Dawn in Okanogan. The fog has settled into the valleys like a second geography, erasing the line between earth and sky. Nova sits at the pine table in her kitchen, the wood worn smooth by decades of elbows and coffee cups. She holds a stone in her right hand—small, black, unremarkable to anyone else. She found it three days ago at the bend in the creek where the water runs cold even in summer. She doesn't look at it. She looks at the mountains, or where the mountains should be. The fog is a wall now, patient and absolute. Her lips move. She tries to say something—a question? A name?—but the sound won't come. It lodges in her throat like a splinter. She tries again. Nothing. The stone is warm. It shouldn't be warm. It's been sitting on the table for an hour, and the kitchen is cold. She sets it down and picks up her tea. Cold. She doesn't care. She drinks it anyway, the bitterness anchoring her to something familiar. On the counter, her phone buzzes. A message from a number she doesn't recognize. There's no text—just a single em dash, as if someone started typing and stopped. She looks at the stone. The stone sits on the table, radiating a faint heat she can feel from three feet away. The fog presses against the window, and for a moment, she thinks she sees a shape in it—taller than a man, wider than a door, watching. She blinks. The shape is gone. The fog is just fog. But the stone is still warm. She picks it up again, and this time, she doesn't try to speak. She listens. The silence in the room has weight. It hums at the edge of hearing, a frequency she feels in her teeth. The fog waits. Something is going to happen. She doesn't know when or how, but she feels it the way you feel a storm coming in the bones. The stone in her hand is the first word of a sentence she hasn't learned to read yet. She holds it tighter. The fog does not disperse.