Despite the fading tenseness in her body and my occasional shiver, it's the first sense of comfort that I've had since the outbreak. Even before, when Feral's didn't exist, I only ever had one girlfriend, and she broke my heart to pieces a year before the outbreak. I had few friends, fewer family members I would be willing to spend time with, and not much time for dating. The thought even now seems foreign, an unobtainable fleeting dream that always seemed out of reach. 

The spike of guilt that pierces my chest doesn't go unnoticed as I briefly imagine a world where the apocalypse never happened and I had met Dani in a more normal sense.

Perhaps we would have met at university, or maybe a coffee shop on some random Tuesday. Maybe we never would have met at all, and as I lay there struggling to get any sort of decent sleep, I entertained the idea of how a first meeting would have gone had the apocalypse never happened.

What little luck I have continues as my sleep is dreamless, and I wake to Dani sitting up and poking me in the side.

"Come on," she says, her voice keen and awake. "They'll send a search party after us if we don't head out now."

I groan, curling in on myself and burying my face into her lap.

"If you don't get up, I'll make you," her voice is teasing and she pokes me again. I wiggle out another protest, but eventually, I sit up and blearily rub my eyes. "Welcome back to the world of the living," Dani muses, standing up and stretching. "Your clothes are dry now, but they kinda smell like a campfire. Go ahead and get dressed, I'll radio the others and let them know we're headed back to the house."

Nodding, I stretch and yawn, none too eager to get off the warm couch.

I sigh, "What I wouldn't give for a normal morning again..."

Behind me, as I get dressed in semi-warm clothes, Dani scoffs. "What's a normal morning to you?"

"Coffee, breakfast, and doom scrolling," I confess with a guilty smile.

She chuckles. "And now we're living in the 'end times' everyone was talking about. Talk about ironic."

I chuckle half-heartedly as I finish tying my boots and adjusting my now wrinkly attire. "Speaking of, what do you think of that Circe lady the other day?"

Glancing over my shoulder, Dani is tense as she answers, radioing the rest of the group that we're on our way before she gives me an answer.

"I'm not sure," she confesses with a heavy sigh. "She saved you for some reason and didn't harass us to pay her back, but that could just be because she wants to follow us and steal supplies for later on."

I pat her shoulder to let her know it's okay to look now as I shoulder my quiver and bow, still a little chilly, but no longer shivering uncontrollably. "Yeah, that was pretty strange," I add, motioning to the door as Dani steps outside with me not far behind her. "I'm thankful for the save, but I can't help but to be suspicious."

"And what about that warning about the farmhouse?" Dani adds. "That it's not as safe as we 'mistake' it to be?"

My brows furrow as well, unsure of how to answer it. The farmhouse has been safe these past several weeks. Besides the other day, we haven't seen any signs of Ferals or other survivors, and Jessica hasn't found us yet either.

"I don't know," I breathe, trudging through the snow alongside Dani. "She clearly knew more than she let on. Maybe she knows about the vault under the barn?"

Dani grumbles, pinching the bridge of her nose, and for a moment, I feel guilty. "There's no telling at this point," Dani says. "There's just too much going on and not enough directions to point besides the CDC. Someone there clearly wants this locket really bad, and the longer this goes on, the less I like the idea."

Sighing, I pull my jacket around myself a little tighter, the guilty feeling refusing to leave my chest. If I had never been caught in the woods, my siblings and I likely would have been to the CDC by now, and none of this would have happened.

"Hey, Cass," Dani says, pulling me from my spiral before it can get worse.

I blink, glancing over at her and noting how she continues to stare dead ahead, her eyes lost in thought.

"Yeah?"

She's quiet for a moment, then she glances at me out of the corner of her eye and her shoulders relax. "You know none of this is your fault, right?"

I pause, watching her carefully as she takes a few steps before realizing that I've fallen behind her.

"What?" I ask.

"It's not," she reiterates, walking back to stand in front of me. "I came because I wanted to. So did Josh and Sparrow. We knew the risks when we left, and..." She pauses, her eyes searching my face with a worried crinkle on her brow and a guilty expression on her face, though for the life of me, I can't think of why she would be guilty.

"And..?"

She opens her mouth like she wants to say something, pauses, then sighs, reaching up and brushing her hand over the top of my head. "And you have snow in your hair."

Small flakes of snow float down from where she brushes it off my head, and I frown. There's something more on her mind that she's not telling me, something clearly important judging from the guilty expression on her face as she turns to continue toward the house in the distance. I hurry behind her, curious and worried, wondering what could possibly be going through her head. It isn’t the first time she’s done something like this, I’ve noticed, but it is the first time it was followed by such a dark, intense look of guilt.