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.Evan had found some seeds, long past their season dates on their packages, but Thea had taken them with good spirit, sticking with winter crops of brussels sprouts, onions, cabbages, and cauliflower.She had marked out the plots and with untutored hands set the seeds, surrounding the area with wide glass panes that would shelter and warm the seedlings.She tended this unpromising garden zealously and was rewarded with the most spindly of sprouts that poked unwillingly from the earth long enough to raise her hopes, then reddened, twisted, and wilted.“Maybe they’re too old,” Evan said by way of consolation as he worked on stout wooden barricades at the entrance to the little valley.“They were dated for the nineties, and that’s more than fifteen years ago.”“But they’re all we have,” she objected.“I think I’d better dig up the ground again, and see if I can make a better greenhouse.”“If that’s what you want, there’re other envelopes.Maybe you’re right and some of the plants will grow.” By tacit agreement he did not ask about her hand.He knew how wretched she felt about her continued weakness and three numb fingers.“I’ve got to try, Evan.I’ll make a real greenhouse, and then we’ll see.”“Fine.” As he said it, he planned how to cut down their food once again.When the next snow came, it stayed longer, frosting the mountains and chilling the lake.Now the nights were sharp with ice and packs of starving dogs howled in the dying forests.There were no sounds of engines on the roads, and no signs of tire tracks.Although the fruit was bitter, Evan and Thea ate all the hard, tiny apples that grew on the trees, relishing them as rare and sweet until at last they were gone.After that their hunger was worse.Their stores dwindles down to rice and a small trove of Japanese noodle soups that they found in the broom closet of the store.Lake Kirkwood had little to offer them: here there was no miner’s lettuce, no watercress, no berries trailing their sharp vines through the underbrush, no wild currants, no grapes.If there had been fish in the lake, there were none now and the cold grew deeper every day.One night, soon after the third snowfall, Thea turned to Evan as he lay beside her, half asleep.“Evan?”“Um?”“What will happen to us here? Won’t we starve? What if we go south? Can’t we get out of the mountains onto the desert? If it’s this cold here, we might be able to get by on the desert.We could raise things if it were warmer.You said yourself that it’s getting colder.”“We might go south,” he agreed languidly, fingering her breast scar, which had recently turned a tawny color like his regenerated arm.He gave her a bemused smile.“It’s catching, whatever it is.”“I know.My father thought the defective kids and the regeneration were all part of the same thing, all tied together somehow.He thought it might be a virus that changed.” She returned to her first question.“Evan, why don’t we go there? What’s wrong with the desert?”“We can go, love, but what for? It won’t be any easier to survive out there than here.” “Why?” Evan took a little time to frame his answer.“Because if the rain falling here is poisoned, the rain falling there and everywhere else is poisoned too.” He was staring up at the ceiling, thinking of the cream-colored, deadly snow that was falling, falling above them, around them.She tugged at his beard, which was now almost entirely white.“What if there were just one of us, then, could you make it through the winter?”“Stop talking nonsense,” he said, folding his arms around her.“No, Evan, I’m trying to figure something out.”He sighed.“All right.Could one of us last through the winter? I don’t know.It doesn’t matter.It’s better here with you than out on the desert or anywhere else alone.”She moved impatiently.Turning close to him, she said, “Evan, promise me you’ll think about the desert.Please.It might be better there.If we’re going to leave, we’ll have to do it soon, before the snow is too deep for us to get through.”“All right, I’ll think about it.” But the idea drifted from his mind and soon as he was asleep.At first light he turned over, his arm stretched out to touch her, and he found nothing but her pillow
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