’s possible the lights are on somewhere else.

“What do you mean, you’re not sure?” Sadie starts toward the fireplace. “Isn’t it your job to know? Isn’t it your job to be sure?”

Sim, his wet boots and coat now lying in a heap on the floor, shakes his head.

“I didn’t see any lights out there—”