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down to eight. Once Dad had told her that a refrigerator should be kept at three degrees Celsius. Five more degrees and she’d be living inside a fridge. She decided to put on a fleece vest over her other layers.
    She wandered out to the kitchen. Alice wished her dad had taught her how to make hot chocolate on the barbecue; a hot drink would be nice. He hadn’t. All he had done was tell her she couldn’t use their camp stove in the kitchen. Alice couldn’t understand why, because she knew how to work that one. He said it was dangerous to light them inside the house, but really, she wouldn’t have had it on for very long. Well, it didn’t matter. By evening she would be at the farm and Aunt Evie would cook one of her delicious meals on their wood stove. Dad had been really happy when she told him about Uncle Henri’s call.
    Alice poured herself cereal and got some milk from the fridge. She sniffed it. It didn’t smell great but it wasn’t sour yet. As the house got colder, the fridge got warmer. Weird. Before she picked up her spoon, she cranked up the radio. Maybe it would have good news.
    A t this point, millions are without power. The Montréal area is the hardest hit. Police are evacuating the elderly to shelters throughout the city. Power outages extend to Kingston in the west and New Hampshire in the east. The nation’s capital is frozen solid. Ottawa is virtually closed for business. Police encourage all residents affected by the ice storm to stay off the roads. 911 calls have swamped the emergency system. Please stay off the lines except for true medical emergencies.
    Alice’s eyes grew large. What on earth? Millions without power? Millions? No wonder her dad had to stay at work. Dad had said the storm was worse than anybody had originally thought, but still...millions?
    Alice turned off the radio. She ran to look out the sliding doors in the dining room. The back yard had changed. The ice was thicker, much thicker. She bet it would hold her now. But if Alice knew anything, she knew ice, and this stuff looked super slippery. She sure wasn’t going to try it out. She looked at the big old maple tree. The tiny blankets of ice wrapped round all the branches were fat tubes now, several centimetres thick, dragging the tree down. Every branch had splayed away from the trunk. Some drooped so low that the tips were frozen right into the ground, making frozen archways. That thirty-metre tree was only about ten metres tall now.
    Alice ran to the front hall. Her whole street was dead still; not a single person was moving, not a single car. She stepped outside onto the porch. The world was so quiet. No sirens, no traffic, no people talking on cell phones, no dogs barking, no kids laughing. It was so quiet she could hear the light sound of the freezing rain falling, followed by an abrupt silence as each droplet froze in place. She could hear the wind blowing tiny pellets of ice and frozen snow against the windows, making a scratchy sound. And all around her, the world groaned. The groaning seemed to come from nowhere and from everywhere. She listened harder. It was coming from the trees and the power lines and the houses. They groaned under the weight of the ice. Alice began to breathe heavily. She couldn’t help it; hearing the groans made her feel as if a weight was sitting on her chest as well. She tried to slow her breathing down, tried to imagine the weight lifting. All of a sudden there was a rifle shot.
    Alice’s lungs exploded in a great exhale. Terrified, she jumped back into the safety of the doorway. The shot was followed by a tinkling of glass, a shower of broken bits that shattered when they hit the icy street. Finally, there was a breathy whoosh, as if something heavy had fallen onto something soft. Then there was silence.
    Alice was panting, from fear this time. Had somebody died? Had some maniac shot through a window and killed somebody who fell into a snowbank? On her street? Alice heard shouts down