Thirty-one years after the lights went out, Dana Ryler thought she was done. She had crossed a continent, opened a mountain, and earned a quiet valley. Then a boy rode four hundred miles to a half-built depot, fell off his horse, and said four words: the mountain opened.
Now three thousand people are pouring down a river trench out of the far north, and something is walking south with them. It leaves wool and boots stacked in perfect rows on bare rock. It numbers every delivery against a total. It takes people out of camps in winter and gives nothing back.
When it takes her husband, Dana learns the truth: this is not a haunting. It is a procedure, written in an office in 1997 by a man who never came home, running on forever because nobody left alive is allowed to stop it.
To close it, she will need a thousand miles, a sealed door, and two halves of a lock that only the dead were authorized to turn.