They packed quickly and headed into the cinder cone forest.

The forest rolled out before them. Thick with tall trees but not shrouded like it had seemed from its edges. Under the canopy, birds zipped tree to tree and all sounds had an echo, though there was no clear reason why. After a couple of days, Agnes could see, through breaks in the vegetation, what looked like dunes. Scattered cinder cones around the base of the Caldera. Their tops were sandy and bare, their slopes speckled with skinny firs. They had been bubbling baby cauldrons, but now they were long dead.

They’d been racing, quick camping, sleeping for only a few hours a night, eating jerky as they went. Carl was leading. He was like a wolf with meat on the nose. The children were having to run sometimes to keep up. The line of them was stretched long into the forest. But it was Glen who really struggled. After a couple of nights, he’d barely made it to camp before they were up and walking again. He didn’t get up with them. He sat hunched over his knees, shaking his head, heaving. Agnes stood with him. Carl was already blazing some kind of trail out of view.

“Mom,” Agnes yelled. Her mother reappeared quickly from up the path and saw Glen. She looked like she might collapse, but then she barked angrily, “Everyone drop your things—we’re camping tonight.” She dropped her bag and sprinted ahead to where Carl was hustling along.

People dropped their bags and milled around. Some of the Newcomers cast irritated glances at Glen, some of the Originalists too. They had left people behind in the past. But this was Glen. And this was different, Agnes thought. Wasn’t it?

Her mother was gone a long time. The camp was set up, a mix between a quick camp and something longer, since the Community didn’t know the amount of time they’d be there. A fire had been set up, but the beds were basic, a circle of one pelt per family.

Agnes heard them before she saw them. A rising cacophony made from two angry voices. When Bea came back down the mountain, her eyes were dancing and her jaw was set. She plunked down by Glen, who was curled by the fire. They were close enough to touch, but she didn’t touch him. She chewed on her knuckles instead. Carl followed after, furious in every movement. A walking argument. But he kept his mouth shut.

Debra was the first to speak. “How long will we be here?”

“Until we are all rested and able to continue,” Bea said flatly.

Carl paced by some wimpy trees. At times he would stop, spread an arm like he was about to speak. But he would say nothing. Just tuck his arm back and begin pacing again. No one spoke and no one wanted to look at anyone else. Finally, Carl took his pelt into the woods. Agnes expected Val to follow with Baby Egret, but she didn’t. It seemed she hardly registered he’d gone.

The camp tension lightened slightly. Bea sighed a long, tortured sigh. Debra got a bag of jerky and passed it around.

Agnes went to sit next to her mother. “What did you tell Carl?”

“I told him we were only as strong as our weakest member.”

“What did he say?”

She shook her head. “Glen just needs some sleep. He’ll be fine tomorrow. And I’ll lead so we can keep a healthy pace.”

“I could lead,” said Agnes.

But her mother looked at her. She looked weary, troubled. “No, I don’t want you up there. In case we run into anything.”

Just then Baby Egret’s caterwaul ricocheted off the tree trunks and Agnes flinched.

Her mother laughed. “You think that’s bad. That is nothing compared to you. The neighbors, they moved to another floor because of it.”

“No, they didn’t,” Agnes said, a smile creeping to her face.

“Yeah, they did,” her mother insisted. “You were so loud. Such a ruckus. But you didn’t have colic like Baby Egret. You just liked to scream. You were mostly happy. So I didn’t mind.”

Agnes listened to Egret and tried to imagine herself that young, and she couldn’t. She was so much older now, so far away from her childhood she had trouble conjuring it. She flushed and wrapped her arms around her waist. It had been too long since she bled last and she wondered if she wasn’t bleeding because she was pregnant. She smiled a little at the thought. She didn’t want to tell anyone her suspicions just yet. It felt like a secret she ought to keep to herself. At least for a little while. She had finally convinced Jake to have real sex. His face was rose red and his voice so quiet she had to keep asking “What” to his murmurings. “I love you,” he would whisper into her neck. She didn’t know about that. But she did know when he tensed and became very still, his eyes rolling skyward, that she had someone else’s life inside her for the first time.

“Why did you do it?”

“Why did I do what?”

“Have me? Have a baby?” Agnes wasn’t sure if she’d ever asked this. When her mother looked at her as though struck by a thought that caused her great emotion, one she didn’t want to share, Agnes was certain she hadn’t.

Her mother opened and closed her mouth several times. “I don’t know how to answer that.”

Agnes tried to help. “Well, probably because you wanted to be a mom?” That seemed easy enough, she thought.

Bea smiled. Her eyes got wet, and she touched Agnes’s cheek as though she were brushing away dirt.

“Something like that.” Then she laughed seeing the irritation of a bad answer flit across Agnes’s face. Agnes’s frown turned to a smile. She always smiled when she made her mother laugh.

“Big answer please,” Agnes sang and reached one of her small hands out to play with the fringe of her mother’s tunic. Her mother played with the fringe adjacent, and their fingers entangled.

“The small answer is I wanted to be a mom.”

“Okay.”

“The big answer, I guess, is I wanted to be my mom. To live her life. The life I knew would work out. With the kid and with everything working out okay. It wasn’t even necessarily the life I wanted. It’s just what I assumed would happen. I wasn’t very adventurous, I guess.”

“And was it just like that?”

“Oh no, it wasn’t like that at all.”

“Why?”

“Well, my mom raising me had already happened. And I knew that everything had turned out okay. But when I had you, I realized that nothing was certain. We were at the very beginning together and anything could happen. It’s obvious now, but for some reason it came as a shock to me. When you got sick, I had a hard time believing it. I remember thinking, This isn’t supposed to happen. So I got scared. It wasn’t all scary, of course, but I remember being scared a lot when you were little.”

Agnes didn’t need her mother to tell her that it was both nice and not nice to have a child. It was always there on her face.

Nervously, Agnes said, “I wonder if I’ll have babies.” She hoped she’d said it in a casual tone, one that wouldn’t give away why she was saying it.

Bea smiled. “If you want to, you’ll have them.”

“Do you think I’d be good at it?”

“I think you’d be great at it.”

“Will it hurt?” Agnes said, not sure what to imagine but imagining that it would occur in the thick woods in the dark or on a smelly playa, her anguish making birds caw and fly away. She’d heard some of the women give birth and it seemed awful. But she remembered secretly watching as her mother birthed Madeline’s little body. Her mother hadn’t looked to be in very much pain, and had been mostly silent, until after it was all over and she clenched her fists and screamed.

“It will definitely hurt,” Bea said. “But the pain of labor doesn’t last forever. That’s just the very first part. There’s so much more to being a mom.”

“Like what?”

Bea cackled. “Like what,” she said. “Like what,” she said again, pulling Agnes up into a tight hug. Agnes squirmed but couldn’t free herself. She coughed and sputtered, made her unhappiness known in grunts. But it just made Bea laugh and squeeze harder, rocking her back and forth like she was a baby again. Agnes always felt so much younger in her mother’s arms. Her legs splayed across her mother’s lap, her arms like doll arms pinned uselessly at her sides. And so she relented to the swaying and her mother’s hard love and almost, almost, almost fell asleep.

Agnes awoke warm and happy because they had all slept, Glen and Bea and Agnes, in a huddle by the fire. It was the first time since her mother had returned that they’d been together as a family asleep. Or as a family doing much else. The sun sliced between tree trunks on its way out of the ground. The rest of camp seemed to be asleep. She watched a robin hurry up to her as though it had something urgent to tell her. Then stop. Then hurry up. Then stop. Then the robin took off and a shadow overcame the sun and chilled her. She squinted up. Carl’s face was blocking the light, staring down at them. He didn’t speak. He didn’t wake her mother or Glen. They still lay in a pile, her mother’s head atop her pressed hands on Glen’s side, her shoulder fitted into his stomach, his skinny body curled, protective, around her. Carl paused only briefly and then prowled by, his bright eyes taking it all in.