Ruins

Yoon packed the first hole with sticks—the biggest at the bottom, the smallest, toothpick-size fragments at the top—and pulled out a match. “The moment of truth.” She shielded it with her hand, struck it, and dropped it on the wood. It caught almost immediately, the fire spreading slowly from the twigs to the bark to the thicker sticks below, and the second hole acting as a chimney to suck in air to the bottom of the blaze. In moments the fire was burning hot and steady, completely smokeless, and well below the rim of earth that kept the flames hidden. “One match,” said Yoon proudly. “Bow before my greatness.”

“Just help me skin these,” said another woman, and took the rabbits from Marcus’s hands. She started on one and Yoon on the other, keeping the blood and fur and organs buried deep in a third hole nearby. The broken cat lay on the ground beside them, waiting for its turn. Marcus was a surgeon, or at least he’d been in training to become one before the whole world had gone crazy, and blood had never bothered him before, but somehow two bunnies and a kitty was too much. He wandered back toward Woolf and the others, already deep in whispered conversation with Delarosa.

“That’s why we need your help,” Woolf was saying. “We can recruit the smaller Partial factions and put up a meaningful resistance, but we can’t do it alone. You and your guerrillas have the expertise we need to get through Morgan’s lines and find the pockets of resistance on the other side.”

“You’ve done fairly well yourselves,” said Delarosa, but shot a quick glance at Marcus. “Most of the time.”

“One little vine,” said Marcus.

“The more people we have, the faster we can work,” said Woolf. “We don’t know for sure how many Partial factions there are, but either way we need your extra manpower. Time is running out.”

“You’ve heard the rumors?” asked Delarosa.

Woolf shook his head, and Marcus leaned in closer. “We’ve been pretty out of touch,” said Marcus. “Is Dr. Morgan escalating the invasion?”

“Not the Partials,” said Delarosa. “Something new. Some of the outlying farms have mentioned it, and we’ve heard it from the Partials as well when we gather intel.” She looked at Woolf. “There’s some kind of . . . thing.”

“That sentence wasn’t as helpful as you probably intended it to be,” said Marcus.

“What kind of thing?” asked Woolf.

“I don’t even know what to call it,” said Delarosa, shooting a glare at Marcus. He could tell he was stepping over the line, but mouthing off was an instinct when he got nervous. He resolved to rein it back in. Delarosa grimaced, like she was struggling to find the right words. “A monster? A . . . creature? None of it makes sense, but the stories are remarkably similar: a man-shaped . . . thing, eight or nine feet tall, and the color of a new bruise. It walks into villages, settlements, anywhere there’s people, and warns them.”

“Warns them of what?” asked Woolf.

“Snow,” said Delarosa.

Marcus nodded slowly, trying to form a response that wouldn’t get him smacked. Woolf was apparently thinking the same thing, though his tone was diplomatic: “And you believe these stories?”

“I don’t know what to believe,” said Delarosa. “I won’t deny that it sounds completely insane—more like a folktale than real news.” She shook her head. “But the reports, like I said, are too similar to discount. Either an island full of war-torn refugees got together to play a giant practical joke on us, or something’s really going on.”

“An island full of Partials,” said Marcus. “Maybe they’re spreading these rumors for some reason of their own.”

“The Partials are just as confused as we are,” said Delarosa. “The thing’s appeared to them as well, and I believe their stories more than anyone’s. If they knew our agents were humans, they would have just captured them instead of spreading the same insane story.”

“Trimble didn’t have any creatures like that,” said Vinci. “I don’t think Morgan did either.”

Delarosa shot him a sharp look. “How do you know that?”

“We’ll get to that in a minute,” said Woolf. “When you say he’s warning about snow, what do you mean?”

“Winter hardly seems like the kind of thing to warn someone about,” said Marcus. “Maybe the giant monster wants us to put on a sweater?”

It was Woolf’s turn to look at Marcus, but instead of derision, his eyes were full of sadness. Marcus frowned at this, wondering what he should feel guilty for, and realized that Delarosa had the same odd expression. “What am I missing?”

“We haven’t had a real winter in thirty years,” said Woolf. “Maybe that’s what it means.”

“A real winter?” asked Marcus.

Delarosa nodded. “With snow.”

Marcus had heard of snow, but he’d never actually seen it in person. “It never snows this far south.”

“We’re on Long Island,” said Delarosa. “It used to snow here all the time—‘this far south’ used to mean places like Florida or Mexico. But the climate shifted, and by the time of the Break even Canada was too warm for a real snowstorm.”