Peter couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Rider’s silver snowflake. He supposed he must’ve been wearing it the night he died. But as hard as he tried to picture it nestled across the breast of his poncho, he could only recall how empty a person’s eyes became the moment their life left them. Perhaps the pendant wasn’t even there at all. Perhaps Cooper already had it in his possession when he and Rider spoke privately in Henry’s bedroom just minutes before. That symbol of frozen life was the way Returnees could share their allegiance to one another in secret. Maybe Rider had given it to him as a gift of solidarity now that Cooper had taken the same journey into death and back as he had. Perhaps it was more than a gift. Perhaps it was an invitation to take up the cause, whatever that might mean. Peter picked the snowflake up. It glinted as it turned in his hand.

“You were my friend,” he whispered. “What have you asked him to do? Why did you have to ask him anything?”

Peter put the snowflake in his pocket and made his way outside. He barely remembered hurrying back to the woods, but by the time he’d left the cover of the pines to follow a trail left by the others and taken the steep walk up the ridge, it’d stopped snowing and a round moon made the snow bright underfoot.

The ridge gave way to a rocky bluff that fell away sharply into the forest on the other side of the hill from town. Briefly, Peter looked back, noticing how the neon strip of Mainstreet formed a dome of smudgy light over the town. High above it was the dome of the actual world. The star-strewn sky. He hadn’t even seen them once since beneath the haze of lights since they’d arrived. And for a moment, from this higher vantage up in the stars, it almost seemed strange that people’s worries, their lives, their cities and towns were ever allowed to take up so much of the world.

Peter heard voices. Laughing. Chatter. The babble of many conversations. Beneath him, down off the bluff where the bald rock met with pines to mark the forests on the other side, came smoke. Peter scrambled down closer, ducking in among the first of the trees some distance away to make sure he wasn’t seen, and watched.

The flickering flames of a campfire lit a clearing in the pines, making the shadows of Cooper and the others seesaw woozily across the snowy boughs. At first, it was hard to make out what was silhouette and what was shadow, but every now and then, someone turned towards the fire and the bright burn of its flame made masks of all their faces.