The logging road bled rust into the snow.
Dana picked her way between the skeletal remains of a pickup truck, its cab crushed flat by a fallen pine. Ice had welded metal to bark, creating monuments to the kind of violence that happened slowly. One degree at a time. One season of neglect after another.
Her breath clouded the air in sharp puffs as she worked the snare line. Three traps, spaced twenty yards apart where game trails converged near the creek bed. She'd set them before the boy arrived—back when her biggest concern was stretching her meat stores through another winter.
The first trap held nothing but wind and disappointment.
The second had been triggered, its wire noose snapped clean. Blood dotted the snow around the disturbed earth, but whatever had been caught there was gone. Taken. Something with hands had worked the mechanism free, not claws or teeth.
Dana's pulse kicked against her throat.
She crouched beside the broken snare, studying the sign. Boot prints circled the trap—size eleven, maybe twelve. Deep treads, military issue. The kind of boots that cost more than most people saw in a year before the world ended.
The tracks led west, toward her property line.
Dana followed them through the maze of deadfall and frozen bracken. Her rifle hung heavy across her shoulder, but she kept her hands free. Better to move silent than ready. Speed mattered less than invisight when you were tracking something that might be tracking you back.
The trail wound between birch trees whose bark peeled like sunburned skin. Past the rusted shell of a logging skidder, its blade buried in earth that had frozen around it like concrete. The prints stayed crisp in the snow, unblurred by wind or time.
Fresh. Maybe six hours old.
Dana's mouth went dry.
She'd been in the cellar with the boy six hours ago. Watching him fight his demons. Listening to him whisper names she didn't recognize. Someone had been out here then, studying her defenses. Learning her patterns.
The tracks stopped at the edge of her perimeter.
Dana knelt where they ended, her knees sinking into snow that crunched like broken glass. The boot prints faced her farmhouse, thirty yards away through the wire. From this angle, whoever stood here could have seen the kitchen window. The glow of her lamp. The shadow of her moving through the rooms.
They'd watched her.
Measured her.
Decided she was worth coming back for.
Dana's fingers found the spare shells in her coat pocket—brass cartridges that clicked against each other like teeth. She'd loaded these shells herself, back when ammunition was something you could buy instead of scavenge. Back when the dead stayed dead and the living didn't hunt each other through frozen forests.
She set the third trap where the tracks ended. A simple deadfall—forty pounds of stone balanced on a trigger stick. It wouldn't kill, but it would maim. Send a message written in shattered bone and torn flesh.
The sun bled orange through the tree canopy as Dana worked her way back toward the farmhouse. Her shadow stretched long and thin across the snow, a dark finger pointing toward home. The temperature was dropping. By midnight, it would hit ten below. Cold enough to freeze spit before it hit the ground.
Cold enough to kill.
She reset the other snares with methodical precision. New wire. Fresh bait. Scent trails that led deeper into the woods, away from her fortress of rotting wood and rusted steel. Let whatever was hunting her follow the wrong signs. Let it freeze to death chasing shadows.
The farmhouse windows glowed amber in the growing darkness as Dana approached. She'd left the lamp burning in the cellar—something for the boy to focus on when the nightmares came. Light was a luxury she couldn't afford, but some things were worth the risk.
Some things were worth keeping alive.
Dana secured the perimeter locks and descended into her kitchen. The space felt smaller than usual, the walls pressing inward like the sides of a coffin. She heated soup over her camp stove and tried not to think about the tracks in the snow. About the calculated patience they represented.
Someone was coming for her. Had probably been planning it for weeks.
The question was when.
She lifted the trapdoor and peered into the cellar. The boy sat propped against the far wall, his bandaged leg stretched out before him. He'd managed half a bowl of soup this time. Progress, of a sort.
"How's the leg?"
"Hurts." No complaint in his voice. Just acknowledgment.
Dana climbed down and unwrapped his bandages. The wounds were clean, edges drawing together the way they should. No red streaks crawling up his thigh. No fever heat radiating from the torn flesh. Her stitches held.
"You'll live."
"Wasn't sure I wanted to."
The words hung in the cellar air like smoke from a snuffed candle. Dana kept working, cleaning the wounds with alcohol that made him hiss between his teeth. She'd heard similar confessions before. From soldiers who'd seen too much. Done too much. Carried too much weight in their chests.
"Wanting's got nothing to do with it," she said. "You breathe or you don't. Everything else is just noise."
"Is that what you tell yourself?"
Dana's hands stilled. The boy watched her with eyes that seemed older than his face. As if he'd been born knowing things that most people spent lifetimes learning.
"I don't tell myself anything." She finished cleaning his wounds and reached for fresh bandages. "Stories are for people with time to waste."
"Everyone tells themselves stories. Even if they don't know it."
"What's yours?"
The boy was quiet for so long Dana thought he wouldn't answer. When he finally spoke, his voice barely rose above a whisper.
"That I'm not him."
Dana wrapped his leg in clean cloth, pulling the fabric tight enough to hold but not tight enough to cut circulation. She'd asked the question expecting deflection. Instead, she'd gotten something that felt like truth.
The dangerous kind.
"Him who?"
But he'd already turned away, his attention fixed on the shadows dancing across the cellar wall. The conversation was over. Some doors, once closed, didn't open again.
Dana climbed back to the kitchen and secured the trapdoor. Outside, the wind had picked up, driving snow against the windows in waves that sounded like handfuls of rice thrown at glass. The storm was building. Weather that would trap them both in this shrinking space until it passed.
She ate her soup cold and tried not to think about the tracks in the snow. About the patience they represented. About the fact that someone had been watching long enough to learn her routines.
Long enough to know she was alone.
Near midnight, Dana pulled on her coat and stepped into the storm. Snow bit at her exposed skin like frozen needles. The wind tried to push her back toward the farmhouse, but she pressed forward into the white chaos beyond her door.
She had work to do.
Dana retrieved the spent shells from where she'd scattered them two days ago—brass cartridges that had held the rounds she'd put through the skulls of three wolves. Scavengers that had gotten too bold, too hungry. Too willing to test the boundaries of her territory.
She'd put them down clean. Three shots. Three kills. The way she'd been taught.
But the shells remained, glinting in the snow like fallen stars. Evidence of violence that would last longer than the memory of it. Dana gathered them one by one, her fingers numb inside her gloves.
Behind the farmhouse, she knelt beside a oak tree whose trunk had been split by lightning years ago. The hollow in its heart made a perfect grave for small things. Dana dropped the shells into that dark pocket, one at a time.
The brass rang against the wood like bells tolling.
She covered them with handfuls of wet earth and patted the surface smooth. No marker. No words. Just three small graves for three small deaths in a world that collected them like coins.
The wolves had names once, she supposed. Before they'd become problems that required solutions. Before they'd become memories that required burial.
Everything had a name before it became something else.
Dana stood and brushed the dirt from her knees. The storm swallowed her footprints before she'd taken three steps toward the house. By morning, even she wouldn't be able to find the spot where she'd buried the brass.
That was the point.
Some things were meant to be forgotten. Some weights were too heavy to carry above ground.
But as Dana climbed the porch steps and reached for her door, she caught a glimpse of movement at the tree line. A shadow that didn't belong to the storm. A shape that held still while everything else moved.
She blinked, and it was gone.
But the feeling remained—the crawling certainty that she was being watched. Measured. Judged by eyes that had already decided her fate.
Dana stepped inside and threw the bolt. Tomorrow, she would check her traps again. Reset her defenses. Do whatever was necessary to protect the small fortress she'd built from the bones of the world.
Tonight, she would sit by her window with her rifle across her knees and wait for morning.
Or for whatever was coming for her through the storm.