The stars at night vibrated so closely together, their cloud of light covered the whole of the sky. So much more comforting than the narrow embrace of the Milky Way.

They crossed new sage seas where all it did was rain. They didn’t know if it was the season or the climate. The wet sage smelled like its best self. Better even than its sunbaked self. It smelled clean and soapy and left the air sticky. The deer they met ran and ran and ran and ran, then stopped and looked. And after seeing them still, the deer ran and ran and ran some more. The horizon was unreachable.

They found the true desert, or it seemed to them. The soft alkali sands where they lost their tracks as the sun moved overhead, changing the texture of the land with its light. The loamy dry lakebeds, playas, smelled of mushrooms, of dark body crevices. The hot horizon floated in front of their eyes like a river of gold.

They walked for days through knee-high plants and by alkali lakes, dried and white and glazed and crackled. Up long, low slopes, then down, and the sight was always the same: another expanse of tossed brown and green sagebrush, tufted white grass, each plant distinct and curling into itself and only itself. They could walk between each bush without touching one. It was a lonely landscape.

Sometimes a tree stood stunted but conspicuous, and Bea thought, Poor thing.

The slopes they walked upon looked as though a giant had lifted the front edge of earth. Plates of land sloped up and dropped off at the end. At the zenith edge of each of them, the walkers scrambled down the escarpment to another valley floor that seemed flat as a sheet of paper. Not until their calves strained would they realize they were climbing again.

Sometimes the escarpment was high and they might climb, slide, or stumble down stories of rough land; sometimes it was just a few hundred feet, but it seemed in that drop they must be losing whatever height they’d just gained. A zero-sum landscape. But each night the air became more chilled in that high-elevation way, and so they knew that, slowly, they were rising into new mountains.

They walked mostly in silence, made uneasy by the uncertainty of where they were heading and the strangeness of the land leading them there. They saw less and less vegetation with each slope they put behind them, and Bea, rather than feeling as though the landscape was changing, felt more that it was simply disappearing from under her, and that soon she’d be walking on nothing, near nothing. The sage and grasses thinned out and the sand became loose, shifting in the wind. From the top of each rise, the whole valley floor below would seem to move as though full of ghost snakes slithering between the plants. In the immensity of the land, their faulty eyes saw movement rather than the stillness that was there. At night, when they camped, they slept poorly under the light-pricked, energetic sky.

*

At the end of one long day of a gradual climb, they reached the top and looked out over the next valley. Far off to the right they saw a trail of dust hanging in the air. At the head of the cloud were horses, maybe a dozen or so, running fast and together over the valley floor.

“Must be water,” said Glen.

“Let’s wait here and see if they stop,” said Carl. “We always need water, but we don’t need to walk seven days in the wrong direction for it.”

They sat. Some dangled their feet over cliff edges; others lay in between the sage. Hawk cries came from above, whining, Go away, go away. Carl and Glen stood, hands shielding their eyes, watching the horses’ progress.

Just before the edge of where they could see, the dust stopped and the cloud settled. Carl lifted the scope to his eye and looked through the cracked lens. “It’s green,” he said. He pointed to a spot on the horizon where the shadows seemed slightly darker than the rest of the land. “That’s not too far,” he said, passing the scope to Glen.

Once down in the valley they followed the animals’ trail and a day later found a compact marsh circling a trickling spring. Bea had wanted desperately to hear the horses whinny or watch them be rambunctious with one another, or even have them look upon her with that disdainful gaze specific to horses, but the horses were gone now. Where they had stood, the tender stunted grasses were bent or kicked up. The ground held onto the impression of their wild hooves.

“Only take from the mouth of the spring,” Val warned. “Those dumb horses shit all over the place.” She scowled.

Bea only saw the droppings of one horse, on dry land well away from water. She watched Val angrily kicking aside clods of dirt as though they were turds.

She took Agnes by the hand and led her to the other side of the small but striving marsh. They stepped over the thin rivulets that were trying to get somewhere new but drying before they arrived. A frog jumped out of their way, and they both laughed in surprise.

“A frog,” Bea called to the others, but no one heard. It splashed forward, croaking for the companionship of another, then became lost in the marsh that was verdant on its edges and blue with mirrored sky at its core.

“Where did it come from?” asked Agnes.

Bea looked out across the bunchgrasses and sagebrush, unruly and unwelcoming.

“I think it must have always been here,” she said.

The Community waded through ankle-deep mud, browning the water in their wake, and passed forward personal bottles, skins, and a few large bladders and jugs they carried for the Community to fill at the mouth of the spring. They drank, refilled, and then harvested watercress growing wild around the edge. The sudden moisture made them feel waterlogged and dreamy, and soon they bedded down just a few hundred yards away.

In the night, Bea heard a parade of animals. The scamper of rodents. The light pad of coyote paw and the soft grind of antelope hoof against dirt. Bea was sure some antelope had stepped into their camp and then reeled back in surprise. She heard the soft push of water from snouts and tongues reaching in. She sat up and could see shapes and the faint glow of eyes around the water that shimmered in the scattered light the night brought. A crescent moon was rising, and it cast a road of light across the floor of the plain. A fire-bright sliver. It seemed impossible to illuminate so much. But she could see animals moving toward the water, could even see some of the markings on their coats.

Then she heard a taut snap behind her, a whiz next to her ear, and a second later the antelopes stampeded away from her, returning to the shadows. She turned and saw Carl, sitting up, lowering his hunting bow.

He turned to Bea and said, thick-tongued and sleepy, “Am I dreaming?”

“You almost hit me,” she hissed, touching her ear and second-guessing if he had.

Carl rubbed his eyes and peered into the dark. “Did I get one?”

“Of course not,” she snapped.

“Oh, relax,” he said, shaking off his grogginess. “You’re fine.”

Bea felt Agnes stir at her feet. She was awake. Probably Agnes had been awake this whole time because it seemed like Agnes was always awake, attentive, watching. Bea nudged her hard with her foot. “Even animals sleep, you little spy,” she said under the covers. Agnes played dead. Bea lay down again and curled up, withdrawing from her daughter, from Glen, who’d slept through everything.

She heard Carl whisper, “I’m going to see if I got one.”

She heard his tread toward the water. She heard him return, whistling.

He rustled back into his bed. “Hey, Bea,” he hissed. “I didn’t get one.” When she didn’t answer, he hissed again, “Did you hear me—”

“Shut up.”

He chuckled, pleased to have irritated her.

At her feet, Agnes squirmed to a place where some part of her was again touching her mother.

Bea closed her eyes. She heard the hum of insects, alive now in the safety of the dark. She listened for the footsteps of more animals returning to the watering hole, but she heard none. Against her eyelids, the crescent moon shone. A shadow passed quickly over her eyes, and the insects got quiet, and she knew the shadow wasn’t some wayward cloud, but was from a night flier out hunting whose presence had been exposed by moonlight. She pictured the moon in some kind of pact with all the would-be prey on the plain, and all the prey of the plain offering thanks and small sacrifices to their guardian moon. Then she pictured the night flier, alone on the wing, cursing the moon and the light and the thankful creatures below, and vowing revenge on them all.

*