HIBERNACULUM

Under the snow, something got cold enough to wake up. Haltia, Michigan. Eleven hundred people, an iron mine flooded for a century, and a winter that falls to thirty below. When the company pumps the old shafts dry to reach the nickel that fills electric batteries, eight hundred thousand bats flee the mountain in a single night - and freeze in midair over the rooftops. That is only the beginning. Far below, beneath the one level no one has reopened since 1913, an animal the cold kept sleeping opens its eyes.
It is blind. It does not see light. It sees heat. Yours. A lamp, an engine, a chimney, a man's breath in the freezing dark - every one of them a beacon. And it does not eat what it kills. It cuts it apart and hangs it high in the dead pines, out of reach, to last a whole winter. Rae Kangas runs the mine rescue team. She knows how to go down into the dark. Now she has to learn something else: that to go unseen, you have to be cold - cold enough to lose your fingers.
And that her town, which has always chosen the paycheck over the truth, gave the thing its name a hundred and thirteen years ago, and never knew. HIBERNACULUM : freezing, meticulous, and merciless - for anyone who loves it when the small American town hides, under the snow, something that is already counting its stores.