Making sure that happens is the least he can do. The only thing he can do. The only thing that makes sense in an absolutely broken reality.

  “You killed them,” Brandon repeats, not opening his eyes. “There’s a monster out there. And you got both Avas killed.”

  “Don’t be a jackass,” Jaden scoffs. “Did that bitch put you up to this? Listen, it’s only a game, and if they got out, then—”

  Brandon grabs Jaden’s ankle. The other man is yanked off balance in his crouch, and as he teeters, Brandon rolls, using Jaden’s momentum to launch him off the side of the platform.

  “One,” Brandon calls down to his friends.

  Two people get out a day. So two people have to get out tomorrow, and it won’t be Mack and LeGrand. He can give them that. Because he’s not just a thing. None of them are. He’s a person, like his grandma taught him to be. A kind person, and a good friend. He doesn’t want to live in a world where he’s a thing, or where he’s a bad friend, or where monsters are real.

  Brandon stands up, taking a deep breath. He steps to the edge and looks down. Mack and LeGrand are waving and shouting. He waves back down, then takes one last long look at the perfect blue of the sky.

  “Two,” he says, loud enough for them to hear. He steps off the platform.

  * * *

  —

  Mack stares down at the mess. It feels callous to think of two people—one she liked, one she didn’t—as a mess, but that’s the only way to describe it. Maybe something is broken in her, too, but she doesn’t look away. It feels important to witness.

  Brandon is clearly dead. He tipped as he fell, neck snapped on impact. She can’t understand why he did it.

  “Two a day,” LeGrand says, solving the mystery. He’s not looking at the mess, but staring into the trees, watchful.

  “He’s making sure they’re easy to find.” Mack closes her eyes at last, cutting off the view of Brandon’s empty stare. “Giving us an extra day.” She knows she’s talking about him in the present tense, like he’s not already past tense, forever. But it’s better to think of him like that, like he’s still playing the game, still playing it for his friends, still the same sweet guy who offered to let three strangers come live with him just because he had a house, because he could help.

  He’d figured out a way to help now, too. She wouldn’t have asked this of him. And she wouldn’t have done it herself. She knows death is coming for her, sure. Long overdue. But she’s going to let it find her, not rush to meet it.

  Besides, she still has to figure out a way to let LeGrand win. Thanks to Brandon, now she has an extra day to do it.

  A terrible gurgling sound rips her eyes open, and she turns to the jumble of bones and burst skin and pooling blood that once was Jaden. Still is Jaden. He’s not dead. His fingers twitch as he claws at the ground, his goal unclear. Bloody bubbles ooze out of his mouth, and Mack is sure that means something medically, but she has no idea what.

  “Dammit,” she whispers. Because Jaden got her Ava killed, but he didn’t know. Not all the way. And even if he did, this seems crueler than the universe should allow. In this state, odds are he won’t even survive until tomorrow. There’s no hope of help coming, no potential for rescue. For medical intervention. Even if there were, she doesn’t think it would matter.

  Mack looks at LeGrand, who is equally horrified. Jaden has started groaning in a low chorus of agony.

  Mack knows if she says it out loud, she’s asking for permission. And she shouldn’t make LeGrand complicit. He’s got to get out, after all, and save his sister. He’ll need to be whole for that. Mack doesn’t need to be whole, and besides, has she ever really been?

  She searches the ground for a big rock. The area they’re in is littered with small rocks and unidentifiable trash, but nothing as heavy as she needs. She’ll probably have to find one of the sections of collapsed wall. Get a chunk from that. “Go into the trees,” she says to LeGrand. “I’ll be right there.”

  “Mack,” LeGrand says.

  She doesn’t want to argue with him. It’s the only kindness she can offer Jaden, the only—

  “Mack!” This time there’s a quiet warning in LeGrand’s tone, a quality of fear that makes her go still.

  That’s when she hears it. The soft padding of something drawing near, the long, slow sounds of something inhaling deeply. Of something following a scent. LeGrand backs away, melting into the trees, and Mack looks at Jaden, suffering. Then she takes a step backward, and another, and another, her eyes on the path they had come from.

  The walled walkway curves sharply, hiding the full length from her. But the sounds are getting closer, and she wonders how she could have ever attributed them to a person, or even to an animal. She takes another step backward.

  Another.

  Another.

  She should be running, but she can’t make herself do more than creep backward, timed to the steps she can hear shuffling ever nearer. One step forward, one step back, a careful choreography.

  And then her dance partner is revealed.

  “Oh,” Mack breathes out, because as soon as she sees what’s coming, she realizes what she expected to be revealed. She expected a person. Not just any person, either. Some part of her expected to see her father come around that bend, knife in hand, thin lips a grim line, eyes blank and emotionless, here at last to claim her.

  So she can’t quite understand what it is she’s actually faced with.

  She stands still, watching, as it shuffles forward, turning its head side to side as the wet snuffling noise continues, the flat broad snout of it searching, two tear-shaped nostrils flared. Above that, where eyes perhaps once were, are a patchwork hatching of poorly healed scars, pink and gray, a story of violence.

  Violence, too, in its hands, almost human but too large, each finger a blunt, thick instrument, tapering to claws that are jagged, broken, crusted in blood.

  It’s the blood Mack can’t look away from. Is that the last of Ava, her Ava, crusted and drying into flakes on the ends of the monster’s hands?

  It stops, swings its head to the side. Its nostrils flare bigger, and it takes a deep, lingering breath. Her eyes drift up to massive horns erupting from its head, five of them, almost elegant in comparison with the rest of it. Gray at the base where they sweep out from the head, then curving back toward each other, tapering to white tips that nearly meet in a single point eighteen inches above its skull.

  Ivory, she thinks, remembering a nature program she and Maddie watched about poachers. It made them both cry with such desperate snotty gasps that their mother ran in and turned the TV off, scolding them. Mack could never understand why she was in trouble for being sad about the cruelty of the world.

  Maybe even then their mother knew what her fate held, what both her daughters’ fates held, and was only trying to spare them for as long as she could. To lie to them about what the world lets happen. But their mother’s protection, even her own body, wasn’t a strong enough dam to hold back the coming violence.

  One hoofed leg slides forward, a long strand of spittle falling in slow motion from the monster’s mouth to the matted, filthy hair of its chest.

  A hand clamps down on Mack’s shoulder and drags her backward. The monster, suddenly spurred into action, lunges forward with surprising speed. But it stops at the gasping remains of Jaden, left there for it by Brandon.

  Its movements are oddly tender, smooth and unfrenzied, as it reaches down and gathers Jaden’s broken body up in its arms, then lifts him toward its mouth.

  Mack can almost see—in that mouth, in that gaping maw, there aren’t teeth, there are—

  LeGrand tugs her hard and she nearly falls. It’s enough to jolt her out of her reverie, and she catches herself, then tears through the undergrowth and leaps over fallen trees, guided by LeGrand, leaving behind the sounds of death.

  She understands, now, why Brandon decided to jump. Knows she owes her life to the fact that Jaden fell between her and the monster.

  But—

  “Three.” She grabs LeGrand’s arm. She recognizes where they are and points in the direction of the bumper car trellis. Up there, they can see and hear what’s coming for them.

  LeGrand nods, expression grim.

  Three. That means their security, their idea that it was only two a day, was wrong. It could and probably would come for them next. Maybe it was only getting two a day because that’s all it could find.

  “Four,” LeGrand quietly corrects. Because surely the monster wasn’t going to stop at Jaden.

  Mack is fiercely glad that Brandon’s already dead. He knew what was coming for them, and he chose how he would leave the world. She’s choosing, too. She’s going to get LeGrand out, and then she’s going to walk to her first hiding spot—where Ava slept against her, where Ava trusted her, where she remembered Maddie and her absurd yarn duck—sit on the ground, and wait.

  “There.” Mack points again. The trellis is up ahead. LeGrand goes first, then helps her up. They lie flat, faces pressed against the ivy, hearts racing.

  So now she’s seen it. She knows what’s out there. It doesn’t make any more sense than it did before, but at least she can move from horror, the fear of the unknown, and into terror, the fear of the known. Terror is almost a comfort at this point, a familiar friend.

  “We wait until dark,” she whispers. “Then we go for the fence.”

  “But the electricity, and the guards.”

  “Maybe you can find a tree overhanging, climb that. I’ll distract the guards.”

  It’s a hazy plan, and she can feel somewhere deep inside that it’s hopeless, but she has to have a goal, has to have a focus, has to have something to think about other than that those sightless features were the last thing Ava saw. Those claws the last thing she felt.

  “You’re getting out,” she whispers.

  LeGrand nods, the ivy trembling beneath him. “We can both get out.”

  But Mack knows she’s not. She was never going to. It settles over her and she feels her heart calm, slowing, something like peace wrapping itself around her.

  They will wait until night, LeGrand will escape, and Mack will finally meet the same fate as the only people she has ever loved. Death would come for her, and at last she wouldn’t be left behind, hiding alone in the dark.

  * * *

  —

  LeGrand next to Mack is such a different presence than Ava. Ava’s body was somehow both familiar and thrilling, a comfort and excitement at the same time. LeGrand just…takes up space.

  It’s late afternoon, and Mack feels the slow trudge of the sun in her soul. The waiting is terrible, and the fact that the waiting is boring feels somehow crueler. Terror shouldn’t be boring, shouldn’t be a slog through infinite empty hours. It should be sharp and quick and final.

  Maybe Maddie really was the lucky one. Her terror was over quickly. Mack has been living in it for so many years, but she’s almost at the end. She’s nearly done now.

  LeGrand grabs her arm, his tight fingers a warning. He needn’t have. She hears it, too.

  They both press their faces against the trellis, finding an empty space to look through, but they’re not close enough to the edge. They can really only see straight down at the cracked and pitted cement beneath them. Whatever is coming is getting closer. Not satisfied with four in one day, then. Maybe the monster, too, wants to get it over with. Mack doesn’t blame it.

  “We jump down,” Mack whispers. “I’ll distract it, and you run.”

  LeGrand’s watery blue eyes, not piercing or beautiful, dull eyes in a dull face that she hopes see his sister again, narrow as though he is considering disagreeing.

  “Almera,” Mack reminds him. He relents, nodding once.

  A crunch of leaves signals the monster’s proximity. “On three,” Mack whispers, surprised at how calm she feels, how steady her heartbeat. A smile creeps across her face, and she knows it’s absurd, but she can’t help it. Olly olly oxen free, and it’s not the winning she’d expected or the freedom she hoped for, but isn’t it a sort of freedom nonetheless?

  “One…two…three.” She rolls and tips herself off the edge of the trellis, grabbing hold of it to stop her fall and then dropping to the ground. Her ankles absorb the shock with protest, but she doesn’t need them for much longer. LeGrand lands heavily next to her and runs without pausing. Mack turns to greet her fate.

  Her step freezes before she can take it. Her eyes snag on the rifle. She can’t quite make herself look at the face, can’t quite accept it.

  “You’re dead,” Mack whispers.

  * * *

  —

  Staring at Mack, Ava wants to tell her about the past few hours. Wants to explain. But she can only remember, because even remembering has so many questions she doesn’t know how to put it into words.

  Death had come for Ava, unknowable, unseeable, a mystery and a stench.

  As the other Ava was consumed into nothingness, Ava screamed defiance and rage that it had to happen now, just when she had reason to hope again, to have something in this damn world she cares about.

  She swung her pipe and connected with nothing.

  Spinning in a wild circle, balance thrown by her desperation, she swung and swung and hit only air.

  Fight or flight had long since been trained into fight or fight, but even Ava had enough training to know that this time, fleeing was the only option. She turned in the opposite direction of whatever the thing that ate Ava Two was, and she ran. Her leg screamed, not fit for running, but she knew the limits of her body better than anything, and she could push them.

  Though her own uneven gait was painfully loud, she trained her ears, listening for pursuit, for that terrible wet breathing noise, waited to be assaulted by the death-rot smell of it. But she broke free of her path near the fence and heard nothing. Smelled nothing. She crouched, hidden in the undergrowth, and caught her breath.

  “Motherfuckers,” she gasped. She had noticed the weird material of the fence the first night, but she didn’t put together why it was made of metal wiring. She could hear the electric hum, the slight crackling in the air. That also explained the periodic towers she saw. Not a remnant of the old park. A new addition. Guard towers.

  She needed to get back to Mack, Brandon, and LeGrand. To warn them. She stretched her leg in front of herself, wishing she could take the damn thing off. Wishing she could run like she used to. Wishing a lot of things. Three minutes. She’d give herself three minutes to catch her breath, and then—

  A shot rang out nearby. Not shooting at her, but shooting at someone not too far away. A voice of strangled confusion drifted on the air. Brandon. Safe to say he wouldn’t leave the hiding place without the others. Which meant they were on the move. Ava could join them.

  But.

  There was a gun somewhere along the fence.

  She took stock of her supplies, what she could access, what she could use. She gently silenced the panic blaring in her mind and packed it away, because it wasn’t going to accomplish anything. She had work to do.

  * * *

  —

  Mack doesn’t throw her arms around Ava. She can’t believe what—who—she’s seeing. She stands there, staring, her eyes roving over Ava’s face like fingers, trying to memorize the contours, the freckles and scars and lines of a face she had thought was gone forever. She knows how fast she forgets, and she wonders what she had forgotten already in these few hours.

  LeGrand is less emotionally overwhelmed. “You’re alive,” he says, walking up from his aborted escape route.

  “Yeah. Let’s move.” Ava slings the rifle over her shoulder, hands him a bag of rubber duckies.

  “No, we have to hide.” Mack feels slow and muddled, her brain still not caught up to this new development, this new tectonic shift in her reality. Why does Ava have rubber duckies? “Until dark.”

  “It’s taking more than two a day,” LeGrand adds. Then he frowns. “Oh, except. It didn’t get you. That must be why it took Jaden.”

  “How did you get away?” Mack looks like she’s staring at a ghost. She had never imagined this reunion, had never considered that something taken could be returned, and she doesn’t know how to process it. Maybe another person would have cried, hugged her beloved, felt happiness or relief.

  Mack feels numb. She was finally at the end, and now…she doesn’t know what to expect. She had been sure she was going to win, then she had been sure she was going to die, and maybe in her head the two things had become one.

  Ava shrugs. She sorts through her memories, reports what happened as though typing it up after the fact, removing herself and her emotions. Nouns, verbs, stripped of feelings. “Something ate Ava Two. I swung at it, but I didn’t hit anything, and since I couldn’t see it, I—”

  “You couldn’t see it?” LeGrand asks.

  Ava tilts her head, puzzled. “You could?”

  Mack nods.

  “What? Why can’t I see it? What did it look like?”

  Mack understands now why Brandon couldn’t describe it. She ends up shrugging, too, echoing LeGrand’s movement. The monster is a weight on her shoulders, a psychic wound she worries will never scar over.

  Ava’s frustrated, annoyed by their lack of helpfulness, and weirdly feeling left out. But she doesn’t have time. There is no time. “Fine. Whatever. You can tell me where to aim if we run into it. Where’s Brandon?” Ava looks around, expectant. They aren’t safe yet, not by a long shot, and she won’t stop until they are. She won’t feel until they are.