45Gwendolyn’s POVThe aftermath of the attack on the Vermont house was not a clean break. It was a lingering infection. We left that night—abandoning everything, the house, the books, the basement, the life we had spent six months pretending to have. Adrien bundled Nathaniel into the back of a beat-up, nondescript van we kept in a hidden shed three miles from town. I didn't look back at the burning house—we had torched it ourselves to destroy the remaining traces of the hard drives and the biometric signatures we’d left behind.We were nomads again.But this time, the nomads were tired.We headed north, toward the Canadian border, through the blinding, swirling chaos of a record-breaking blizzard. The van’s heater barely worked, and the silence inside the cabin was as heavy as the snow that piled up against the windshield. Nathaniel spent most of the drive curled in his seat, staring out into the white darkness. He wasn't the boy who liked clocks anymore; he was the boy who had seen