Sclerites See You in Spring by Tory handcock

The county spent all winter waiting to find out what the sclerites were doing out there in the cold. Cal spent it hoping the answer would take longer to arrive.

It doesn't. The first south wind comes three weeks early, and the flat wakes up.

What comes off it isn't just the standing dead. It's the thing that's been keeping them alive all along — wings rising off the warm ground at dawn, thick enough to see from a ridge, and the plain arithmetic of what they've been feeding.

Six hundred people behind a fence can survive a winter. What walks north when the ground thaws is a different problem, and the camp has one night to decide what it's willing to burn to get out ahead of it.

Cal has a notebook, a woman who's never spoken a word to him and tells him everything anyway, and a promise he isn't sure he can keep. He also has a plan that ends with him drawing the worst of it away from her — and the honest math on his own odds, which he does not share.

What's left after that is a smaller group, a colder road, and a county that has stopped standing still.

The sequel to Sclerites: Feel Like Yourself Again.