Just yesterday, she and Sasha walked the same route to the festival. The air tasted like promise, and she’d dared to leave with Jason, dared to drink his wine and eat at his table. But this morning is a crueler, darker mirror of the day before. She and Sasha are the only ones who have changed. They pass the bakery’s table, but Autumn isn’t there. Cork rocks on his feet, hocking the goodies like he made them himself.

  “It’s the twins,” he quavers out, holding out a pecan cluster on a paper napkin. Neither of them takes it.

  “Hey, do you know where Autumn went?” Sasha asks him, and it sounds strange to hear her say her actual name, rather than “Pip.” It comes out so smoothly, like it’s been well polished by a repetitive going-over in Sasha’s thoughts. Too intimate.

  Cork hasn’t lowered the offered treat, so it hovers in the air between them, paper napkin trembling. “Well, let’s see now,” he mutters. “There was a little boy runnin’ around by the bakery, and she chased after him.”

  “Wyn.” Sasha glances at Lil, wide-eyed. “How long ago was that, Corkie?”

  “Hmm.” He frowns up at the sky, as if to check the sun. “Been a good long while.”

  They look back at the bakery, and Sasha gasps. “See that thing?” she murmurs, nodding at the window. There’s something crouched in it, brown and spiderlike. “That’s one of those bird traps I told you about.” It looks almost archaeological, a frail bundle.

  Lil sees the silent scream of panic building in her. And there’s no choice. “Go,” she says. “Take the truck.”

  Sasha winces. “You sure? I can—”

  “I’m sure.” Last time, Autumn had come back bleeding. If Autumn doesn’t come back whole this time, Sasha won’t be whole either. “Go.”

  Sasha holds Lil’s gaze for a long moment, and there’s more tenderness there than any touch could convey. “I’ll find you, okay? Just find some help, and then you have to rest.”

  “Yes, Mom,” Lil teases. See? It’s okay. Everything is okay. We are okay. And Sasha runs like her heart is ahead of her. Lil always figured it was that way, with them.

  She goes on. Her feet hurt worse now. Her right sock feels…off. Wet and warm with every step. She misses the usual burnished line of heat in the air that defines Southern autumns. Chill hangs heavy in the wind.

  “Goodness, you look peaky, dear,” Agnes calls when she passes her volunteer stand, her scarf pinned with a glittering cicada brooch.

  Speaking requires pulling herself up from a deep well. “I’m tired,” Lil murmurs.

  “Poor dear.” She has her special-occasion lilac glasses slipping down her nose and a clipboard in hand. One of her eyes bleeds red from a burst vein. “You won’t be young forever, Lilian.”

  Oddness lurches through her. “What did you call me?” Lil asks.

  Lilian. Her mother.

  “Those twins run you ragged,” Agnes chuckles and pats her wrist right over the bandaged burn—pain fireworks behind her eyes—and Lil jerks free. Agnes’s smile doesn’t even twitch. “Get yourself some coffee.”

  Lil pulls herself away. She continues across the square. But when she reaches the far end of the stalls, the closed library, where the festival turns around—an empty volunteer post where someone is meant to be—and she has nowhere to go but back. Here, at the brink Lil recognizes the awful, secret prayer she’s nursed the whole way here: that she’ll see Jason in the crowd like nothing happened. Arguing with Cesar, ordering someone to get more marshmallows for the hot chocolate stand, running the carousel, directing the older patrons. Funny how hope might only reveal itself as it’s dashed against the rocks.

  She crosses into the park, just beyond the bounds of the festival. It’s deserted enough here at the far end that she hears the gossip of leaves on the wind and familiar steps on the pavement, approaching her from behind. It must be Jason. His warmth, coming up to crowd her, resting his fingertips on the small of her back.

  Instead, Theon walks past her, squinting up at a shuttered storefront. “Not looking so good, Lilith.”

  The place on her back, the place he touched, simmers.

  “Why,” she breathes, “is it always you? Why can’t you leave me alone?”

  Theon’s gaze scrapes away at her. He touches on the place over her ribs that aches in the shape of Jason’s hand, and she flinches away. “Believe it or not, I didn’t think you’d be here,” he says. “But I guess I should have known. You don’t sit still.” He doesn’t look great himself. The sense of casual disregard he always carries feels harried this time. His skin strains over his forehead like ill-fitted fabric. Like he wants to crawl out of it.

  “But here we both are,” he murmurs. Deceptive softness. “I didn’t even mean for us to be. Isn’t that funny.”

  Lil stalks away. She just needs to get help for Jason.

  “Lil. Can we just talk—”

  Then she can leave.

  “Lil.”

  Then she can—

  “How many times?” Theon calls after her. She pushes on. The warmth in her sock is less of a warning now, more like a sopping mess, but she won’t be stopped and she won’t listen to him. “How many times will we keep doing this?”

  “Until you leave me alone,” she calls back.

  This time, something like desperation cracks through his voice. “Dammit—I wish I could.”

  A fight, her Achilles’ heel. Lil might have been drawn right back in if not for Jason’s name pounding a tattoo against her chest. “Find some other town to ruin.” She speeds up. “No one says it has to be here.”

  “You say it has to be here. You do,” Theon snarls. His footsteps sound after her. Lil walks a little faster. So does he. She casts her eyes around for an ally. People laugh around them, and all her neighbors are here, everyone, and finally, there’s Cesar, flirting with the apple seller. She’s so close, she just needs to get there.

  Fingers ghost at her elbow. She rips away and around to face him. “Don’t touch me.”

  Theon’s face is tortured, beseeching, as if she’s the plague here. He grabs again. She catches her fingers in his stupid suit jacket, and the scent of burned wood fills her mouth as she shoves him back a few stumbled steps.

  Lil channels every ounce of anger and disdain into her voice, her only weapons. “Leave me alone, or next time, Theon, I swear—”

  “I can’t!” Theon shouts. “You’re the one doing this to me.”

  It stops her cold. Around them a couple breaks apart, circles them, and embraces on their other side. The crowd moves like a river around a stubborn rock.

  “What,” Lil breathes, “did you just say?”

  Lips pursed, Theon pushes his hands up into his hair. There’s a red streak on the side of his neck, like he’s been scratching an itch. “You’re the one doing this to me,” he murmurs.

  “I’m the one doing this to you?” she hisses.

  “You and your—” Theon breaks off. Squints at her, confused.

  “I’m the one doing this to you?” Lil rages forward and shoves him again.

  Theon stumbles back, something like comprehension dawning on his face.

  “I don’t want you here. I don’t ever want to see your face again. I’ve never encouraged you. I’ve never even been polite to you. I want you gone,” Lil snarls.

  Theon stares at her. “You don’t know.”

  Lil can’t. She turns, running for where Cesar stands. “Hey,” she calls. “Hey, Cesar—”

  The moment she reaches out to touch his arm—

  He is gone.

  Lil stumbles to a halt. Behind him, the firehouse, moments ago blue and beautiful, is a charred ruin. The red door has fallen in, lost under pine needles and trash. Dark green kudzu vines twine up the broken columns, the fractured facade, an insidious blanket over a long-dead corpse. The silence is deafening.

  “What…?” she twists.

  And it’s back—carnival music and children singing and vendors calling that there are still roasted nuts, more cider on the way—

  Just as suddenly, flicking of a cosmic light switch—

  The festival vanishes. The town is gone. Leaves scatter the pavement. Kudzu creeps along the streetlights. And one by one, the library, the town hall, the bakery light up with flames. She cannot breathe under the weight of Theon’s eyes.

  And then it’s all back. Light. Sound. Color. Cinnamon sugar in the air. Barbecue smoke. Lil staggers back down the steps, away from the firehouse, away from Cesar. And a hand catches her collar.

  “You don’t know what’s here and what isn’t anymore,” Theon murmurs in her ear. “It’s confusing. Even gone things come back here. Fires burn one second. And then they don’t.”

  His breath is too hot on her ear, the stench of blood in her nose. “You’re so worried about Jason,” he says. “But how do you know he’s even gone? For all you know, he’s here, and you just don’t see.”

  Before her, the festival looks safe. But she’s seen the rot. She can’t blink, in case it flickers. In case everything she knows—

  A sharp nail brushes against the back of her neck. “How long will you hold on, Lil?”

  She twists out of his grasp, and for the first time since she’s known him, been haunted by him, she runs.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Despite all the folks at the festival in town, the road is quiet enough that Autumn can march straight down the highway’s dashed yellow median without fear.

  It’ll be harder with Neel than with Wyn, she knows. The day they met, with Neel’s shotgun between them, Autumn saw the shadow of the children she used to play with out there in the brush and broken-down cars west of town. They’d talk to her, pepper her with questions, even play tag—but the moment night fell or one of the nearby farmers drove by, they’d scatter into the trees. Eventually, with enough mistreatment, enough abandonment, a child stops looking at adults with hope. Neel has passed that point. But he loves Wyn. Surely, that’s a thread Autumn can use to tug him back.

  She had tucked Wyn in a blanket on the couch with her own worn stuffed tiger, Bastian. Her last sight of him was of a warm, cared-for child pulling on Bastian’s whiskers and watching her. Those not-words of his tree talk, birdsong, and leaf rustle are so familiar it seems all it would take to catch their meaning is straining a little harder. She’s so close to understanding him.

  With careful prodding, Wyn gave her enough to go on to find the little house. No way is she dragging him back into the kudzu-choked woods—not when it took this long to get him out of there. So she laced her boots and started the long walk down the highway. She’d made only one quick stop downstairs to tape a quickly-scribbled note on the door of the bakery.

  Just in case someone comes looking.

  A loud corner of her heart still cries that she should wait for Sasha rather than go alone. But Neel can’t wait, and there’s no telling when Sasha will be ready to see Autumn. But on the slim chance Sasha does want to see her, at least she’ll know where Autumn’s gone.

  After getting caught in that mountain lion trap, Autumn stays out of the woods as long as she can. So she follows the road. She’ll climb over the barricade of the construction work at its end. It’s what Wyn says he’s done before: crawled under the “orange branches.” She’s mulling over the potential routes when she becomes aware of the sound stalking her from behind.

  Honk, honk, honk honk hooooonk, HONK, HOOOOONK…

  Autumn starts. The silence is broken, a far-off morse-code blaring that, for a stuttering moment she thinks is the train.

  She turns, and around the bend toward her flies a familiar rusty pickup. By the time she’s in view, it’s close, close enough to flinch—but it swerves to the roadside and rocks off onto the grass. Sasha takes her hand off the horn, relief clear even through the windshield. She jumps out of the cab and hurries over, hands in her pockets.

  “Hey,” she breathes, a puff of cold air visible between them. “You might’ve called. Or we need some radios or something. Dammit.” She stomps her feet against the chill. She’s visibly irritated. “Wasn’t sure I’d find you.”

  “I’m glad you did,” Autumn admits. She itches with the urge to throw her arms around Sasha and breathe in the scent of her hair. “I can’t just leave Neel—”

  Sasha is already nodding forcefully. “We’ll go get him.” She glances around at the road. “Can we take the truck to—wherever he is?”

  “They’re camping out somewhere past the construction zone,” Autumn says.

  “Great.” Sasha looks worn, as well as annoyed. “Get in.”

  They drive.

  Autumn has so much she wants to ask her. Has she processed anything Autumn told her; does she see Autumn differently now? Is she angry? Has everything changed? She drums her fingers on the armrest, and the road ends before either of them can think of anything else to say.

  Sasha stops the truck, rummaging behind the seat for her camera. Once flooded, the highway here is now a chapped lip, parched and cracked.

  Not long ago, Autumn drove up on the other side of this construction block. She stood just beyond it, and felt like the only person left in the world.

  “What will we do about the, uhh—shotgun situation?” Sasha mutters, huffing slightly as they clamber over the orange barrier fences and skirt a mammoth earth mover.

  “Wyn thinks they ran out of shells a few days ago.” Meaning he and Neel were alone in their house with no protection, no weapon against the hungry man or anything else in these woods.

  They don’t pass the obstruction to the wrecked bridge just beyond, but hook southward. There’s a bit of a jump over a deep mud ravine where even this dirt road has been taken out, where the land has slid out toward the destruction and nearly washed it away. But beyond, on the road toward the tracks, the earth is firm. Once they’re past the mudhole, Sasha turns and stares at the construction zone for a few moments. Cast in the harsh shadows of afternoon, the machinery sits there in dark, monumental repose. Sasha pockets her lens cap and takes a look through the aperture of the camera. Autumn hears the slow click of the shutter. Then Sasha slings the camera over her shoulder and follows her.

  The dirt road is narrow, bounded by dense evergreens on one side and waving grasses on the other. Sasha is quiet. Eventually, when the road peters out, eaten by vegetation, they leave it and go into the dense brush. Autumn can only hope she’s going the right way, that she isn’t imagining the gaps in the bushes, the grass tamped down by little feet. They trudge through wheat-colored grasses, prickly bushes and burrs sticking to their jeans. The fields are opening up to the west, so flat she can almost see the curve of the earth. The gnarled and spindly pecan trees crouch low to the ground, like arthritic hands. It feels like this airless plain goes on forever. Every so often, there’s a low crack as someone’s heel comes down on a small bone.

  But there, a few hundred yards away, leans a rotting shotgun house, gray and paintless, the small windows broken out, the door swinging. And Autumn comes to a stop. “I think…I think that’s it. He said it was a gray house.”

  To call this corpse a house is almost dishonest, and they both stand there a little too long, breath taken by trying to escape the thickening kudzu snaking across the ground here. To imagine children living in this ruin, huddling together as winter came on—there is nothing to say.

  Finally, Autumn picks her way nearer the wreck. “Neel?” she calls. “Are you in there?”

  Silence.

  “Look at that.” Sasha gazes at a now-familiar bundle of twigs that sits on the path to the house. Three little skulls, maybe of field mice, watch them, bound with bits of grass and string to the small sculpture. A breeze stirs and Autumn is struck by a rancid smell coming from the thing, which seems to tremble, wavering before her eyes, flickering…

  Because it’s on fire.

  “What’s happening?” she breathes.

  “There.” Sasha nods to another protective altar on the sagging steps and then—another. Perched on a drooping windowsill. All flaming, their little offerings twitching in the fires they fed, exoskeletons collapsing, cobwebs billowing like toy boat sails. Sitting at the lowest hanging of the roof, a carefully formed pentacle of yellow grasses perches, charred and dancing. Children’s best attempts at protection, up in flames.

  In her bones, Autumn knows it can’t be natural. The hungry man is hunting.

  Neel.

  Autumn dashes up the porch and pushes open the door, bile rising in her throat. Inside it’s cold, somehow even colder than the air outside, a dank icebox odor. There is a hobbled table next to a camping stove; here is a nest of blankets; here are crayons in twenty-four colors and pictures pinned to splintery walls. It’s home enough for more than two children—once, maybe not so long ago, there were more.

  And all of these things, every stick of furniture, every relic of a home, are scorched. Great licks of soot shoot up the walls. The floorboards curl, nails melted. Even Autumn’s first step inside creates an ominous trembling.

  There’s a loud blast from somewhere much closer than expected, and they both jump hard. The train. They must be very close to the tracks here.

  At the sound, a lithe jackrabbit form springs away from them, tearing out the back. Neel is a blur of singed and dirty fabric.

  “Neel!” Autumn bolts through the house, out the dangling door.

  Behind her, Sasha swears as her foot goes through the rotten boards of the back porch. Autumn hears the clatter and snaps as Sasha pulls her foot free and jumps off the porch, landing with a crunch of bones. “Neel?” Sasha calls, and they run after the sound of crackling leaves. Neel is darting up a steep hill, toward a break in the trees; the train track that runs through the forest. Stay away from the tracks, Lou’s voice echoes in her head. “Neee—eel!” Sasha tries again, her voice ripping raw right at the end. The air is dense and charcoal-scented. He’s climbing up and away from them with a speed granted only by terror.

  There’s a hush of displaced air and Autumn looks back. The shack is burning again, fire raging inside with a heat that billows out to nip at their backs.