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Town of Walters, est 1834

Upstate New York

LYDIA SUSI’S DESTINY came for her in the veil, on a rando

As she ran along the wooded trail, two h the preserve’s northeastern acreage, she wasline that topped the contours of the mountains Soon, the stripe would expand to an aura, and after that, the sun would accept the handoff from the moon, and day would arrive

Her grandfather had always told her there were tilights, two gloas, and if you wanted to find your past, you went into the pines in the evening as the sun went down If you wanted your future to co that sacred transition of night intoThere, he’d told her, when the distinction between that which ruled the light and that which held domain over the dark was at its narrowest, when the moon and the sun reached for each other before the rotations of their orbits tore theainst the infinite and seek answers, direction, guidance

Of course, that did not ood news Or what you wanted

But life was not an à la carte buffet where you could choose everything that went on your plate—another words-of-wisdo a pipe and drinking a glass of sima after his dinner year round

Why li to just Vappu? he’d said

Lydia had never believed in his superstitions She was a researcher, a scientist, and the kinds of things that her isoisä had gone on about did not fit in with that PhD in biology she’d bought on layaway fro off

So no, she was not out looking for any prognostication fro her workout done before she headed into her office at the Wolf Study Project With the way things had been going lately, she was going to blink and it would be seven at night Short-staffed and under-funded, everything was a fight for resources at WSP, and by the ti, she was exhausted So Carpe Cardio was her motto and why she was out in this misty darkness—

Lydia let her stride peter to a halt

Her breath puht, and as a breeze carabbing it out of the air and bringing it in under her windbreaker

As she shivered, she looked behind herself The trail she was on was the widest one in the preserve, a highway rather than a street, but she couldn’t see much into the trees Pines crowded up close to the shoulders of the packed path, and the fog wafting through the craggy trunks and fluffy boughs obscured the forest even more