Foreverland Is Dead

lines. Her hand is on Cyn’s shoulder, pills pinched in her fingers. She doesn’t ask, just puts them between Cyn’s lips.
    Cyn lifts her heavy head high enough to chase the pills without spilling water. Not that it matters; the pillow is damp with sweat.
    It’s light outside. There’s a lump in Jen’s bed. Roc is making noise in the back.
    “What’s going on?”
    Mad puts the cup on the floor, hands her a bowl of cold grits. She pulls the covers off the foot of Cyn’s beds, inspecting the bandages. They feel dry but a stench rises.
    Kat limps to the stove, poking the dying embers to life, throwing another stick inside. She begins undressing.
    “Jen hit a fence,” Kat says.
    “What?” Cyn gets higher on her elbow. “Where?”
    “Went through the woods, the three of us. Went to that small cabin and split up. Jen went straight north and I went northeast. Must’ve walked about twenty minutes but didn’t get far. Trees are thick and there’s no path. Mad went the other way, same thing.”
    Kat’s face is scratched as bad as Mad’s.
    “Right about the time I saw the end of the forest, I started to feel the buzz,” Kat continues, sitting on the edge of her bed to shuck her boots. “I slowed down, but kept going. It got more intense the closer I got to the end of the trees. I could see the clearing right where they stopped, like I could just step out and walk into another meadow. I got all the way to the edge and felt like I was going to drop.”
    She leans on her knees, rubbing her face.
    “Then I heard screaming.”
    “Jen?”
    “She was a long ways off, but it sounded like she was set on fire. Took about ten minutes to get to her. She was just outside the trees, squirming in the snow, wouldn’t stop.”
    Mad pulls the covers over Cyn’s feet, tucks them in. Won’t look up.
    “How’d you get her out?” Cyn asks.
    “It took a while,” Kat says. “We reached in and grabbed her foot, damn near blacked out doing it. Once we got her, though, she stopped screaming.”
    “She ain’t talked since,” Mad says.
    What memories are in her now?
    “It was a road, Cyn,” Kat says.
    “What do you mean?”
    “There were tracks in the ground, just like you saw. Mad and I think she ignored the feeling in her neck, just walked out of the trees and right through the fence.”
    “And started remembering.” Mad goes to the stove. “Ain’t that right, Cyn?”
    “It’s like the road was taunting us,” Kat says. “Pretending there’s a way out, but then we just start remembering.”
    “I don’t want to know,” Mad says. “Not anymore.”
    Their eyes are cast downward.
    Their spirit will starve long before their stomachs. There’s no escape.
    No hope.
    They feel the cage, too. Sense the walls. The illusion of freedom is crushing them. There was a world beyond the mountains, but not anymore. Hope is the dream.
    “How far did Jen get?” Cyn asks.
    “What?” Kat looks up.
    “She walked straight north, how far did she go from the bunkhouse before she reached the fence?”
    “I don’t know, three hundred yards or so. Hard to say with all the trees.”
    Cyn visualizes the bunkhouse from a bird’s eye view. She trekked due south about two miles, give or take. Jen went in the opposite direction only three hundred yards or so.
    She reaches under the bed for her coat and searches the pockets. There’s a pencil and a tattered square of paper in the pocket. She unfolds it, holds it up to the light.
    If Jen walked three hundred yards to the north—she puts an X on the paper—and Cyn went two miles to the south, then she could identify the perimeter. And if the fence is an enormous circle—Cyn sketches an outline using the two points as a reference—that would mean that the center would be…
    “Got it.”
    Kat and Mad are at the stove. “Got what?” Kat asks.
    Cyn circles the tiny X in the center of her notes, holds it up.
    “I know where the gate is.”

46

    Miranda’s elbow wakes her at three o’clock in the morning.
    She had slipped on an icy rock during her exploration. Every muscle in her body aches, the blisters on her feet throb. And the pain relievers are wearing off.
    There’s a light on somewhere in the back of the house.
    Mr. Williams is adamant about conserving energy. Lights get turned off, the heat turned down. Even the music. She lies on the couch, beneath three heavy comforters, listening to the office chair creak.
    He’s up.
    Miranda doesn’t want to move; it took