David crouched behind a split fence post and counted the dead things in the yard. Six deer. They moved wrong. Ribs showed through matted fur. One turned its head and stared at him with a wet, orange eye, and David felt his stomach drop into his boots. He had come to this valley to find out what happened to Firblood's people. Every farmhouse he'd passed held the same answer: shuffling shapes at the windows, doors clawed from the inside. Somewhere in this rot there had to be one person still breathing. He meant to find them. The cottage sat past the deer. Stone walls ringed it. The gate was iron, the windows narrow slits. Someone had built it to keep something out, and recently. David saw fresh scratches on the gate's lower bars. Whoever lived here was still alive to make them. He moved along the fence line, low and quiet. A brown chicken crossed the path in front of him, pecking at nothing, walking with the strange focus of a thing that had forgotten its own head. David stepped around it and kept going. Nothing in this valley worked the way it should. He reached the gate and pressed his face to the gap. A garden. Red-lobed plants curled on thick stems, teeth of green cilia twitching as flies drifted past one. And beyond the garden, kneeling in the dirt with a spade in her hand, was a girl. She was alive. Really alive. Dirt on her cheek. Chest rising and falling. She looked up and saw him, and David forgot the deer, the chicken, the whole ruined valley. His chest went tight in a way he did not have a name for. She was thin. Her hands were steady on the spade. She did not scream. She only watched him, measuring. "You bit?" she asked. "No." "Prove it. Roll your sleeves." He rolled them. She studied his arms, then his neck, then his eyes. Something in her shoulders eased a quarter inch. "I'm David," he said. "I've been looking for anyone. Anyone left." "Skigh," she said. She did not stand. "There's no one else. Just me and Garrett, and Garrett doesn't come out." Behind her, at the cottage's narrow window, a face moved and was gone. Dark hair. A beard. Eyes that had already decided David was a problem. David gripped the iron bars. "Let me in. Please. Whatever did this to your town — I'll help you stop it. I'll keep you safe." Skigh looked at him a long moment. Then she stood, walked to the gate, and slid the bolt. Behind her, one of the deer in the far field lifted its head. Then another. Then all six. They turned toward the open gate at once, and began to walk.