The freezing fog came off the Black River like wet cotton batting, smelling of dead willow leaves and diesel soot.
Mara stood on the crushed gravel of the motel turnaround, her collar turned up against the damp chill that had settled into the valley since midnight. Ten feet away, the highway had ceased to exist. Highway 60 was normally a two-lane asphalt scar cutting through the scrub oak toward Van Buren, but this morning it was only a white wall of vapor that swallowed sound, distance, and direction.
Above her head, mounted twelve feet up on the rusted steel stanchion of the old neon marquee, Tessa Rowan was leaning out over an aluminum ladder. The mechanic had a strip of lead solder between her teeth, her bare fingers blue around the handle of a cold-chisel as she chipped away thirty years of bird droppings and blistered red enamel.
“Hold the ladder leg, Mara,” Tessa called down, her voice pinched with cold. “The frost has the gravel slick as bacon rind.”
Mara planted both boots on the lower rung, bracing her weight against the uprights. The aluminum groaned, but the rubber feet bit into the frozen limestone chips.
Beside them on a wooden cable spool sat the brass-cased housing they had carried from the workshop after breakfast. It was eight inches in diameter, cylindrical, machined from an old locomotive boiler fitting and fitted with a bull’s-eye lens of thick, leaded amber glass. Inside the lens, suspended between two ceramic insulator posts…
