Late that night, as most of the Originalists and Newcomers slept, searchlights played high above on Winter Ridge, the hum of a helicopter circled around them. A truck’s lights washed over where the ridge dropped and swept against lowlying clouds. From where the Community slept it looked like a silent invasion.

Most were asleep, but Agnes and Jake saw the lights. They saw because they stayed up later than everyone else and had been doing so since the new moon. Sitting together, most often silently. Staring into the fire and wondering about what the other was wondering about.

They watched the lights curiously for a few moments.

“What is that? Is that aliens?” Jake asked.

“It’s Rangers.”

They lit the ends of sticks in the fire and took them away from the sleeping Community, picking their way in the dim dark through the grasses. They spelled out words in the air with the lit ends of the sticks, drawing with the embers secret messages for the invaders above.

Agnes wrote, Liars and Cowards. And, Hi Brad’s uncle.

Jake wrote, Dicks.

The words burned into their sight so that they read them again and again against their eyelids whenever they blinked.

“They’re so dumb,” Jake said, walking back to the fire.

“Why?”

“If they’d searched for the body in the day, we probably wouldn’t have seen them. Certainly not their lights. Maybe we might have heard them.”

Agnes hmmed. It had been a sunny day. She would have seen the glint of the sun off the metal of the trucks. She would have heard the helicopter when it was many miles away. Tonight, with lowlying clouds, was a good night to try. If the clouds had hugged the Ridge as the Rangers must have assumed they would, their lights would have been mostly invisible. The clouds would have dampened the sound of the helicopter and made it sound possibly like some wild horses running close by but out of sight. Or some strange bug ticking nearby. The Rangers’ luck ran out when the clouds for a time left a gap that just happened to encompass the search party and the group below with clear cool air and a window to the starry sky. A middle-of-the-night search meant they had planned well, but nature worked against them, as it often did. And she and Jake had worked against them too, by being awake. She hmmed again and let Jake continue with his theory. She liked that he was trying to understand this new world of his, even if he got it so wrong. Someday soon, she’d explain the Rangers to him. That they were much smarter than they sometimes appeared, and much more powerful too. And that, even though the Rangers had attempted to conduct the search for the corpse in secret, they really didn’t need to hide anything from the Community. Ultimately the Community didn’t matter. The Community, as she understood it, had no power. Her mother had tried to have good relationships with all the Rangers, but as far as Agnes could tell, the only trustworthy Ranger was Ranger Bob. Jake didn’t need to know all of that now. These were things she’d just begun to understand, and she had liked her world better before she understood them. His wrongness made him seem innocent, and that made her feel protective of him.

They walked slowly toward the fire, and she slipped her calloused hand into his soft hand and heard his faint gasp of private delight in the darkness, believed she could hear the shifting muscles from the beginning of a smile because her hearing was that good. They walked like that to the edge of camp, then slid their hands from each other and walked alone to their own beds, Agnes’s next to Glen’s snoring lump and Jake next to Frank, though not in that family’s bed. Agnes saw that Jake’s own bed was slightly to the side, which saddened Agnes, that he had to be a little bit alone. She had never asked him about his family, she realized. Was she supposed to? She watched Jake crouch, pull his sleep skin back, and disappear into the blackness of the ground just as the fire smoked out.

*

They packed all morning. The smoking tent came down. The curing tent came down. The components were rolled into their buckskin bags and fastened on the packs strapped to the designated carriers, which were Patty’s mom and Linda that day. “Trial by fire,” Linda said as she hoisted her laden pack. Patty’s mom stumbled under the weight, surprised that Agnes had handed it to her as though it weighed much less. Smoked meat was passed around. The precious skin-scraping bones. Packs of smoked bones. Extra bones were buried. Tanned hides were draped on backs because they still needed time before they would be ready. Each of the hide carriers smelled only the rich and rotten musk of the brains used to tan as they moved through the blooming sage country under the steady sun.

After a few days, Agnes thought she could see the remnants of a trail as they neared their familiar Valley. Barely perceptible, but she could see it. It could be an animal trail, but something told her it was the softened ground made from their own deerskin slippers, or from their old rubber soles so long ago.

She knew this place well, even though she’d never led through it. The way the land sloped up on the left, toward the caves where her mother, Glen, and she had spent their time. The secret grasses on the right, where her sister had been almost born. Agnes peered into that place as they walked, remembering how her mother squatted and swayed, her head down, and that strange moment when she lifted a glistening lump and kissed it. From where Agnes was perched, she had seen her mother kneeling for a long time. She knelt in complete stillness for what felt like hours. Then her mother stood, kicked a coyote, and walked away, and Agnes ran back to the cave where Glen napped.

Madeline’s place was soft with new grasses, and it made Agnes think they might be near some anniversary time, but she couldn’t think of how long it had been. Time was lost on everyone here. She didn’t care much for it, but now, it seemed sad to her that her little sister had no one marking time for her. She’d never thought of the dead that way. But as she led the group into the Valley, she saw it as something desolate, a place where nothing had been until this moment, even though she knew it was really full of everything.

Her mother hadn’t told her the girl’s name, but Agnes had heard her and Glen use it in private, secretly talking in the night under the skins. She remembered watching her mother return to the cave that day, how she squatted to wash herself, how she stared at the game Agnes and Glen were playing but didn’t join in, how she nuzzled her pillow, though her face wore no expression. Her mother was, it had seemed to Agnes, gone, though her body remained. And then how, sometime later, she was leading them back to camp as though it were any day, and if Agnes hadn’t known better, she would not have thought anything bad had just happened. There would be a shield around her mother for days that made it impossible for Agnes to touch her until they slept, when she would cuff herself to her mother’s ankle. She had needed to be close to her mother because she missed her sister, even though the girl had never been real. Agnes had wanted to ask for comfort but didn’t know how. She’d wondered if she ought to have given comfort to her mother. But her mother was a wall and Agnes assumed her mother didn’t need anything from her. She never did. Agnes decided it was Madeline who might need some comfort. And so she had sneaked to her burial spot the next night to keep her company.

There had been nothing left. She saw some thin bones tossed under a bush. She picked one up and bent it between her thumb and index finger. It was soft. It glittered with wetness under the moonlight. Agnes felt a desire tugging at her. She wanted something. Something to remember. To connect to Madeline somehow. But she didn’t want the bones. They could still be scavenged and helpful to something. She picked up one of the broad green leaves her mother had laid over the body. Agnes put it to her nose to smell it, but it clung, sticky to the tip. She pulled it away, and in the night’s black light she could see it was covered in thickened, sticky blood. Agnes’s nose and cheek were wet with it. She didn’t wipe it off. She felt the slow tickle as the blood’s last moisture evaporated and her sister remained. She smeared more on. As it dried, it tightened her skin so that it was hard to frown, or smile, or talk. Like when she and her mother used to smear mud on their faces during rainy days. “We’re at a spa,” her mother would exclaim as she wiped mud across Agnes’s cheek. Agnes didn’t know what a spa was, but she loved anytime her mother laughed.

Agnes wore the blood mask back to camp but wiped it off with her spit-covered palm so her mother or Glen wouldn’t see. What a strange thing to have done. She couldn’t say why she’d done it.