Ama wants to play the game. When she speaks, these people smile, the space between her two front teeth like a permanent wink. But Ama doesn’t have the thing Ronnie has. The inner voice that tells her the rules. The one person Ronnie will disregard the rules for is her big sister Ama. Even when Ama is wrong, which she usually is. Even when Ama doesn’t understand the game, how it works, how you win, or what you get if you do. Ronnie knows Ama needs her little sister to believe in her and the game inside Ama’s head. Where water can displace who you are if too much gets in. Where these people and their bizarre food are something you can beat. You can win. You can. I promise. Ama is determined.

  “Climb in,” says Ama and points to the ultimate hiding spot. It doesn’t look like a place anyone should be. “That’s why they never gonna find us,” says her sister. Ama is two years older. Ama is always right. The gap between her teeth shining in the dark.

  The streetlights come on. The stars shift in the sky. Doug and Trish are walking through the neighborhood full of big, faceless doors calling for them. The panic rising in their voices. Trish with her hair long and tightly permed, her hair that wants to be curly and fun like Mabel’s steel-gray hair that she used to tie up in a special hat every night. Trish crying. Neighbors coming out to help. The little girl who was It and stood kissing the tree is also crying because this is her fault. She found everyone else but the two jumble bunny sisters. That’s what her father calls them. Jumble bunnies. One bedtime when she asked her mother what the word jumble meant, her mother thought a moment and then said messy, like when things are mixed together and you can’t tell them apart. Yeah, that’s it, that’s the reason why the It girl can’t tell one sister from the other. Both of them the same shade of dark, the same ratty braids, teeth flashing like coins, their voices fast and then slow and all over the map when they talk, not straight ahead and clean like everyone else because they’re jumbled, the two sisters mixed together, mixed up. The It girl wishes her father would call her a jumble bunny. She likes the word bunny, it sounds like something soft and cute—only when he says it, his voice sounds mean, like he gets when he comes home from a day at court and they know not to laugh too much. Either way, the jumble bunny sisters are missing. Now the It girl will never be It ever again.

  Then Ama is telling Ronnie it’s part of the game. People calling and calling for them to come out, come out wherever they are. People starting their searches with the area swimming pools, in the dark, the water throwing quivering shadows up in the air. It’s a trick. Ronnie staring hopefully at her big sister like the time Mabel was lying on the floor and Ama said she was doing those new exercises like the people do on TV. Ronnie wanting to believe. That they’ll win this game, that Mabel will rise up off the floor, that Doug and Trish will love them, everyone will love them, at Baskin-Robbins their cones will be as big as the other kids’, there’ll be afternoons of miniature golf and invitations to the other children’s birthday parties, the other kids’ parents not watching them, following them through the house when they have to use the bathroom, the moms careful to put the knife far away from where Ama and Ronnie are sitting after the moms cut the cake.

  Later, Ama will say it’s a new world record. Nobody has ever gone as long as they did. It’s almost midnight by the time they’re found. Ronnie knows it’s late because when they come home, that man in the jacket is on the TV making people laugh, though Trish is crying, Doug yelling, shrieking, yeah, it sounds like shrieking if you ask Ronnie. “Why didn’t you come when we called?” Through her tears Trish throwing them in the shower though Ama hates showers, hates the way the water gets in her ears, like a cat, it makes her crazy, the feel of the water where it shouldn’t be, get it out! get it out! Trish screaming it’s late, we don’t have time to fill the bath. Scrubbing and scrubbing the stink out of them. Screaming why would you hide there? Why would you do that? What is wrong with you?

  Yes, it’s a new world record because it’s almost midnight when Mrs. O’Leary spots the two of them in the backyard and scurries inside to tell her husband. “Those two coons are buried up to their necks out back in the compost pile,” she says. She puts on a pair of shoes and goes out to find that poor young couple, Trish and Doug, who think love is enough and haven’t the foggiest idea of what they’ve gotten themselves into.

  Ama is right. The compost pile is the last place anyone would ever look. Among the coffee grounds and eggshells and cantaloupe rinds and a summer’s worth of waste from the O’Learys’ two dogs. Nobody will see us in there, says Ama. It’s the first rule of hiding, of disappearing off the face of the planet. Go where you blend in. Claim the bit of earth no one else would ever want. Make peace with it. The place people fear. The spot filled with decay, shit, death, oblivion, from which springs the arduous work of rebirth, that’s it, that’s what’s happened here, the body of that young, auburn-haired tech titan who got her head smashed in while with her husband and has now disappeared but nothing truly dies, Ronnie can hear her older sister’s voice on the Antarctic wind. Ama saying that lady ain’t gone, she’s just off somewhere no one will ever look, she’s being reborn shiny and new, all of them are changing right before your very eyes, every last one, it’s all for their own good, they’ll come back like nothing you ain’t never seen before, so watch yourself or you will >>

  Striker let go of the gold cross around her neck.

  The cabin was empty. No Taylor in sight. She walked back outside with nothing but more questions.

  They were seven bright yellow lemon drops standing on the lip of a volcano. The Texan and Child, the Baron and the Dame, the Fantastic Plastic Russian, and Everybody Hates Kevin plus her. The group gathered around the fisherman’s hole. As always, they were waiting on Striker for answers.

  “It’s like a million suns are pouring out of there,” said Kevin.

  “I think the ice is acting like a mirror,” she said.

  “Okay, but how do you dig a space that big in frozen ground?” he asked. “It’s like frigging cement.”

  “Is ancient crater formed by flying rock,” offered Vadim.

  “Come again?” said the Baron.

  “He means a meteor,” said Anders.

  “Da, that,” said the Russian. “Is full of extraterrestrial crazy-making microbes. Proof is penguin is craziest of birds.” Because of his accent, Striker couldn’t tell if he was kidding.

  “Why is there even a door here?” asked Anders.

  “Precisely,” said Kevin. “Look around. If you aren’t keeping things out, then what exactly are you keeping in?”

  “Good question,” said Striker. “You ask me, it was the door to a brig.”

  “Excellent,” crowed the Baron. “We now have ourselves a fully functioning society.”

  “What’s a brig?” yawned the Dame.

  “Brig is like jail,” said Vadim, matter-of-fact. “It big sucks. No window, no air for fresh breath.” He began to kick snow onto the door as if to rebury it. “Brig lowest part of ship. Deep below waterline. If ship springs big leak, brig people never come out. Nobody helps them.” He sounded like he’d experienced one firsthand.

  “Even on a ship, you need a place to store people who don’t play nice,” added the Baron.

  “Na zdorovie,” said Vadim, smiling agreeably.

  “How do you know where this door came from?” asked Bobbi Sue listlessly. “It could’ve come from anywhere.”

  Striker wasn’t about to mention her vision of living out exactly what Vadim had just described, the frigid water gripping her lungs. Instead she pointed with her foot. You didn’t have to look too hard. The door was tatted up with carvings. Names, dates, groupings of lines, mysterious hieroglyphs, doodles. It was the graffiti of imprisonment. She was just glad the eerie mark that was following her around was hidden on the other side, face down in the snow.

  “Check this out,” said Anders. They ran a finger over a small etching of a stick figure wielding a crude ax and running after others, one of the figures with lines gushing from its throat.

  “Yes yes,” said the Baron. “Ancient man was quite the artiste.” He walked up to the mouth of the hole and peered into the light. “But the supping hour is upon us,” he said. “There was mention that this place might contain vittles.” He looked around. “Who wants to go?”

  “Do we think my wife’s down there?” asked Kevin. His eyes grew big but stayed dull and flat. “Like, she regained consciousness and wandered off?”

  Duh, thought Striker. She hadn’t even been thinking about food. Taylor had to be down there, right? Hunched over among oodles of junk with the worst headache ever. Nothing else made sense.

  “I’ll go,” said Anders.

  “You most certainly will not,” said Bobbi Sue.

  “Mom.”

  “No.”

  “I’m not great in tight spaces,” said Striker. “I found that out last time.” Thankfully nobody asked for details.

  “Fine,” said la Grande Dame. “What do we have for light?”

  It was obvious she wouldn’t need it but Kevin cracked open one of his dry bags. He held it close to his chest as he rummaged around and pulled out a flashlight half the size of a pen. When he turned it on, its beam was dazzling, a light so sharp it could cut steel. He demonstrated. Twist this ring, and you could diffuse the light. He cast the beam on the wooden door, made a wide circle, the circle every bit as bright as the focused beam had been. The flashlight was high high-tech. You probably couldn’t buy it in any store.

  He handed it to the Dame. Nobody remarked on his not volunteering to go. The guy wasn’t cut out for it and they all knew it, even the teen. They let him believe that by providing the flashlight, he was doing his part.

  “What else you have in magic bag?” Vadim asked. Kevin ignored the question.

  “Anyone care to come?” asked the Dame.

  “I would, my love,” said the Baron, “but you know.” He tapped his chest with a finger.

  “What?” said Kevin.

  “My heart is—” Presumably he was searching for the right word, but it came across as bad theater.

  “Fickle,” said la Grande Dame.

  The Baron didn’t fight the description. He simply nodded.

  “I will come,” said Vadim. “Am very good in tight space.” The double entendre sailed through the air like a wedding bouquet for anyone desperate enough to catch it.

  “What’ll you do if you find Taylor?” asked Anders.

  Nobody said anything. Were they thinking about what kind of state she’d be in? The chick had already seemed high-strung enough without a traumatic brain injury to boot.

  “We’ll bring her out,” said the Dame. “Of course we wouldn’t leave her down there.” The Baron saluted her answer. She threw him a withering look, then briskly disappeared into the hole.

  Vadim sat down next and got in position. Already his legs had disappeared in the light.

  “A question for you,” said Striker. “What’s prizrak mean?”

  For a moment his face tensed, like someone crumpling up a piece of paper and then changing their mind and smoothing it back out.

  “Prizrak? Where you hear?” he said.

  She thought of the moment back in the ice field when the very dead Alexei wasn’t dead long enough to utter the word before slumping back down into deadness. “Doesn’t matter,” she said. Instantly she wished she’d asked Vadim the question in private, but what was done was done.

  Vadim made sure the zipper was fully up on his dry suit. He smiled wider. That’s all he ever seemed to be doing. Every time she snuck a glance, the guy was gazing at the horizon with a maddening grin like someone who had pulled the wool over innumerable sets of eyes.

  “Prizrak,” he said. “Ghost.” Then he waved and leaned forward, falling like dead weight straight into the hole. They listened for the sound of his feet hitting the bottom but nothing doing.

  “What do we think?” monotoned Bobbi Sue.

  “Five minutes tops,” said Striker. “There’s not a lot to see.” She purposefully hadn’t mentioned the tunnel in the far wall. Maybe the Dame and Vadim wouldn’t notice it. Who knew? It was possible Dark Striker had knocked over a shelf, toppled a pile of crates, the tunnel once again hidden behind a mountain of junk.

  “What if they’re down there more than five minutes?” asked Anders.

  Nobody answered. Not because they didn’t want to, but because nobody had any answers.

  For once Striker didn’t instinctively check her watch. She didn’t need a device to tell her more than five minutes had passed even if the sun said otherwise. Had the others noticed how the day had stopped, their shadows never growing any longer? It was unsettling. At the actual pole it must feel like walking outside time, Striker thought. Every moment the same, the light never changing. It made for an interesting thought experiment. In a world without time could you ever make a mistake? Could you harbor regrets? Without time was it even possible to have a childhood?

  Her butt was numb from sitting in the snow. If only there were a hot spring nearby. She could pretend she was Swedish and shuttle back and forth between the elements. Temperature stress was supposed to be good for the heart. What about regular stress, she thought. The past several hours had put all their hearts through the wringer. That old saying was wrong, the one about what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. From what she’d seen, what doesn’t kill you, doesn’t kill you. Maybe next time it would.

  Bobbi Sue and the Baron had disappeared inside the cabin. Somehow Bobbi Sue was starting to go even bluer in the lips, the Baron not much better. Striker shielded her eyes as she peered into the hole. Was it just her imagination or was the damn thing getting brighter?

  “You hear that?”

  “It’s my stomach,” said Anders sheepishly.

  “Oh.” She relaxed and went back to thinking about that first summer with Trish and Doug. There were nights she’d wanted nothing more than to be gone, hoping Zinnia Trace was something you could rub from your eyes like sleep. Ama was never able to navigate that alien world. It’s not that hard, Striker would say. Just do what they do. It was such a long time ago and yet it remained baked into everything she did, the way she moved and talked, Zinnia Trace forever staining her mind. Like her use of the word shizer. It was the expletive her opa used to say, Doug’s father from Bavaria. The old man cursing at the dinner table and Trish and Doug letting him get away with it because it was in German.

  Truthfully she didn’t remember much about the days before Zinnia Trace. Her old life was mostly a blank. Therapists said it was due to her young age and the candyland quality of the new existence she’d been dropped into, everything shiny and bright. The only image Striker could remember of Mabel was her grandmother slumped in the ratty old chair with her feet soaking in a dented bucket, how each night Ama told her their grandmother was part mermaid and needed to regrow parts of herself. As an adult, that was what Striker resented the most, the fact that all she had left of the world she was born into was a vision of a beat-up bucket. It was an old story, possibly the oldest. People wanting to know where they came from. On ancestry.com, Black people had to work twice as hard for the smallest scraps. Losing your autonomy often resulted in losing your history. Striker often wondered who she and Ama had been in the before place, if they’d had radically different personalities, been on track to become completely different people.

  Something fluttered down out of the sky. Gracefully it landed on the hatch. The bird waddled over to the lip of the hole. It peered down into the light as if gauging the situation. Finally it looked up at Striker, its missing eye red like a sore.

  “Agreed,” she said, getting off the ground and stretching her limbs. “Time to get off our butts.” She rummaged through her options. Let’s be real. Bobbi Sue was never going to let Anders go. Bobbi Sue and her Wandering Uterus couldn’t be trusted. The Baron was pretty much worse than useless. Kevin? She had no idea what made that guy tick.

  The math wasn’t in her favor. There was no one else to go. Two people, maybe three, were wandering around beneath her feet, and despite what her watch said, time wasn’t stopping for any of them. Honestly, going down into the hole to find the Dame and Vadim was nothing compared to what she’d already lived through. The hardest stuff was behind her. Coming-of-age on Zinnia Trace. Keeping an eye on Ama. The thing in the tiny room under the stairs that she couldn’t bring herself to recall. The smell of rotten food. Someone playing Christmas music on an organ.

  “I’m gonna need a rope,” she said, and headed into the hut to wrangle one up.

  The Baron lay on one of the beds, Bobbi Sue squatting by the vent over a pot heaped with snow. They had both taken off their dry suits. Like some kind of zombie, Bobbi Sue sat stirring and stirring, the expression on her face one of profound emptiness. At least someone had wiped the guano up off the floor.

  Striker found a length of rope hanging from a hook. It was in remarkably good condition, the rope still coated with wax. “I’m headed down to have a look,” she said.