It was their first big storm. Spooked, they stayed put for so long a Ranger drone eventually arrived to coax them out. They trudged, disoriented and bleary-eyed, scared of putting one foot in front of the other. At their destination, Carl stomped on the clicker in front of the desk Ranger, shattering it, but not before reporting the steps, which he had begrudgingly collected.

This had happened in the first year, when many of them still had shoes, sleeping bags, when to some it still felt like one of those camping trips they’d heard grandparents talk about, something they would soon return home from, something they could shower off. It was their first storm but also their first long walk in the Wilderness. They talked about it in epic terms around the fire for seasons afterward. It was their origin story, how they’d finally come to be a part of this land. It had felt like they’d accomplished something impossible. Like they had discovered a new world. Bea remembered looking at her family, at her blisters, the toenail she’d lost, and feeling proud. In total, the journey had taken almost eight weeks. Some of them still had watches that told the time and date. Back then they felt awed that they could head in one direction for that long and not run into a dead end. They didn’t understand yet just how much land there was to roam.

Now, hunched in the cave, Bea pictured the map in her head. This walk would be much, much longer than that walk. There were three lines of upside-down Ws to cross. Three mountain ranges. A feeling of dread turned her toes and fingers prickly cold. She scratched at the back of her neck, trying to dispel the anxiety.

She saw that most of the Community had come back together. They mingled among the yellow tape. They would want to leave soon. She heard a foot slide against loose rock, and then she heard a grunt and saw the top of Glen’s head appear below her, then his face, half smiling, and then his hands and arms scrambling the rocks to reach her.

“Where have you been, stranger?” she asked even though she knew.

“Had a look around, saying goodbye to this place. In case we don’t come back.”

She smiled. “You know, we can always just head back to Middle Post.”

“We can?” Glen sank beside her, slightly perplexed, thinking she was serious.

“Of course! Ranger Bob has a guest room. He invited us to stay there whenever.”

“He did?” He scratched his head.

“No.” Bea sighed. She was pretending. It was one of the ways she got through a day under the relentless sky. “Not really,” she said. She expected that would end her game—Glen shooting her a quizzical look—but surprisingly, he laughed.

“Oh, okay, sure, I get it,” he said. “Hey, Ranger Bob! Mrs. Ranger Bob!”

Bea sat up straight. “Hey, do you think we could use your shower?”

“We’d need some towels. Oh, and soap. Oh, and I’d love a shave. Hey, Bob—can I call you Bob?—have you got an extra razor?”

“Hey there, Mrs. Bob, what’s good on the Screen?”

“Oooh, are those pretzels?”

They were giggling, their shoulders shaking together. Glen never fantasized about, or even seemed to miss, the coziness of their old life, of any kind of civilization. She was grateful not to have to be alone with the sour, lonely ache she now felt for it all.

“You know, I’ve been thinking,” she said, “maybe we should have gone to the Private Lands instead.” She was trying to keep the joke going, but her voice fell and she could not laugh at the suggestion like she’d meant to. It was a good joke because the Private Lands were a make-believe place as far as Bea was concerned. A fantastical place that people had talked about for as long as she could remember. A place where the living was better, easy and nice, as it had supposedly been in the past. A secret place for the wealthy and powerful, where they could have their own land and do as they wished. The Private Lands were the opposite of the City and had all the freedoms the City could no longer offer, and you either believed in it or you didn’t. It had always seemed to Bea that the number of people who believed was proportional to how bad the City was becoming. One of her aunts believed now, and still sometimes mailed her newspaper clippings about its existence, secret maps of where it could be found. Her mother had always told Bea to toss such things. “You cannot just believe what someone tells you,” her mother said. “Not without a good reason.” Her aunt’s husband had convinced her to believe and now she was dour and anxious. Before that she’d been sweet and fun. Very close with Bea’s mother. “Oh, she was a laugh before,” her mother would sigh.

Glen hooked his arm around her neck and pulled her close. “Now, now,” he murmured. “This will be fun.”

She knew that a big part of Glen believed this. But no part of Bea did. She pictured the map in her head again and saw all that unknown land, that beige parchment, all that nothing. They would be changed on the other side of it, that much she knew. Not knowing how was only one of the things that scared her.

Part II

In the Beginning

In the beginning, there were twenty. Officially, these twenty were in the Wilderness State as part of an experiment to see how people interacted with nature, because, with all land now being used for resources—oil, gas, minerals, water, wood, food—or storage—trash, servers, toxic waste—such interactions had become lost to history.

But most of the twenty didn’t know much about science, and many of them didn’t even care about nature. These twenty had the same reasons people have always had for turning their backs on everything they’d known and venturing to an unfamiliar place. They went to the Wilderness State because there was no other place they could go.

They had wanted to flee the City, where the air was poison to children, the streets were crowded, filthy, where rows of high-rises sprawled to the horizon and beyond. And because all land that hadn’t been subsumed by the City was now being used to support the City, it seemed everyone now lived in the City. Whether they wanted to or not. So while a couple of those twenty had gone to the Wilderness for adventure, and a couple for knowledge, most fled there because they believed in some way their lives depended on it.

In the beginning, they had shoes, and army-issue sleeping bags, tents, lightweight titanium cookware, ergonomic backpacks, tarps, ropes, rifles, bullets, headlamps, salt, eggs, flour, and more. They walked into the Wilderness State, made camp, and on their first morning made pancakes. They sprinkled sugar on them. They flavored their early stews with bacon. None of that stuff lasted long, though. That first day felt like a vacation in a wondrous new place. That feeling didn’t last long either.

In the beginning, their skin coloring matched that of wood pulp, riverbed sand, wet tree roots, the rich underside of mosses. Their eyes were brown. Their hair was dark. They had all ten fingers and toes. Their skin was unscarred. The dangers of the City had never been from scrapes and cuts.

In the beginning, they were written about and reported on back in the City. A group of people who had forsaken civilization to live in the wild? Why would anyone do that? Op-eds wondered what would happen to them. Mainstream journalists wondered what they were running from. Alternative publications wondered if they knew something everyone else didn’t. Regular people sent them care packages of homemade cookies, coffee, hot dogs, generally inedible by the time they opened them. Batteries, toothbrushes, pens. Useless items for people attempting to live primitively. Someone sent them a forty-pound cast-iron pot. It was a family heirloom. It had been in his closet for years, he wrote on a card. He couldn’t bear to throw it out. He hoped they would have use for it. The Ranger took a picture of them pretending to struggle to lift it. They were smiling or making pained faces. They sent the picture as a thank-you of sorts. But also as a way to tell the sender what a ridiculous gift it was for people who walk every day and carry what they own. With little discussion they voted to leave it behind. It was an obvious decision. But that night they cooked in it. And they’d been carrying the Cast Iron ever since.

In the beginning, they acquiesced to finger pricks, cheek swabs, urine samples, blood pressure readings, filled out questionnaires each time they went to Post, to see how they were impacting nature and how nature was impacting them. Their days were data to someone, though they never believed the data could be all that important.

In the beginning, they followed all the rules in the Manual, the written rule of the Wilderness State, for fear they’d be sent home. They never camped in the same place twice. They picked up all their trash, and even trash they couldn’t imagine being theirs. They buried their bones. They measured out their pit toilets to the right depth, the right length from water. They restored their fire rings to look like virgin land. Where they walked, one would hardly know twenty people had passed through. They left no trace. They drank bad water because they couldn’t always find good water, and they paid the price for that.