“Trigger point?” Anna cuts in. “You mean they detonated? On purpose? I thought that never happened. You said next week—”

She looks to Karo, who answers in a grim voice.

“No. Nobody caused this. The trigger point is just the place where stress on the underlying layer becomes too much. Once one piece gives way—”

“It’s where the avalanche begins,” Dan says.

He says he’d thought it was farther off.

From here they can see the path the slab took down the side of the mountain, maybe a mile wide. Much bigger than any of them had imagined, a trail of ice and debris that rises up ahead where they’d expected the valley to dip low.

“Okay,” Dan says again, and he moves automatically to Karolina’s side, unzips her pack, and draws the radio out.

Maeve turns and looks back the way they came rather than out at the damage ahead. The center, she knows, lies far below them now: too far away to see and hidden, anyway, by the woods between. She can hear Dan and Karolina conferring over the radio, the hand crank turning jerkily around. Dan already doubling-down on his detached calm, his Father Knows Best bullshit. Maeve pulls her sweater up over her chin against the cold. She holds her mittens over her nose.

There is no road. There is no crew working on the power lines. There aren’t even utility poles anymore.

“Let me see your face.”

She turns to find Sim standing beside her, squinting down against the snow’s glare. There’s a high sun but the cold is brutal now. Maeve, lost in the anxiety of the moment, lets her hands drop to her sides.

“Here.” He pulls the fur-lined hat off his own head and holds it out, but Maeve can’t move. She just looks at him. “Here,” he says again, and this time he tugs her hood down himself and fits the hat snugly over her ears, tucking the fur trim deep into the neckline of her coat. The difference is immediate: Maeve melts into it, relief running through her in response to the new warmth. It’s a kind gesture, and he moves more gently than she expects. But then he turns and shouts over his shoulder: “We need to head back, Maeve can’t be out here any longer.”

“What’s going on?” Anna looks over from where she is watching the radio trials.

“She’s not built for this, she’ll have frostbite if we stay out here.”

Maeve only shrugs a little deeper into her coat. She is cold. She is not sure if she is in danger. How do you know? She watches as Anna kicks through the snow toward them, her bell chiming merrily.

“What are you, Dr. Nielssen now?”

“It’s not a fucking joke.” He turns back to Maeve, but Anna keeps coming.

“It’s not a fucking joke, man—” His words, her own mocking tone.