It shouldn’t be a chase, but what else can they do? They scrabble after Neel, up the tree-lined incline, kicking up great clods of loose earth. Autumn hauls herself up with roots, up an incline no one’s meant to climb. It resists her every step.

  And coming from around the bend in the tracks, the train is barreling toward them. Ravenous, it eats up the land, sparks bursting under the wheels. Autumn is snared in the glare of headlights for a breathless, sharp second, in the sharp tang of metal in the air. She is seen.

  Neel spots it and freezes at the crest of the hill, eyes round and full with animal panic. Where’s Sasha; where’s anyone to help them? Wyn waits in her home, with a tiger and all the trust he placed in her, and here she is in free fall. The train, her body, the boy are all held in a deadly balance.

  “Come back,” Autumn calls. “With me, with Wyn!”

  He doesn’t even seem to hear her, only the train that’s surging closer, the sound hammering in their ears.

  “I just want to help you,” Autumn cries. “I’m like you. I’m one of you—”

  And finally, Neel glares at her. “No one helps us! Nobody ever helps us!”

  Neel climbs onto the tracks and glances at the oncoming train. Then, without another pause, he launches his body off into the dense greenery of the other side. Somewhere, Sasha is shouting a warning.

  But now Autumn can hear nothing; everything is engulfed by the blare of the oncoming train. The kudzu is so dense up here that the earth might as well be made of it, miles of ropey vine strangling every tree and telephone wire in an endless green monoculture. Neel is struggling, running like his shoes keep catching in the vine. Autumn can see it snapping the air at his heels like whips. Chuck Vickers, she thinks, and her body surges with a new, vast panic.

  “Neel!” Before Autumn can think, she’s charging his way, straight at the tracks, straight at the train. “Neel, come back!”

  She stops on the edge. The timber slats are warped, ready to catch her, trap her, break her ankles. Don’t get on the tracks. But it’s beyond, in wild enough land to be the edge of the world, where Neel, nobody’s child, has slowed, dragging his body forward in captive jerks, the kudzu curling up his legs. He’s wading through quicksand, and maybe he knows it now, because he turns, catching her eye, and opens his mouth to say something. She can’t hear him, or anything, through the wind and squealing metal in her ears. The train bears down, rattling her teeth in her skull.

  With a snap she feels but can’t hear, another kudzu tether rockets from the ground to grab at his wrist. It pulls at him, hungry to heave him under. “Neel!” she sobs, and even she can’t hear it.

  She gauges the distance, the gap between her and the train, and leaps—

  Her last view of Neel is of his gaping scream, vine looping around his neck in savage twists.

  Because something has her too, a thick restraint, like steel, slips around her waist and hurls Autumn back from him, throwing her to the ground, catapulting her down the hill. Autumn screams into the brush, choking on leaves and debris, her body striking rocks and sticks and animal bones as she’s tossed down, down.

  The fall knocks the breath from her. It’s very dark, tethers seizing her. She drags uselessly at the air, fighting what holds her, clawing at the kudzu that wants to bury her, bury all of them—

  “It’s me, Pip—it’s me,” Sasha yells at her. She’s barely audible over the train crashing by above them. “You idiot. You fucking—idiot.” It sounds like she’s crying, too. “You threw yourself in front of that train.” Autumn writhes, wrestling hair and leaves from her face, lungs still roaring for air. She’s lost a shoe somewhere, her bare foot scuffing the cold ground. But as she catches her breath, her pounding, screaming heart seeks out Sasha. She focuses on her face. Sasha looks as wrecked as Autumn feels, battered from the fall and Autumn’s blows.

  “Sorry,” Autumn gasps out. “I’m sorry, sorry.”

  Sasha is already dragging herself to her feet, listing drunkenly, ripping vines at random. “C’mon,” she mouths, offering her hand. It’s not easy to stand, but Autumn hauls herself up and they rescale the hill, getting as close to the passing train as they dare. Neel is just beyond.

  “I can’t see him,” Autumn says.

  “I know.” Winded, Sasha holds her side. “It’ll pass. We’ll look.” The train’s sleek body seems to stretch on forever, running boundless on the track. An age goes by, and another. All the endless years of her life have passed in a blink compared to this. The never-ending hours at her dad’s bedside. The train just goes gleefully on and on.

  And, of course, when the railroad is finally quiet, the field beyond is empty.

  Neel is gone.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Sasha tells the story again. To herself, in her head. About that road that closed, a long, long time ago. About a town, imprisoned in time. About a birthday party, and a girl who finally stood her up. And a boy, really a very little boy, running for his life down a lonely railroad into an endless swarm of green.

  It is night. She is in the story’s darkest hole.

  Before: the long walk to the truck, the numb drive to Wyn at the bakery. Sasha waited outside, and Autumn was gone a long time as she spoke to him. When they appeared, Wyn had a tiger hanging from his small hand. Then they drove to the Clearwater orchard.

  Lil is here, face scrubbed, eyes red. She gives Wyn a cinnamon roll and goes rummaging for clothes in the drawers upstairs.

  They sit in the living room at the house. No one cries. It’s too much—it is beyond tears. They are dumbstruck.

  Several times, Lil says something to Sasha, asks a question about where something is, maybe, and waits an age, and then Sasha answers, a second too late, when Lil has already left the room.

  Will the house catch fire around them? They know now that even phantom flames leave wounds.

  Where the hell is Jason?

  The kettle is wailing, but no one rises to take it off. Because Lil is listening to Autumn. Listless and silent, Wyn is tucked into Pip’s side. She’s saying it all again, the polished-stone version, learning from any stumbling, any confusion, in the midnight confession she gave to Sasha the night before. Now they all know.

  Sasha stares into an empty hearth. She confirms nothing.

  They’d been so close. She’d seen Autumn bracing herself, ready to risk her life to leap in front of a train.

  Somebody has to remember this story.

  ***

  Later, Lil would always wonder if she should have known that day, that something was wrong. But she’s gone over it time and time again and there wasn’t a sign. No twist in the wind, no cold front, no vultures circling over the high branches. Instead, the air in the orchard tasted of summer’s fresh blush. Sasha called that very day, telling her about her half-pint apartment in the East Village. Lil balanced the phone between her chin and shoulder as she stirred together peach preserves on the stove and tried not to sound wistful, or worse, bitter in her responses. She’d gone to the porch to call Mom in.

  Only Mom didn’t answer.

  Call you back later, Lil sighed and went to ask how Mom wanted her eggs. She looked out over the orchard, but didn’t spot the bright-red ribbon Mom sewed on the brim of her gardening hat. The truck was parked near the front gate because Mom liked to drive out at sunset and walk back. They fought about it all the time, how inconvenient it made Lil’s morning shipping runs to Su’s. The morning was pleasantly breezy. She went back inside to continue her tasks.

  It wasn’t unusual for them to miss each other while they both went about the business of the orchard, since there was so much to do. But when Mom didn’t come up to the house for lunch either—that was odd. So Lil walked their property, calling for her, the seed of uncertainty blossoming into outright fear.

  It was afternoon before Lil thought to check the pond.

  “Mom. Oh god, Mom, get out of there. Mom. Mom!”

  Mom was in the water up to her chest. Her head rested on the bank like a pillow, her face pointed to the shaded canopy overhead. Her hair wasn’t even wet. They called it a drowning anyway.

  Lil never told Sasha the whole of it. Rushing into the frigid water to drag her out. How heavy her body was. Mourning in the shade of that place. Pulling her as far as the edge of the orchard, as far as the sunlight before giving up. Lil remembered the rules. She didn’t let anyone see the pond. She removed the cracked pieces of golden husk Mom still clutched in her hand and stuffed them in her pocket before calling the sheriff. Sheriff Connelly liked Lil and didn’t ask many questions about the dirt on her hands and feet, the water dripping from her clothes. It was an irresponsible act of kindness. But what could she tell him? What could she tell Sasha? She didn’t know why Mom ate a golden pecan. She didn’t know why after so long, Mom had—

  And, Lil didn’t know why she hadn’t known the instant Mom was gone. She hadn’t felt the orchard become hers. It gave no coronation. Lil lived hours on that blissful, peach-scented day before she realized the life she knew was over.

  ***

  The night Autumn and Wyn come to stay, Lil spends as much of herself as possible caring for them. She distracts herself by finding clothes for Wyn. By setting him and Autumn up in a guest room—Mom’s old room, practically untouched. She busies herself laying out fresh towels in the bathroom. Gorges herself on the noise of their footsteps. But finally, there’s nothing to be done, no more diversions for her mind to escape. The dishes sparkle, the spare blankets are in Autumn’s arms, even Sasha has gone to bed, all done staring into the ether. The house falls quiet, and Lil can no longer stand it.

  She feels bile rise in her throat. She spills herself into the velvet night, runs until she reaches her place of horror and comfort, grief and love, danger and deepest devotion. As always, the pond gleams for her in the blackness, the moon captured in its still bowl. Lil walks in up to her ankles, then her knees, then thighs, and stops.

  The chill is bracing. It soothes her mind like a honey balm against a migraine. Today, it doesn’t grasp at her and pull, but rests with her. Lets her draw from its strength.

  She has woken up a dead woman. She has woken up a ghost. Or maybe she hasn’t woken up at all; she is a memory. How many years have passed through her like smoke?

  How is it that she never knows when her life ends until it’s too late?

  “I don’t know what to do,” she pleads to the water, to Mom—to anything that might hear. “Please, I don’t know…”

  Tonight, she is wrecked enough that she might have let the water swallow her. But tonight, it holds her up as she collects the shambles of herself.

  Lil retreats when her feet feel numb. She draws her legs up and sits on the bank until she can breathe. She scoops a handful of water and spills it down her back; the burns left by the Honeysuckle fire ease tenfold.

  Dawn bleeds pink over the ground, and it’s reasonable that the others will soon rise. Lil stands and brushes herself off. While she sat her vigil, a cluster of four golden pecans have hit the ground. She considers them. And what to do.

  When she gets to the house, Sasha is already up, sitting at the table with the coffeepot beside her. The door to the basement is ajar, and there’s a light chemical odor in the air, like she’s been down in her photography darkroom. Several lenses are scattered across the table. The sound of the screen door cracks the silence.

  Lil clears her throat. “Hi.”

  “Hey.” Sasha waves the coffeepot at her in greeting, pushing the other chair out for her with her foot. “At least there’s still coffee here in the underworld.”

  Sasha pours her a cup. Footsteps creak overhead: Autumn or the boy. Wyn.

  Between them, Lil reaches out and puts two golden pecans on the table. Sasha gazes at them, wordless.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Lil says quietly. “About when Mom died.”

  Sasha’s eyes flick to hers.

  “She ate one.” Lil wraps her hands around her mug for something to hold, something warm and grounding. “Now I’m wondering if maybe she was trying to stop…something like this.”

  “Something like…a town trapped inside a camera?” Sasha holds up a fish-eye lens and peers into it. “All the bouncing light is captured inside. On film, it looks like one still image.” She places the lens on the table again. “You think Mom might have guessed this was possible?”

  Lil shrugs. “I always wondered if she knew more than she told me.”

  They ponder this for a moment. Sasha idly rolls one of the pecans beneath her fingertip, musing.

  “We aren’t the only ones who know. I think Theon does too.” Lil braces herself. “Yesterday, I saw him at the festival. I didn’t find Jason.” Saying it is sinking a knife into her own stomach, knowing it will hurt. Accepting it. “But Theon really wanted to talk to me. And when I wouldn’t…” She describes her strange vision of the town flickering in and out of ruin and wholeness. The ruthless kind of sense Autumn’s story made. And Theon’s strange place in her own personal nightmare. “Theon saw it. I think maybe he did it. I think…” She darts a look at Sasha in case she’s off the rails. “Maybe he’s doing all of this.”

  Sasha’s pondering the lenses again, frowning. “Maybe.”

  “But we’re safe here.” Lil realizes it’s true even as she says it. Hasn’t she felt it, strong and proud in her body, every time Theon tried to approach a fence and she successfully pushed him back? The orchard has always felt like a sacred duty; that’s how Mom saw it. A blessing. A burden. But a covenant that starts at a pond as deep as the world. Theon has tried for—by Autumn’s telling—thirty years, and still, he can’t step foot inside the Clearwater orchard.

  “We’re protected. As long as we’re on this land, he can’t get in. Not without our permission.” Yes, she sees it now, the shape of his growing hunger, his frustration the longer she holds on. “It’s why he’s after me the way he is. He wants me to give in and I won’t.” Emboldened, she raises her eyes to Sasha. “We won’t. Maybe he’s literally buying time, trying to force us to give him what he wants.” She feels the press of arctic water in her marrow, her own wellspring of strength. “Something he can’t just take.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Before they speak in the kitchen, while Lil spends her morning in the orchard, Sasha retreats to the basement darkroom and holds negative after negative up to the light. At first, she studies each image, spends minutes on it, even uses the enlarger to focus them. But soon, she’s only scanning, scanning, scanning. They all show her the same thing.

  There’s so much film down here. Baskets of it, drawers of it; tiny film canisters stuffed into bags, piled high in the wastebasket. Not a year’s worth of film. A career’s worth of film. No—not quite that. Not an artist’s career. A lifetime of a distracted hobbyist snapping shots in between a hundred other odd jobs.

  Twenty-nine years of on-the-side dreaming.

  There’s no project. There’s no end date. These negatives are the scrabbling, desperate handholds of a life unmoored. Maybe that’s why she’s never developed any of them, not a single one. Just hoarded them under the house and scurried back upstairs into make-believe.

  Sasha has her big cry down here in the darkroom, her goggles fogged as she mixes chemical baths: developer, stop, fixer. Mom and Lil gave her this space and gear in high school, as several Christmases and birthdays put together. It’s not set up for color film, but Sasha developed lush, slightly overexposed black-and-white prints in here as a teenager.

  She has no desire to develop most of this film. The shots are strange enough in ghostly negatives, in their neat little rows of silvery blurs and shadows. Images of muddled decades. Some canisters repeat others; how many times has she gone out to the Keller Orchard? By the looks of it, she’s shot out there again and again. Her pictures look like long-exposure images where her subject just couldn’t keep still. There’s the old abandoned house, with missing rails and sloped, destroyed roof, half-consumed by kudzu—and softer, just beneath, there’s the house when it was whole and full, the windows uncracked, the paint complete. From another strip: there’s the Keller house on fire, silver licks of flame, white shimmer of char. Overlaid, the vines, pulling it down, quenching the blaze, suffocating it. Two stages of phantasmic decay. She blows this one up, blood turning to ice water. The top floor, just at the corner of the window, peeping out of a single frame, a blurred, impassive face. A child watches her from within the burning.

  She and Lil have been sitting inside this decay (or this inferno?) just as placidly, it seems.

  Sasha scrubs at her face, then grabs for her camera hanging on the basement’s inner doorknob. Rewinding the film, she pops it out to take a look with the loupe.

  Same, all the same, a monotony of apocalypse.

  She pauses on one image.

  Safelights on, lights off. Back in the enlarger. She fiddles with the f-stop.

  Big multigrade paper. It’s a slapdash job, her test print, but it more or less gets the idea. She’s more careful the next time, watching from too close as her image appears in the developer, that comforting, acrid smell in her nose. Ten seconds in the stop, thirty in the fixer. That same old alchemy.

  As it dries on her line, Sasha’s chest loosens. It’s a fixed photograph, free from duplicates or auras. The walk on train tracks, the horizon. And Autumn, in a velvety grayscale, looking back at her, sticking her tongue out.

  Autumn.

  Her eyes are amused, a little question in them, like, How many more distracted lifetimes are you gonna waste, huh?

  Sasha flicks off the red light and jogs upstairs.

  ***

  Autumn’s a little relieved when Sasha pulls her away from the house, out of breath and bright-eyed. She doesn’t even question where they’re going when they leave the orchard and the sense of sanctuary inside the fences. Sasha leads the way with a long stick, poking at the ground as they go for snakes, or traps in the mulchy debris. It doesn’t take long for Autumn to figure out where Sasha is leading her. But she doesn’t know why.