Val shrugged. “Okay, I trust you.” She had said it casually, but Agnes heard it as an overture full of meaning. Because trust was an adult word. And nothing was casual out here.

They camped in place for a few sunrises and then packed up and carried on. Soon, the horizon looked muddled, no longer the sharp line they’d grown accustomed to. The brown landscape ahead morphed into white, gray, and black mounds that loomed more with each passing day. The ache in their calves grew, the sign that they were climbing.

The land turned from dust and silt to rocks and dirt clods that broke open under their feet. Agnes scooped them into her small hands as they walked and further cracked them open in her palm, feeling the cool dirt slide between her fingers and fall with heaviness to the ground. Nothing like the fine dust that hung in the air in the desert. She breathed lightly. Her shoulders became loose. The dust, she realized, had made her nervous. The dust storm they’d choked in. The one that turned her mother into a ghost. And then, in that truck, the dust was a curtain her mother had disappeared behind. With the dust behind Agnes now, she knew unwanted surprises were behind her too.

Soon stunted junipers appeared and so did evening rains that cooled off the land and turned the air herbal, sweet, sour, and sticky with the essence of those trees. Their evening fires were savory, and they carried the sap with them from their morning cleanup, clearing the burnt sticks, trying to crush them underfoot, only to get sap on moccasins or between fingers trying to fling the burnt sticks that instead stuck to their palms. The mix of heat and moisture made the trees weep, and brushing against one meant gluey clothes until enough debris matted the stickiness away.

During one evening, camped at the edge of a juniper forest, Agnes gathered the sap in her hands and stuck her hands to many parts of her body repeatedly until the stickiness died. She hugged the sticky junipers and then struggled to pull herself off.

As she writhed away from the tree, Sister and Brother and Pinecone walked up.

“What are you doing?” Sister asked.

“Playing Stickers.”

“Can we play?”

Agnes looked at Sister and said yes. Then she looked at Brother and said yes. When she got to Pinecone, he looked so stupid in his little deer necktie he insisted on wearing, she couldn’t help but pause.

Tears sprang to his eyes. “Why don’t you like me?” he said in his warbled way.

“I don’t not like you,” Agnes lied.

“You don’t want to play with me.”

“I don’t like your games.”

“I don’t have games.”

“You always want to play Shopkeeper.”

“No! I don’t like Shopkeeper!”

“Don’t lie, Pinecone,” Sister and Brother said in unison.

Pinecone was born in the Wilderness, and yet he only ever wanted to pretend he was in a store working a cash register. He’d heard someone talking about it once. How they had bought something and the salesperson had been rude, long ago in their old City life. He’d then asked the whole Community to describe different stores and how a cash register worked. It was so stupid, but he put so much time into it that the adults had encouraged everyone to play the game with him. Even the adults had to pretend to shop for rocks and sage leaves.

“Shopkeeper is the only game you like to play.”

“I play your games.”

“But you don’t like my games.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Okay, what about Bears and Coyotes.”

Pinecone bit his lip.

“Or Stick Tag.”

Pinecone shivered. “I don’t like those games.”

Agnes groaned. “See? Your name is Pinecone. You should want to play those games.”

“Why because of my name?”

“It’s Pinecone!”

“I know!”

“It’s from this place. It’s from your home. I wish my name was something wild like Raptor or Spotted Newt.”

“But your name is Agnes.”

“I know what my name is.”

“What does it mean?”

“I don’t know. It’s a family name.”

“It sounds like agony,” said Sister.

“And what kind of name is Sister, Sister?”

“It’s my name,” Sister sniffed. Then she lifted her chin triumphantly. “Your name sounds like what you are.” Her face scrunched up like she was in pain, her lips quivered, her eyes teared and danced in the back of her head. “Agnes,” she snarled.

Agnes frowned. She didn’t want to get into a fight with Sister or Brother. Or even Pinecone, really. She hated watching the adults argue. It was not the kind of adult she wanted to be. “Okay,” she said. “All I meant is I wish I had a wild name. I’d kill for a name like Lightning or Condor. Or even Pinecone.”

“Let’s play Kill for a Name,” said Pinecone.

“How do you play?”

“I don’t know. Pretend to kill for our names?”

“Kill what?”

“Each other?”

Agnes shrugged. “Okay.”

The game didn’t last long, but it was fun, and after, Agnes felt a little kindlier toward Pinecone. He was learning. Someday she would steal that necktie he’d requested Debra make him. Where he’d ever seen a necktie was unclear. But he loved it, would hunch over and swing the weight of it back and forth like a tick-tock clock.

They went back to hugging the junipers. And then Agnes made up a new game that involved them pulling their hair back with the sap, then piling dirt clods on top to make it unstick. Agnes called it Wet Head, but for some reason the sap in the hair never unstuck, could not be coated enough to become unsticky again.

Debra gathered them together, their hair matted in odd angles, looking like mountain cats caught in a squall. She shook her head.

“I can cover your heads with dirt or I can cut your hair off. Your choice.”

Around the fire that night, the children got blunt awkward haircuts and Agnes was shorn to the scalp.

Debra clicked her tongue. “It’s even on your skin.” She sprinkled dirt and patted the sticky spots until they were smoothed over. “What were you thinking?”

Agnes kept touching the sticky part of her head, finding short soft hairs left behind, or longer ones coiled against her scalp. She gathered the cut hair, banding it together with more sap into a great long tail.

“Are you going to save that for your mom?” Debra asked.

Agnes slapped the tail against her open palm, wincing at the surprising force of it. “Can’t,” she said.

“Why not?”

“She’s dead,” Agnes said, slapping the tail again. She jumped up and whipped her hair tail around her head, whooping, and the other children gathered their hair and tried to join her. But her hair had been the longest and her tail was the most dramatic, and so they just leapt around behind her, copying her moves. She was the oldest. Her new haircut the most severe. She knew that made her the leader. She pranced and slunk and watched the children fail to embody her uniqueness. But then, as she leapt around, she saw the adults exchanging looks she took to be displeasure, and so she abruptly stopped, knowing the children would stop too. She threw her tail into the fire and marched away to bed. The children followed. Their hair burned with the juniper sap, and the smell was so terrible everyone else went to bed too.

*

The foothills rolled into something more treacherous. Jagged, brittle rock that behaved more like hardened, sculpted dirt. It crumbled underfoot or in their hands as they scrambled higher. Then more rolling land, higher meadows where they would camp for a few nights and scout to get a sense of just what exactly they were heading toward.

In daytime excursions from camp for game or provisions, they found the animals were different. The squirrels were red, not gray or brown. The deer had bushy black tails that stood up two feet high when they ran from them. Their antler velvet was thick and black too. And they were small in comparison to the deer from the lowlands. The wolves were bigger, and the one bear she saw was brown, not black. And there were condors with wingspans as long as three people that blotted out the sun when they flew overhead. All the newness made the land feel newly dangerous.

And yet they had found ruts cut into the land that appeared to lead into the mountains. As though once, long ago, people and their wheels had passed through here for so long and with so much impact it could not be restored or re-wilded without tearing the whole mountainside out. It was like having the way forward whispered in their ears.

Agnes found the ruts. Early in the foothills, the Community had been following a stream, but Agnes had beelined away, and the group blindly followed. Soon they noticed their feet hugging the new grooved land.

“Had you seen them, Agnes?” Carl asked, trying to decipher if this was luck or mastery.

Agnes shook her head. “There will be more deer over here—see the trees?—and we want deer, so I took us here.”

“But did you mean to follow these lines in the ground?”

Agnes didn’t understand. “Why wouldn’t we follow these? They are easier to walk.”

At first the move had made some of them nervous. It was risky. Juan suggested returning to the stream. They always stayed by the stream when there was a stream to stay by.