Prologue

They called it The Great Frost.

22nd of December 2032. Pinatubo went first. I saw it on the news at home. Ash falling on Manila. Terrible, we said. Far away.

Rainier the next day. Yellowstone on Christmas Eve. That one we felt. Not the ash. Not in Britain. We felt the shift in the air. The way the sky went white and stayed white. The way the temperature started dropping and didn't stop.

They called us up on the twenty-sixth. Reserves, all of us. People who had day jobs and uniforms in wardrobes. Keeping order, distributing supplies, holding the line between people who were freezing and people who were starving. Liam and I, shoulder to shoulder, the same as training. The same as always.

The Gulf Stream died on the twenty-seventh. I didn't know that at the time. I just knew the cold was getting worse. Minus five at breakfast. Minus twenty by afternoon. The cold was something physical. Something that pushed against you. Something that found every gap in your clothing and filled it with ice.

By nightfall on the twenty-eighth, the temperature was minus forty and still falling.

The army held for two weeks. Barely. Long enough to learn that keeping order and keeping people alive were not always the same thing. Long enough to lose Liam.

I don't talk about what happened after that. The walking away. The roads. The cold that didn't care whether you were a soldier or a civilian or a good person or a bad one. The door frozen shut on my family's house. The thirty-six kilometres between that and the cabin. Zoe, opening the door, and warmth hitting me like a fist.

Eight months since the freeze. The cold hasn't let up. This is the world I'm living in now.