But walking ahead of the Community, Agnes felt proud to be leading, just another kind of creature on a mass migration. Just creatures finding water the way all creatures must. It wasn’t that she didn’t always feel this way each day they’d been out here. That she was just another animal. But there was something about the scope of what she could see now. How massive it was. They often saw animals: a herd of deer, mating hawks, a wolf pack. The elk herd was the largest group of animals they ever came across all at once, other than flocks of birds. But flocks of birds didn’t have the same battered hooves as the elk, the same sweaty fur.

Looking across the vast plain and seeing all the animals moving as one, in one direction, with the same needs, she felt a part of the place in a way she hadn’t before. She’d never realized she felt apart from it. But she guessed she had in some unknowable way. It was their reliance on the water spigots. On the maps. On the fact that they checked in with Rangers. They were never fully living on their own. Not like these animals were every day. Not until now. And she was leading. She thought about a conversation she’d had with Jake when he’d first arrived, when he’d asked how long she thought she would be staying. He had no concept that the Wilderness State would be forever, having just arrived, bewildered. But she’d never considered they would ever leave. When they left the City, her mother hadn’t called it a trip, or an adventure, or something temporary. She had said, “This is our new home.” At the thought of leaving here, her breath caught in her throat. She felt like that small girl again, listless and coughing, turning a handkerchief red. Unable to assert force on the world. But that was no longer her. She was no longer that small girl, curiously watching from a distance, from behind her mother or behind Glen. Tentatively reaching out to touch a wet deer nose, breaking through a spider’s new morning web, wiping dew and silk from her face with surprise. Now she was the head elk. The point of the V. The dominant doe. She was a part of it all. It all depended on her.

Agnes sprinted ahead. She heard Val call for her to wait. Glen croaked for her to slow down. Her mother ordered her to stop. But she whooped in response and ran faster. She spooked the deer, which veered away. The geese above got smaller as they rose to retreat from such ecstasy. This was the last breath of that little girl. Agnes grinned. She did a cartwheel, whooped again. If she’d had something in her hands to dig deep into the dirt with, she would have buried her younger self. Instead, she made squishing sounds as she pretended to dig around in her guts. Then she dramatically pantomimed pulling something out of her, the heart of that little girl, and with one last whoop she threw it up into the geese and they honked and veered off again, raining shit down around her.

Then Agnes waited for the others to catch up.

*

The closer they got to the foothills, the greener and softer the world became. The weight of the air changed. There was water again in every breath, and soon they hoped they would find it running clean and easy from small springs and brooks. They passed solitary pinyons and collected the nuts when they could to process later. Pinecone asked to carry the bag. “Because of my name,” he said. He carried it with a seriousness that made Agnes laugh, a little unkindly, she realized when she noticed that others smiled at Pinecone’s focus. Finally, the tippy tops of the mountains came into view and the Community veered toward them. They left the migratory masses behind. The watering holes. The camaraderie. The safety of the group.

Glen had become ragged, hoarse, weak again. He’d developed a limp from simple movement rather than from some traumatic injury. He hid it as well as he could. In the night, he was coughing again, and in the morning he gingerly stepped and winced, stepped and winced, as though pained by even small moves. The Community had water now, but the water rationing they’d gone through had taken a toll on Glen.

One of the nights after they left the last watering hole, Agnes had seen him walking off at dusk, dragging a single blanket. Agnes tried to join him, but he forbade it. Agnes had begun to read Glen’s physical wavering like people read the weather signs in the sky. A halo around the moon meant rain. When Glen disappeared, something bad would happen.

It took a few nights for Bea to realize Glen was sleeping on the outskirts of the camp again. That it took her mother so long to notice confirmed Agnes’s belief that not only was she a bad mother, she was a bad wife as well. As if I needed confirmation, Agnes thought.

“Why didn’t you tell me he was doing that?” her mother muttered, throwing debris into the campfire.

“I didn’t think you cared.”

“Of course I care,” she said in a tense hushed whisper. “Do you know why he’s doing it?”

“Maybe he’s dying,” Agnes said.

Her mother’s face burned. “What did you just say?”

Agnes swallowed. “Maybe he’s dying,” she said, quieter, afraid. She said it because she believed maybe he was. It’s what many animals did when they were dying. She prepared to continue with these explanations. But Bea turned to her, her face wild, not with anger but with fear, and every part of her advanced as if to slap Agnes. Agnes cringed, certain she could feel her mother’s hand just at her cheek. But the slap never came. Agnes opened one eye and saw her mother walking away from the light of the fire, directly toward where Glen was, as though he were true north. She did not return to camp before Agnes went to sleep. And she was not there when Agnes woke in the earliest silver dawn.

Agnes found them huddled just far enough that the light from the campfire would be visible as a glow on the horizon, not flickering flames. She squatted just an old pine’s length from them, but if they saw her, they did not acknowledge her. They behaved as though they were alone, somewhere private, not under the open sky.

Glen reclined on his belongings. Patches of his beard were gray, and it covered what Agnes knew were sunken cheeks. He looked like a scrap of hide too small and ragged to do much with.

Bea sat beside him, leaning over him, lounging almost. She had a brutish wooden bowl next to her and a rag in her hand. She dipped it into the bowl, and it came up dripping. She ran the wet rag down the center of Glen’s chest.

Glen sighed, and his shoulders released apart, as though she’d unlocked them from his breastbone. He laid his head back.

Agnes watched, perplexed. How could he feel relaxed in her hands after she’d disappeared and now abandoned him for Carl? How could he accept her love? Tenderness needed to be accompanied by something else to matter, something like loyalty.

After Bea joined Carl, she made sure Glen was cared for. But as far as Agnes had seen, she did none of the caring herself. Until now, Bea had kept her distance. If she observed Glen at all, it was from afar. Perhaps her mother’s privacy had made it feel as though her love for Glen was over. But now, here, that was clearly wrong. Sometimes Agnes doubted her mother’s motives for things, assuming she held onto quieter additional desires. But there was nothing ambiguous here as Agnes watched her mother kiss Glen tenderly on the cheeks, the temples, his closed eyelids, his forehead, as he smiled blissfully and sadly; then, when she kissed his mouth, his body reached for hers. He was in love. And so, it seemed, was her mother. Agnes thought back to all that time without her mother after her mother had abandoned them. She couldn’t remember Glen showing a moment of anger. As though he was certain she had only acted out of necessity, and therefore he could cast no blame.

She watched from the shadows as Bea lay in Glen’s arms, her head on his bony chest, lifting slightly with each breath. Their eyes were closed, but they were not asleep. Agnes felt warmth in her chest, and she remembered that this was how they’d slept for years. Her mother and Glen in each other’s arms and Agnes at their feet. Watching them together, Agnes felt heartsick. She wanted to be a part of that family bed again, to be the one they wanted to share tender time with. Did they miss her right now? Did they miss the feel of her hands around their ankles?

*

The Community stayed put for a few nights and processed the pheasants the Hunters had rustled up.

Bea joined Agnes at bedtime now that Glen was off in the outskirts. But her mother curled much too tight in a ball, on purpose, Agnes thought, and it left Agnes restless and cold throughout the night. She didn’t want to sleep like that again. One night, Agnes left the warmth of the fire in search of Glen.

It looked like he had a fire going too. But she realized that what she thought she saw, a glow on the horizon, a little black snake of smoke slithering up the dark blue dusk sky, was much, much, much farther away and must not be a fire at all. Maybe it was some remnant of sunset. The smoke nothing but an illusion.

“Hi, sweetie,” she heard Glen say.

“How did you know it was me?”

“I could tell from the sound of your footsteps.”

Agnes was proud of Glen for discerning her approach, but she was also embarrassed that she’d been detected so easily.

“Don’t worry,” Glen said, sensing her disappointment. As she got closer, she could see him smiling. “I only know your footsteps. And that’s only because I spend a lot of time listening for them. No one else would be able to hear you.”

“Good,” she said and squatted down next to him. “Can you come back to camp?”

“I’d prefer to stay out here.”