Snow Angels, 1

Milliken and Mae Mae have always lived in the trenches, it's all they know. They were born in it and will die in it, like the rest of their people. Nobody gets out of the huge walls of ice that surround it. Life in it is hostile, but easy if you follow the rules. Rule number one, the trench provides. Everything necessary to live grows on its walls, nothing under the ice, or is in the gifts that the cold gods left. Rule number two, never, never step out of the trenches. Outside the trench there is only death. The winds above would tear the flesh from anyone's bones. Rule number three, the trench never ends. It extends to infinity in both directions. Seeking the end only leads to death and madness. Leaving the trench means waking up the snowman, death personified. On Milli's twelfth birthday, her father takes the two girls overnight skating down the trench, a coming-of-age ritual involving fishing the frozen river, hunting down the wild dogs that roam the their shores and give appropriate thanks to their gods: the Cold ones. Upon their return they discover that the ice man is not a legend. It exists... and it has come to kill them all. Now a question remains to be resolved: who has broken the rules?