Silver Spring was tucked into the valley near the creek that gave it its name. It was only three streets wide. Main Street had all the commercial businesses sandwiched between two other streets of houses.
There were long, snaking roads further into the hills for the rich bastards who could afford to string utilities that far, but those were few and far between. That meant that once she left her backyard, she was basically in the woods.
Cat hiked into the mountains behind the town, lungs burning in the thin cold air as she blinked snowflakes off of her eyelashes. She didn’t need either the snowshoes strapped to her pack or the skis on her shoulder yet because the locals had worn hiking trails into the mountains around town, so the only thing really necessary were the crampons that snapped around her boots because there was a layer of ice under all the fresh snow.
She hissed as it hit the top of her boot and was surprised to realize there was already close to six inches on the ground. This was going to be a whopper.
For a second, she spared a glance behind her to look down at Silver Spring, lights glowing in many windows, even close to noon. The town was already disappearing in the thickening snow.
Part of her thought she should just go back. She wasn’t going to be able to see any tracks anyway soon, and she did not want to get caught out in this, but then she remembered the abject terror in her vision and kept going.
She finally reached the top of the hill in a swirl of wind that sent a snow tornado around her, and she fixed a balaclava over her face and swapped the crampons for cross-country skis and surveyed her routes. These mountains didn’t have the right kinds of slopes for downhill skiing. Instead of perfect grades, they had two options: rolling hills and cliffs, so they’d cut cross-country trails everywhere.
She had never been on the route to the north, because that way lay the closest wolf pack, thirty minutes out of town, and she hoped they hadn’t gone that way. She closed her eyes and leaned on her magic and was relieved when it sparked at a familiar trail due west. Sometimes, after a strong Seeing like that, she would get aftershocks for an hour or two, and this direction triggering it meant she was on the right track.
She quickly moved beyond homes onto BLM land, owned by the federal Bureau of Land Management. Out here, aside from government land, a few private corporations were holding onto mineral or logging rights.
At first, she kept to the well-worn trails but then headed deeper into the backwoods. It was slow going because she needed to keep to the shallow, old snow, which was nearly impossible to find with the fresh layer coating it. She really didn’t want to get off and have to tramp back with her snowshoes. At this point, the only thing keeping her upright was long familiarity with the lay of the land, practice staying out of gullies, and magic.
Her vision was almost constantly sparking with ways not to go, and the number of times she’d seen herself stranded in snowbanks was making her dizzy.
Was she just seeing herself in these visions, or was she seeing the kids? Was she helping or was she chasing wild geese?
It was impossible to say.
She kept going as her sense of danger grew. She was fairly sureshewasn’t in danger, butsomebodywas.
She crossed one gully and started getting glimpses of a fight, mostly through flashes of murderous eyes. What the hell was going on? Were the kids fighting? This did not feel like kids. This felt like life and death. Was this happening now? Going to happen? What was she supposed to do about it?
She got a glimpse of a huge and powerful presence that she had never felt before.
She turned her skis toward it, unsure of how she knew where it was.
Was it even human?
She froze.
Is it human?
It didn’t matter. It felt like the most important thing in the world for her to be there.
Everything was drawing her on, even as she had to walk up the hill step by step. If she put on her snowshoes, it would’ve been faster, but there wasn’t a safe place to put them on. They were deep in the back country, high above the town, where snow had fallen steadily since October and did not melt the way it did in the sun of the Silver Spring valley. If she stepped down, she was going to be feet deep.
The wind was whipping up the snow now. This wasn’t just a storm; they were heading straight for a blizzard, and she should be worrying about her own safety, but she couldn’t.
The ground trembled. She felt it before she heard it by milliseconds. She dove for the nearest tree, determined to keep upright.
It sounded like it was heading right for her. She’d heard this sound a few times, but never this close. It was unlike anything else on earth, a combination of a thousand garbage trucks, derailing trains, and terrifying zoo animals roaring all at once.
It seemed to go on for fifteen minutes, but she knew it was probably less than a minute before the forest fell eerily silent. Even the wind seemed to die down.
She had to get off this mountain. If the kids were out here, they were on their own, but she could not make herself turn back.
She would just ski by where she’d heard the rumble. It could hardly collapse a second time.Thenshe would get the hell off the mountain. Even her vision had not prepared her for the ferocity of the weather.
There was still a cloud of crystals in the air from where the heavy snow had tumbled down the slope. She paused when she saw the first busted trees. She navigated closer and froze at the most incongruous sight of her life.
A naked man was clinging to a broken pine tree.
