Free City of the Lost by Kelley Armstrong Page A

where periodic signs mark past fires with dates, and I can still see the damage, twenty years later. I catch a glimpse of what looks like a huge deer at the roadside. Dalton grunts, “Elk,” and that’s it for the next thirty minutes, until I start seeing brown rodents darting across the road and popping up along the side to watch us pass.
    “Are those prairie dogs?” I ask.
    “You see prairie?” Before I can answer, he says, “Arctic ground squirrels.” I think that’s all I’m getting, but after a few more kilometres he says, “Won’t see them much longer. They’ll hibernate soon, sleep for seven months.” Another pause, maybe a kilometre in length, then he says, “Body temperature goes down to near freezing.”
    “How’s that possible?”
    He shrugs. “Bigger question is how their brains survive on stored energy for that long. I’ve read some articles. It’s interesting. Potential applications for human brain degeneration.”
    I try to prod him on that. Or I do after I recover from the shock of it, because he does not strike me as a guy who sits around reading scientific journals for fun. He ignores the prods, and I wonder if it’s because of my pause—if he offered something that could start an intelligent conversation, and I was obviously floored by the prospect, so to hell with me.
    We’ve been on the road for about three hours when he stops for gas. When he said that would be the limit of my dining options, I thought he was exaggerating. We
have
passed two restaurants. One was closed. The other was not the sort of place I’d trust with my digestive health.
    The “towns” we’ve passed though were no more than hamlets. When I remark on this to the store cashier, she laughs and says there are more moose than people in the Yukon. I think she’s joking, but when I ask Dalton the territorial population, he says it’s thirty-five thousand, three-quarters of whom live in Whitehorse.
    “How large is the territory?”
    He climbs into the car. “You could put Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands in it and have room to spare.”
    I remember dismissing the idea that you could hide a town in this day and age. I have only to look out the window to imagine how one could lose a town of two hundred in the wilds beyond this lonely highway.
    When we finally reach Dawson City, Dalton says it’s too late to fly out to Rockton. We’ll stay the night and leave early.
    Outside the town, I see endless piles of gravel covering the landscape—as ugly as scars after hours of forest and hills and lakes.
    “Did something happen here?” I ask.
    “Gold.”
    “I know. The Klondike Gold Rush. A couple hundred years ago.”
    “Nope, gold’s still there. Those are dredge-tailing piles, from mining the river. Stopped in the sixties and restarted a few years back. Floating excavators spit up this shit on the ground and leave it, because hell, it’s only empty land. Doesn’t matter if you dump a damned riverbed all over it.”
    “They don’t have to clean it up?”
    “It’s not environmentally harmful, and up here no one gives a shit about the rest. Lots of other places to look if you want scenery.”
    He might brush it off, but I can tell the blight on the landscape offends him.
    As we continue into town, I feel as if I’ve time-warped back to those Klondike days. Old-fashioned wooden buildings. Dirt roads. Board sidewalks. When we stop at an inn, Dalton tells me to remove my shoes inside.
    “Is that a custom here?”
    “When the roads are made of dirt, it’s common sense.”
    “Is there a reason for the dirt roads? Construction issues? Materials? The climate?”
    “Tourism.”
    As I leave my sneakers in a “shoe room,” Dalton checks in. He’s clearly been here before, but he doesn’t say much to the proprietor, just tells her we’ll be having breakfast and then gives me my key and says we’re heading out at eight.
    I’d been a little surprised that “eight” was Dalton’s idea of an early