“Hey.” A whisper came from the shadows.

Sitting just outside the circle of firelight, not paying attention, were the two girls Patty and Celeste and the boy Jake. They all stared into the fire with a look on each of their faces she couldn’t decipher, though it wasn’t altogether unfamiliar. Their faces were curiously blank.

Then Celeste peered at her. “What . . . is with your hair?”

Agnes touched its soft stubble. “It’s short,” she said.

The two girls looked at each other and rolled their eyes. “No kidding,” Celeste said.

Patty said, “How old are you?”

“I don’t know,” said Agnes. “Probably twenty?”

The girls guffawed.

“No way,” Patty said. “We’re fourteen.” She motioned to the three of them. The boy had yet to speak, but he watched Agnes from under those cascading bangs. She imagined a cougar leaping from above. He wouldn’t know until the whoosh of its body parted those bangs and he would finally see. Oh, then he would see. But it would be too late. What a sad end. What an unnecessary impairment.

Celeste watched Agnes studying them. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said.

“You do?” Agnes asked.

“You’re thinking how much we look alike.” Celeste motioned to her and Patty. Agnes hadn’t even been looking at them.

“We’re twins,” Patty said.

They looked nothing alike. One was the color of dry sand, the other of wet soil. One even seemed older by a couple of years. And they had different mothers. But Agnes nodded.

“Jake is my cousin,” Patty said, hooking her thumb at him.

Agnes narrowed her eyes at him. “Is that true?”

“Yeah,” he said. His voice was deeper than she would have expected. He had no facial hair, but he sounded like a man. His voice was not meek the way his shoulders were. He kept her gaze.

“I have a dead sister,” Agnes said.

“Gross,” Celeste said.

“So,” Patty said, “did your mom really go back to the City?”

“Yeah,” Agnes said. “And it killed her.”

“So, she’s dead too?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh,” said Celeste. “Then why did your dad say he was worried about her?”

“Glen? He won’t accept that she’s gone.”

“That is so sad,” the Twins murmured.

Agnes nodded. “I tell him she’s not coming back and that we’re fine without her.” It wasn’t something she’d ever told him out loud. They didn’t often speak of her mother. But if he ever asked, it’s what she would say. She thought it would make things easier on him to know. It was easier on her since she decided that was the story of her mother.

The Twins nodded. Agnes glanced at Jake and saw a skeptical look on his face.

“How did she die?” Jake mumbled.

Agnes blinked. “I told you. The City killed her.”

“I know, but how?”

“I don’t know.”

“How do you know she’s dead then?”

“I just do,” Agnes snapped.

The Twins exchanged looks so meaningful that Agnes imagined they’d just shared everything they’d ever thought.

“Well, if it did kill her, I’m not surprised,” said Celeste and shook her head like Agnes had seen Helen, her mother, do earlier. “I honestly don’t think you could live here and go back to the City and survive. Like, the air would instantly kill you.”

“Totally,” said Patty.

“I guess,” said Jake.

“Are there still a lot of sick kids in the City?”

“Oh, definitely,” blurted Celeste.

“Were you sick?” Agnes asked.

Celeste shook her head. “When I was younger. But not anymore.”

“But we have every right to be here,” Patty cried.

“Whoa,” said Jake, softly, soothingly. “Calm down, Patty.”

Patty huffed like a deer in danger, and she glanced at Agnes with a sneer.

They fell into silence and listened to the words of the Manual. It was the part about the Wilderness State’s system for fines. Fines for garbage, fines for entering restricted areas. The most absurd one to Agnes was the hefty fine for dying. She doubted as they read they even understood that’s what it meant, it was so odd. Carl had explained it to her one day, skipping stones into the river. How even though your body would hopefully be scavenged, your clothing and personal items would need to be retrieved in order to lessen the impact, and that usually amounted to a rescue mission, the tab for which the dead person’s family or next of kin would have to pay. “Yet another reason to stay alive,” Carl had said to her.

Jake’s attention had turned back to his shoes, and he flicked his hair repeatedly to try to see what he was cleaning.

“You’re going to die out here, you know,” Agnes said quietly. “And then they’re going to have to find your body and airlift out what’s left of it.”

The Twins guffawed. “Wow,” they said in unison.

Agnes flitted her hands in front of her eyes, pretending to be blinded. “Because of your hair.”

Jake nodded seriously. “We’re all going to die.” He flipped his hair. “Someday.”

Celeste flopped back dramatically into the evening sand. Patty followed closely behind.

Agnes cocked her head and peered at them. “Are they hurt?” she asked Jake.

“You are too much,” Celeste said from the ground. She rose up again on an elbow and smiled before her face took on what seemed to be its natural scowl. “You’ll have to let us know what the deal is here,” she said. She cast withering looks around at the trees, the river, the birds flitting by, Agnes’s soiled moccasins. “I mean, what the fuck is this place?”

“It’s the Wilderness,” Agnes said.

“And? I mean, what is that?”

Agnes looked at Jake. “It’s the Wilderness,” she said.

Celeste’s eyes tumbled in their sockets, and she flopped to the ground again.

The Twins settled their gazes on the sky, and Agnes walked away. The Twins made her tired.

“The stars aren’t that much better here,” she heard Celeste complain.

“I was just thinking that,” said Patty.

“I mean, what’s the point?”

“Exactly.”

Agnes looked back once more at Jake, who was still watching her. She felt how hunched her back had become under his gaze, so she straightened it. She had the urge to punch him, and so she ran as fast as she could to where the adults, of which she was one, were prepping meat.

*

The next morning they set about breaking down the shacks the Newcomers had erected. The boards of wood were hazards of rusted spikes and nails, slim ragged splinters and mold.

Agnes worked alone on one little shack. The outside was made of slats from old apple crates. The walls were dusty, broken-up paintings of idyllic apple farms. Sand crabs leapt around the sand floor. Each time Agnes pulled a board, dust and particulate burst into a cloud that enveloped her. She tried to cover her mouth, but it didn’t help. After a few boards, Agnes stumbled outside as her whole body shook in a fit of coughing. Doubled over like that, staring through her watery eyes, she conjured an old memory and her stomach curled with dread. She remembered herself in her small bedroom, curled in her pink bed coughing into her pink sheets until a spray of red appeared, illuminated by the glare from the City’s night lights. She saw her mother appear, scoop her to her chest, and run with her into the hall, down so many flights of stairs to another apartment. It was spare and smelled of bleach. It belonged to a private doctor her mother paid for emergencies. Almost no doctor worked on emergencies anymore because there were no emergencies anymore. Because of overpopulation, emergencies were thought of more or less as fate.

When her mother laid her on the doctor’s cot, she saw her blood on her mother’s shirt. It was not a blob, or smear. No, it looked as though her face had imprinted itself there in blood—a small eye hole, a smooth cheek, and a gaping mouth. Sometimes, now, walking in the woods, she would see a blot of color somewhere—lichen on a tree trunk, or a boulder sneering out from green grass—and think of this half face, her face. It was a death mask of a death she had cheated. She saw this mask many places, on many things. In other colors. The green blood of trees. Blue blood of water. Blowing white flower petals. Whatever made those things alive, whatever was the core that made them unknowable.

When she saw her mother again, it was the next day and the mark was gone. A new shirt. Clean, peach. Agnes remembered being angry that her mother would discard the mark of such a moment.

But it had happened before, those dashes to the doctor. They would happen again.

“She’s building a tolerance,” Agnes remembered the doctor saying of the medicine.

“What can you do about that?” her mother asked.

“Nothing. This is where we are. Unless you’ve got different air to breathe,” she said, trailing off. Then she snorted bitterly because it was an absurd idea. Different air to breathe.