It was snowing — no real shocker in February. Plows and salt trucks couldn’t keep up, the snow disposal sites and the boulevards piling high. These were the Martian conditions we were used to in Winnipeg. No one batted an eye.

I rode my bike through the bad weather. It made me feel independent, stronger than I really was. People call winter cyclists crazy for good reason. I stood in the seat, tires gripping the fresh powder over the train tracks on Wellington Crescent. But I didn’t see her in time, and I lost control, twisted, and flew over my handlebars, joining her prone body in the road.

I couldn’t move, face to face with blank eyes and icy flesh. The girl was dead, yeah, but well preserved, the weather doing double duty as a morgue cooler. The frost had kept her pretty face safe, made her look carved out of ice and porcelain.

Stumbling to my feet, I struggled to move my numb hands. She’d made a snow angel before she died, wings scuffed around her broken arms, crooked legs frozen mid-dance. Her mouth was open in a hollow scream.

This was the first dead body I’d ever seen. I hadn’t even seen my parents’ bodies after the accident, so it felt as though this one belonged to me. Her hair was red. Her knees were knobby. And her eye had been gouged out — we could almost pass for sisters. Even though it was a horrible thing to see — like looking into a death mirror — I knew this body was meant for me to find.

I didn’t scream. I didn’t do anything. I should have, because reacting in the slightest way would’ve eked me out as “a stable human.” But let’s face it — I was too far gone for that.

Before any cars could pull over to see what the lone girl by the train tracks was staring at, before the police and the ambulance and the news trucks could appear to wrap the girl in a cocoon of speculation and black plastic — before they found out it was my fault — all I could do was grab my bike and ride away until my legs were stone, trying not to think of all the things that were coming for me in broad daylight, or how my brain buzzed with two words: You’re next.