Sam woke to the sound of yelling. She scrambled out of bed, tripping over the blankets, then realized it was not, in fact, inside. The raised voices were coming through her bedroom window.

Sam threw on clothes and stumbled into the kitchen still pulling on her socks. “What’s going on?”

Emily was at the door putting on boots and a jacket. “Fence broke,” she said. “We gotta chase down the animals before they get too far.” She stepped out into the snow. Sam put on her own winter gear and raced after her.

Outside was chaos. People shouted across the street trying to coordinate or let each other know where the animals were. Sam stepped outside to see Quinn, Emily and Caleb March trying to contain a cow.

Thankfully, the average North American domestic cow was about as capable in snow as the humans. It kicked up clumps with each bounding step as it tried to move through the uncleared snow. The adults were up to their knees in the stuff. 

Sure, snow was just frozen water, but Sam found it was too hard to run and try to move snow around. Cold made water stubborn. 

Caleb swung a lasso back over his shoulder and threw. Somehow, he’d managed to time it just right — the cow jumped and threw its head forward right into the rope. He and Quinn pulled hard while Emily got around to the cow’s face to calm it down.

Somebody cursed loudly further across the livestock pen, and Sam looked over to see a horse galloping towards the trees, a rope dangling from its neck. She took off running after it. 

Sam knew she wasn’t faster than a horse. That wasn’t the point. She could at least stay close enough to see it and follow. The horse would get tired eventually. 

In the trees there was less snow, filtered out by the pine branches above. Sam dodged low branches and uneven ground as she chased the horse. At least it left clear horseshoe prints in the snow. 

The horse led her through the woods and into another open field, broken fences signalling an abandoned farm. As Sam started to tire she finally noticed Caleb running a bit behind her. He caught up as she slowed down. 

“You good?” he asked as they both started to walk. 

“Yeah,” Sam said, out breath. 

“Least we have good tracks to follow,” he said.

Caleb was sixteen, the youngest of the March kids along with his twin sister. He wore his hair a bit long and tied in a ponytail under his green knit toque. A scarf draped over his shoulder and threatened to fall. Sam had barely said ten words to him before. She’d avoided the March kids since Zach lashed out at her. She couldn’t exactly get rid of him, though. It was probably smart not to be alone in the snow. 

They followed the tracks long enough to lose track of time, the cloudy sky obscuring any way of following the movements of the sun. The horse clearly had a lot of stamina. 

They didn’t talk much. Sam kept an eye on their surroundings, watching for bears or wolves or whatever else might call the uninhabited woods their home. Most animals didn’t bother attacking large groups of humans, but they might decide one or two people alone were easy prey. But Sam only noticed birds and squirrels. 

There was something dreamlike about the wide stretches of perfect undisturbed snow. Colours and shapes blended together, the sky bleeding into the ground like paint running through water. Sam found herself feeling oddly melancholy as the hours passed. She tried to focus on the task at hand. There was no point in dwelling on what was over and done with.

As the day wore on the cold set in. Sam figured it was early afternoon, but the chill in the air and the sharp edge to the breeze worried her. On the other hand, if they left the horse alone too long it would freeze to death, and Sam was well aware how expensive horses were. Caleb showed no signs of stopping, so Sam soldiered on. 

They were making their way through another thicket of giant oaks and spindly pines when Sam felt the first snowflake on her face. A little bit of snowfall, she thought. The pang of dread in her gut whispered otherwise.

The wind came up next, piercing Sam’s jacket with needles of freezing cold. A swirl of snow spun up in front of her as the next gust came fast and fierce. Caleb finally paused to check the sky. It was darker than it should be, even if they didn’t know the exact time. Surely they hadn’t walked for a full day.

The snowfall quickened, the wind blowing it sideways into their faces. Cold stung Sam’s cheeks as she pulled her scarf up over her nose and tugged her hat further down over her ears.

“We should hunker down,” Caleb said. “We won’t make it back before the storm really sets in.”

“Hunker down where?” Sam asked.

Caleb looked around, wheels turning behind his eyes. “Let’s dig out a shelter in that field back there. Grab some kindling on the way.”

Sam watched which sticks Caleb picked up and tried to find similar pieces. The water witch wasn’t usually asked to help start a fire.

They reached the open field with a good armful of twigs and sticks. Caleb cleared snow at the edge of the thicket with his foot, then stamped down a bit of a path. Three feet of snow gave them a decent wall to carve into.

“I can do that,” Sam said as Caleb started scooping snow with his hands. He stepped back.

“Okay, water witch,” he said.

Sam hid her annoyance with his tone and reached out her hands. The easy thing to do, she thought, would be to melt down the snow they wanted to dig out. She could keep it warm enough to move it away.

There was another witch who’d lived near her first home. She was the one who taught Sam it was safer to go along, and who showed her how to work the water. It was about the vibrations, she’d said. All things vibrated, way deep down. Cold was slow, and hot was fast. Too fast, and the water would evaporate and be too wispy to catch. Too slow, and it froze hard and didn’t want to budge. Melting snow was about getting the water moving. Sam wiggled her fingers and told the water to move. She sent it feelings of running, of rushing rivers, of eagles diving for mice at incredible speeds. She gave the water the feeling of running free in summer grass. 

The snow melted in a circle, leaving a layer at the surface as a roof of their little cave. Sam pulled and the water came along out of the hollow she’d made. She tossed it a ways off so they wouldn’t be bothered by the sheet of ice it would make.

She studied her handiwork. A perfect little snow cave, melted down to the grass. She turned to Caleb.

His eyes were wide, studying her, then the cave, then her again. “Damn,” he said. “You’re good at that.”

Sam felt an unexpected glow of pride. Rarely did she decide herself to use her magic. 

They retreated into the cave, immediately a little warmer out of the wind. Caleb laid out the fire, bigger sticks laid against each other with smaller twigs leaning against each other in a pyramid on top. He leaned back and pulled a lighter and small brick of fire starter from his pocket. Oh, that’s good to have, Sam thought. She should probably carry that sort of thing herself.

“Oh, wait,” she said as Caleb paused. She reached out for the water in the wood, calling it towards her. It didn’t want to go — apparently wood was comfortable. Sam insisted, giving it a good tug in her head, and fell back as a spray of water hit the side of the cave.

Caleb followed the water as it moved, then stared at her again. “Thanks,” he said. The fire caught with a bit of blowing and nudging the fire starter. 

The warmth was welcome, even the tiny fire making a difference as the snow fell faster and thicker. Caleb sat next to Sam against the back of the cave, and they listened to the crackle of fire and the whistling of the wind.

“My mom’s gonna kill me,” Caleb said after a little while. 

Sam flinched. “I could -“

“Oh, no, not literally,” Caleb said quickly. “She’ll just be mad I ran off.”

In her head, Sam moved the block that said “angry” away from the block that said “pain”. 

“Are you okay?” Caleb asked. “Does using your magic make you tired or anything?”

Sam shook her head. The cave had been a bit of a puzzle, but once she’d figured it out it didn’t take much energy.

Caleb sighed, poking the fire with a stick. “Guess we lost Hamlet anyways.”

“Hamlet?”

“The horse. Hannah named it. It’s from an old play, I think.”

“Huh.”

An awkward silence followed. Now that the adrenaline passed, Sam was realizing that Quinn and Emily would probably be mad at her for running off. 

“You sure you’re okay?” Caleb asked. He reached a hand towards her, and Sam instinctively flinched away.

“Sorry, I -“

“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “I should have asked.” He leaned back against the snow. “I don’t like when strangers touch me either. It’s just been a while since someone was a stranger.”

It wasn’t the reaction Sam was expecting, but then she’d rarely been right in her predictions about the people here. No one acted the way she was used to. It was confusing, and a little disturbing. Sometimes it made her angry, though she wasn’t entirely sure why.

Caleb seemed to interpret her silence as an invitation to keep talking. “You know, before things got really bad, we had a little school in the old elementary. Just one classroom, not a lot of kids went. But the ones that did decided that for some reason I was a problem. Not sure why, honestly. They never bothered Mariah. Never really got along with other kids after that, even when they were nice.”

He sighed, reaching out to lazily poke at the fire again. “You’d think the world falling apart would make people nicer to each other.”

“Why?” Sam asked.

He gave her a strange look. “Isn’t it easier to work together? You get to share the load.”

“But what if people don’t do what you want?”

“You talk it through, I guess. When we fight at home, Mom always makes us sit down and talk it out.”

“But what if they still won’t do it, and it’s really important that they do?”

Caleb shrugs. “Sucks to be them, I guess. I don’t know. You figure something else out.”

“Or you make them.” Sam watched Caleb’s expression very carefully.

He gave her that weird look again. “What, at gunpoint? That’s a sh- a crappy thing to do.”

“But it would be easier.”

“But it’s wrong, Sam.”

She felt the need to argue. “Why?”

Caleb frowned, closing his eyes for a moment. “It just is. Hurting other people is a bad thing to do.”

“Says who?”

“My mom? The Bible? Did nobody teach you morals, Sam?”

“No.” Sam didn’t know what morals were. It was one of those abstract words no one ever bothered to explain.

Caleb groaned, eyes closed once again. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered. 

Sam wanted to snap back, but a distant rumble in the ground made her pause. She listened close. The sound was muffled by the snow, but she could just make out the grumble of an engine.

Sam ducked out of their makeshift shelter and peered over it. Coming around the corner was Paul March’s pickup truck.

“What is it?” Caleb asked.

“Your dad.” Sam climbed up the snowbank, sliding and sinking as she went. She waved one mittened hand at the truck.

It slowed to a stop in front of her as she waded through the deep snow to the road. She could hear from his footsteps and muttered curses that Caleb was just behind her.

“Saw your smoke!” Paul called as he got out of the truck. “Good thinking.”

“Don’t compliment them,” Emily grumbled, appearing from around the passenger side. “They’re in trouble.”

“We lost the horse,” Sam told them, looking down at her feet. “Sorry.”

Paul sighed, hand on the back of his neck. “We can get a new horse. We can’t get a new Sam.”

Sam blinked at him.

“Think before you run off, is what he meant to say,” Emily said. She wrapped another scarf around Sam’s shoulders. “You okay? You didn’t get too cold?” Sam shook her head.

“Sam dug a whole igloo into the snow,” Caleb said. Sam was surprised by his tone - it sounded a bit like he was bragging. “She dried out a bunch of firewood so we could actually light the fire.”

“Did you?” Emily said, looking at Sam. She pressed her gloved hands against Sam’s cheeks, and the warmth stung as Sam realized how frozen her face was. 

“We can talk it all out at home,” Paul said. “Kids in the back.”