The Long Cold

Eleven summers of engineered winter have turned the West into ash and frost, and Joyce Miller—once an engineer on the program that dimmed the sun—measures the sky every noon from a house dug into a lava tube. One night the automated beacon reports a higher dose. Her arithmetic gives the world seventeen months before the sulfur runs out and the withheld heat comes back all at once. Two hundred and thirty miles of dead rail stand between her and the only console that can ease it down.