It’s all hopeless. Ava pulls out the firing pin of the rifle, instead. “Just in case you decided to shoot me in the back as soon as we’re over the fence.”

  “Such a nasty girl,” Linda mutters, taking the rifle. “What will they think if they examine the gun?”

  “That Ray didn’t know how to handle one. Don’t know, don’t care. Good luck with the body, he’s a big dude.” Ava grits her teeth. She’s in hyper-focus mode, one task at a time, not letting herself think about tomorrow, what will happen, what she’ll do. She’s so mad, she wants to strangle them all. All she knows is she has to stay with Mack and LeGrand. She’s their only hope. So she climbs, up into the tower and then back over and down into the fucking murder monster park.

  “Your grandparents understood covenants,” LeGrand says, his deep voice firm. “You’ll keep yours.” It’s not a question, it’s a statement, as forceful as he’s ever been in his life. Except when he hit Linda in the head. That still feels like someone else did it, like the hands weren’t his.

  “Of course.” Linda’s head hurts, and she neither forgets nor forgives as she watches him climb. Since they already passed through Tommy’s gate once, this shouldn’t be a problem. All it takes is one cross of that threshold.

  Mack is last. Linda goes stiff with shock as Mack embraces her in a hug. “Thank you,” Mack says.

  Linda hesitantly pats Mack’s back, then something inside her loosens and she really returns the embrace. Linda’s so relieved that Mack understands. At last, finally, someone understands the weight of this responsibility, this duty. Linda’s surprised to find herself suffused with pride for this unnerving, strange girl. A girl who understands that sometimes, sacrifices have to made. Of course she’s a Nicely. They always have been the best family.

  This is all going to be fine. Linda’s got it back under control, somehow, against all odds. She’ll even keep her word to LeGrand and move his sister to a care house, since that means knowing where a spare is at all times. She most certainly will not keep her word about Ava, though. Ava will die.

  “Goodbye.” Mack pulls away and climbs up the tower.

  By the time she gets to the other side, Ava and LeGrand are both on the ground, waiting. Ava’s shoulders, so strong, are slumped. Being here, again, has broken her. She doesn’t know what to do now. She has no idea what to fight, or how to fight it, or even if she has the strength left for any fight at all.

  LeGrand sits on the ground. He might as well wait right here. Doesn’t seem much point to doing anything else.

  “Why?” Ava whispers, not reaching out for Mack, not wanting to touch her skin while it’s still warm, while it’s still here. She had felt safe with Mack, had felt a future in her touch. “Why did you do this?”

  Mack took Maddie’s hiding spot. But she hadn’t known what the result would be. She hadn’t killed Maddie. She can see that now, thanks to Linda. Mack crouches and pulls out the handgun she tucked into her sock instead of putting it back in Linda’s purse with the fallen lipstick tubes.

  “I said we’d choose what was sacrificed. I never said it was gonna be us.”

  DAY SIX

  The sun breaks the horizon, cracking the darkness and flooding an abandoned amusement park—a labyrinth—a cemetery—a place haunted by the living and the dead alike—with light.

  Three people are inside.

  The sun hits the top of the Ferris wheel first, so brilliantly backlit it could almost look whole, like at any moment it will spin to life, rotating riders up and around, an orbit of wonder as they look down at the quickly receding and then breathlessly approaching ground, the stomach-dropping giddiness leading to a stolen kiss. A peal of gleeful laughter. A few minutes of freedom from gravity.

  But no more. This particular orbit has been forever arrested, rusted into place. The view will never change.

  A set of roller-coaster tracks, ancient and rotting, carpeted with so much ivy that it might be the body of some great sleeping beast long since forgotten, is illuminated next. But it’s just wood and metal. The only beast within this park is neither forgotten nor sleeping for much longer.

  Daylight pierces the trees, the ivy, the feral topiary. It can’t break through to the center of the carousel, where both Rosiee and Rebecca ended, surrounded by the grimaces of flaking animal faces. It shines sideways into the base camp, where Ian’s and Christian’s blood has become a sticky black stain, an accusation with no one willing to answer for it. It winks along the chains of the swing, where Jaden thought he was safe and Brandon chose not to be. It lingers on Brandon’s gaze, filmed over, no clean devouring disposal for his body. Who will be the kindest gas station attendant in Pocatello, Idaho, now?

  The sun races along the ground, over countless winding maze walls, devouring shadow and piercing mist, throwing everything into sharpest relief. The bushes where Sydney crouched and closed her eyes so she wouldn’t see what was chasing her. The leering clown mouth where Logan—out so quickly, forgotten now by even our three hiders, who will not be able to remember his name—fell asleep and never left. The clotted pool, a twin to the one in the base camp, a testament that beautiful Ava existed, that she was real, that she tried. She tried so hard.

  And here, following arrow to arrow, the path Atrius left behind. His mark on the competition. Mack pauses at the discarded sensible pumps, tries to remember the woman they belonged to, can conjure only an image of a pantsuit and an aura of stress.

  Isabella, lost first, lost forever.

  Mack doesn’t fail to notice the child’s shoe, cracked and peeling leather, hooked onto a branch now grown to the level of her face. Mack nods, as though making a secret agreement with the shoe, and takes it off, tucking it into her pocket.

  She pushes on, knowing this is far enough, but needing to see for herself the center of it all. What a generation long before her summoned and paid for, and what subsequent generations decided to make others pay for. Trickle-down economics. They got the economy, and the blood trickled down the decades.

  Mack comes around a bend, almost trips on an old iron loop fixed into the cement decades ago. She stops, awed in the oldest sense of the word, where awe is soul-quaking fear and mind-bending wonder wrapped into one.

  Here is the temple.

  And here is the beast.

  * * *

  —

  Elsewhere, ringing the park, surly but with shockingly little mourning for one of their own lost, men sit in their towers with their guns leaning against the walls, drinking coffee, glad that at least Linda is the one who has to clean up the mess. The least charitable among them resent Ray for dying and leaving one less guard in rotation so they all have to do more. The most charitable among them no longer live in the town or have anything to do with these families, so they have no presence in the towers.

  Even Ray’s son Chuck cannot muster stronger feelings than general displeasure over his father’s death and the “whoopsie” inside the park, as Linda so annoyingly summed it up. They’re really going to dump this all on him next time. He’s a forty-five-year-old man, for fuck’s sake, and he’s still working for his father. Or he was, until a few hours ago. But where are his blessings from the great sacrifice? Why should he be tasked with making it run smoothly so other people can benefit? It’s a good town, but sometimes it feels like a prison sentence.

  His radio statics with life at the same time several pops echo through the air from somewhere in the park. He lurches upright, scanning his limited view. He’s manning the guard tower nearest the gate, named Tommy for his great-grandfather, but he doesn’t see anything.

  The static eats several of the words, but one of the guys—Ted, maybe? Sounds like Ted—is saying something about being shot at.

  * * *

  —

  Linda has settled in bed at last, a compress on her aching head, when her nightstand phone rings.

  “What?” she snaps. It’s got to be one of the men, probably wondering about the arrangements for Ray’s replacement, as if she couldn’t manage this all by herself, as if she hasn’t been managing it all by herself for decades! Maybe if she had some damn competent help, last night’s fiasco never would have happened.

  “You aren’t on your walkie. Is there any way they could have a gun in the park?” Gary demands.

  “No, we checked their bags on the bus, how could—” Linda drops the phone on her bed and rushes down the hallway, banging her elbow against the wall. Her purse is exactly where Mack left it on the table after thoughtfully replacing the spilled contents. Linda dumps it out, desperate. But of course she doesn’t find what she’s looking for.

  She goes to the phone on the wall and picks it up, the line still connected. “Sorry, I dropped the phone. Chuck must not have checked well enough. It’s probably the military one. Treat her as extremely dangerous.”

  Those filthy little cunts. Linda throws on her house robe, grabs her keys, and gets in the car.

  * * *

  —

  “Which tower?” Chuck demands.

  “Ferris wheel! They’re all here! Hurry!” The man is cut off. Chuck has a moment of confusion—the towers are named—but he knows which one Ted meant. Rose. Which is also weird, because Ted is usually on Ethel, but he must have swapped with someone. Bad luck for him. And for them all. Ted’s the worst shot of anyone, so they’ll have to get to him fast. And the Ferris wheel is on the opposite end of the park, a good two miles away since he has to go all the way around.

  “Everyone! Get to Rose!” Chuck broadcasts, then climbs down and gets on his four-wheeler, gunning it away from his tower and its view of the gate.

  LeGrand puts the walkie-talkie on transmit and holds it that way, jamming the line so no one can communicate. Then he fires one more shot for good measure at absolutely nothing and starts running.

  * * *

  —

  “Goddammit, where is it?” Ava tears apart Ian’s bag, left on the floor of the abandoned pavilion. She’s the only one who isn’t in immediate danger, but she feels Mack and LeGrand’s peril acutely, a pressure in her chest, phantom claws piercing her own stomach. They’re ending this today. She pulls out an old leather book and shoves it into one of her many cargo pant pockets. Could work as a wick. But not if she doesn’t find the lighter.

  “Ah!” she screams, triumphant, emerging once more from the depths of Ian’s bag with his sleek silver lighter. Thinking better of the book plan, she grabs one of Christian’s Athens Solar T-shirts, takes hold of the monstrous generator, and begins to drag it.

  Her still-intact stomach sinks. Maybe they should have chosen someone with two functioning legs for this task.

  “Fuck fuck fuckity fuck.” She grits her teeth against the pain. This should never have been her fight. But isn’t every fight her fight, whether she benefits from it or not? She’s so tired of having to fight.

  “Mack,” she whispers to herself, closing her eyes, taking a breath. Then she crouches as best she can with a right knee and ankle that won’t bend anymore, shoves her arms through the metal roll cage around the generator—cheap fucks couldn’t spring for wheel attachments?—and stands with a roar.

  One foot in front of the other is good enough, she thinks, then she laughs because she only has one good foot. But she’s enough. She has to be.

  She is the goddamn strongest woman in the world.

  * * *

  —

  In Mack’s mind, scarred over with wounds from that night, her father had lost his face. He had transformed into something towering, bent at impossible angles, with black holes for eyes. He didn’t hold a knife; he was a knife.

  But Mack, staring at death, lets herself finally try to remember her father. And when she does, she laughs.

  He had a beer belly. His arms and legs were thin, the hair there so sparse in some areas it wore right off. He couldn’t grow a beard. His eyes were like hers, too big, wide set, so that he gave the impression of always being distracted or slightly puzzled. The fastest way to set off his explosive temper—which was never a difficult task—was to ask if he was paying attention. That lost him most jobs.

  He’d always tried to fix plumbing issues, would swear and rage and declare he was taking a break, at which point he would go out to a bar. Mack’s mother would quietly step in and finish the job so that when he got back, he could smugly explain he must have done it right, it just needed a few minutes to settle.

  He yelled at his favorite television programs as though his feelings had any bearing on what might be happening on the screen.

  He made pancakes with chocolate chip smiley faces, and whistled with the clearest, purest notes.

  He hit their mother, and he hit them, not because he was strong, but because he wasn’t. No one who is strong hits a child. No one who is strong does anything he did.

  And Mack has no questions about that: He chose to do what he did. He looked at the world and felt it owed him more than he had, and when that didn’t materialize, he took himself out along with everyone who had tried to love him, who might have been happier without him.

  Finally, at last, Mack can form him in her mind as small, impotent, poisonously angry. Not a monster at all, but the most pathetically human of men.

  The monster in front of her is not human at all, but there are traces in its hands. It doesn’t have claws so much as thick, grooved nails that have never been trimmed, broken and growing and broken again into jagged edges. It shuffles toward her on legs that bend backward at the knee, like a cow’s. At the end of those legs, covered in dense, matted fur tinged green with moss, heavy hooves fall on the ground not with cheerful clopping, but with careful padding.

  Its shoulders are broad, too broad, rippling with power on either side of a massive chest, but its waist narrows to an almost delicate taper before turning into hips not designed for upright walking. It has no genitalia at all, just more of that matted, green-tinged fur. It hunches, head parallel to the ground. Atop a short, broad neck, its face is a flat expanse with two nostrils, flaring as the monster breathes in deeply, searching. The terrible scarring where they put out its eyes balances between incongruously delicate ears, velvet soft, sloping on either side of the head beneath the long, sensuously curving crown of horns.

  They look heavy. She wonders if they make its neck ache after a day of hunting.

  Unlike her father, there is nothing pathetically human about this monster, but it strikes her as pathetic nonetheless as it shuffles closer, bringing with it the scent of death and decay and rot to assault her senses, warning her that this is the end.

  And even though this thing, this abomination, destroyed so many people and would consume her, too, she can’t hate it. Whatever those families did to summon it, to make their deal, she can’t imagine it agreed. It doesn’t seem to have the capacity for consent.

  It exists to consume. Who can blame it for following its terrible course, for being in a place it does not belong, for being forced into wretched existence and sustained and fed merely to keep existing?

  Mack takes the sharp edge of Rosiee’s silver heart pendant, rescued from the carousel, and drags it along her wrist. Blood beads along the line, the scrape enough to break the skin but not make her gush freely.

  The monster stops mid-step, head snapping in Mack’s direction, nostrils flaring wide.

  Her task is to make sure the monster is where they want it to be, when they want it to be there. But instead of turning and running, Mack watches. She can’t look away. She missed death the first time it came for her, and she was ready—maybe even eager—for it here. For that last, final, ultimate hiding place, the darkness in which no one could ever find her. Not her father, not her guilt or her shame, not hunger or fear or want.

  The monster unseals the thin line of its lips and a spittle of drool drops down. But there are no teeth there. In its mouth, oblivion. A velvet black so deep and complete she has never seen its like, never will. And beyond the black, a hint of something burning. Not warm, hungry, orange fire, but the cold white pulse of a distant star.

  Mack takes a step toward the gravity-drag of that promise.

  Several shots fire somewhere in the distance, and Mack remembers herself. She remembers her own self, super-compacted, pushed down so deep all she had was the pull of her own misery, the terrible weight of her lonely shame.

  But her shell cracked, and it didn’t end her. She didn’t burn up, or burst. She’s not alone anymore, and she won’t leave her friends, just as she knows—has seen, has felt, and would believe even without that evidence—that her friends, her Ava, won’t leave her.

  Mack turns and runs, and death follows quickly, drawn by the scent of her blood and the need for more.

  * * *

  —

  Ava’s going too slowly. She knows she is. But even her tremendous will can’t make her body move faster. The generator, named PREDATOR with absolutely no irony on the part of the company, weighs nearly two hundred pounds. She’s glad it weighs that much, because that means it still has gas in the tank. But it also means she can barely manage a shuffle, much less the brisk pace she had planned on.

  They need her to be at the right place at the right time, or they have no chance. Mack will die, LeGrand will die, and then what point does Ava have? She finally found the borders of herself again, finally believes she can fill in the vast hollow that took claim of so much of her. Finally found a purpose and a family, two things that had been taken away from her right alongside a functioning leg.

  She would give almost anything for that old leg now. Her knee trembles and almost gives out, her boot-encased metal ankle sliding dangerously far ahead of her. She stumbles to catch up.