Tobias Cartwright pushed open the door of the snow-covered inn and stamped the cold from his boots. He had followed the expedition's last known road for weeks. Fourteen men had vanished into this country, and one of them was a man he had wronged. He meant to learn what became of them, or stop pretending he could live without knowing. The innkeeper looked away too quickly when Tobias asked about strangers. That night Tobias climbed to the attic and found a man curled behind a stack of crates, thin as rope, clutching a brass compass with the initials RK scratched into its face. The man flinched hard and begged him not to speak the name aloud. Tobias knelt and kept his voice low. "I came looking for you. For all of you." The survivor stared at him, then pressed the compass into his palm. "Then you've found the only one left," he whispered, "and they will come for us both before morning."

Tobias pressed the brass compass into RK's shaking hand and told him to stay low. A heavy thud struck the inn door below. Then another. Tobias took the stairs two at a time. He hauled the door open at midnight. A man in torn expedition gear fell across the threshold, blood frozen black on his coat. Behind him, snow stretched out to a stacked stone marker glowing pale in the moonlight — the spot where he must have dropped from the dark and crawled the last yards in. RK came down the stairs and went white. He gripped the rail to keep standing. "That man was left for dead," he whispered. "We buried him in our heads a hundred miles back." Tobias dragged the stranger inside and kicked the door shut. He cut the frozen coat away with his knife. From an inner pocket slid a small mirror rimmed in frost-pale metal, its glass catching the lamplight like scattered snow. RK made a low sound. "He kept it," he said. "He carried it the whole way." The wounded man's eyes opened. He looked at Tobias, not RK, and forced out three words. "Cabin. Ironwood. Maps." Then his breath stopped. Tobias closed the dead man's eyes. He had come for answers and a corpse had delivered the first one. Somewhere out in the dark stood a cartographer's cabin, and whatever the expedition learned had been written down inside it. He looked at RK. "You're going to take me there." RK shook his head, but he did not say no. He only stared at the mirror in Tobias's palm, and at the door, and at the cold pressing against the windows. The night had handed Tobias a direction. It had also told the hunters exactly where to find them.