Agnes would put a hand on their shoulder. “No,” she would tell them. “But we can do all that. We can help you.”

Each day they spread out in what seemed an endless line, splitting and coming back together when necessary, like a V of migrating geese. At times, walking through the forest or the plain, Agnes would swear that the Wilderness now teemed with people.

*

Agnes was hunkered in a stand of trees near the foothills at sundown, listening for the call of her group, when she heard the unmistakable sound of something curiously alive in a tree nearby. They had somehow made it back through the mountains, to the other side, through the sage sea to the Basin, which they hoped the Rangers still disliked traveling to.

She crept closer, tree by tree, stepping soundlessly, using everything she had learned in her life to go undetected. Invisible behind a skinny alder, she paused and watched a tree tremble in a way trees didn’t tremble. Then a very young girl fell to the ground, landing like a big cat on her feet and hands, in a deerskin smock, mud on her face and grass in her gnarled hair. The girl opened her mouth big as though to yelp or holler, but made no sound. But a moment later she cocked her ear and then bolted in that direction, silently. She couldn’t have been older than four.

Agnes made her call. She listened. She made the call again. The small forest was silent for a moment. Then she heard a hesitant call back. Agnes quietly moved toward the sound.

Slumped under a tree was a woman in skins cradling an emaciated girl in patched jeans stained with urine and feces. The woman’s eyes were circled in bruise purple. Her lips were parched. They appeared to be dead. But the younger girl, the one Agnes had seen, was crouched in front of them, a guard. She was vibrant, and after a moment of watching Agnes, she leapt up and climbed the tree the dead lay under.

“Hello,” said Agnes as the girl perched on a branch that reached toward Agnes.

“Hi,” the girl mewed.

“I like your dress.”

“Gracias.”

“Is this your mother?”

“Yes.”

Agnes smiled kindly.

“And my sister,” the girl whispered.

Agnes nodded. “Do you know how long you’ve been here?”

The girl shrugged.

“Do you know how old you are?”

The girl shrugged again.

“That’s okay. It doesn’t matter. Are you alone now?”

The girl nodded, her eyes becoming big and wet briefly, as though letting herself see the situation as it was. Then quickly, as she straddled the tree branch, she began to beat her chest. She opened her mouth again and looked as though she were whooping loudly, as Agnes had seen her do earlier, but she made no noise. Even with no sound, the unbridled emotion in her was obvious, natural. She looked at Agnes and put her finger to her own lips. “Quietly,” she said, no doubt repeating a mother trying desperately to keep a wild and boundless girl hidden.

Agnes’s hackles rose then. She cocked her head. The girl did too. They had both heard something.

Agnes smiled. “I have a lot of friends here. A lot of kids your age. And we live here. Would you like to meet them?”

The girl slid down from the tree like a rivulet. Her feet were dirty and tough, and there were no shoes or socks to be seen. She stood next to the bodies without looking at them.

“Hurry now,” Agnes said, reaching her hand out. The girl took it, but once she was next to Agnes, she climbed up into her arms and rested her head in Agnes’s neck.

Agnes carried the girl the rest of the day. The girl fell asleep on her shoulder from time to time. She cried out in her sleep occasionally. She peed herself, and Agnes felt it run down her own leg. But Agnes kept walking, carrying the shivering girl, who was finally able to be scared and tired, calling out to her companions in the quiet night air. And when she could not walk any longer, she laid them both down to sleep.

In the morning, Agnes woke to the girl’s face an inch away from hers, peering down at her nose.

“What’s your name?” the girl asked hesitantly.

“Agnes. What’s yours?”

The girl looked up at her with her spooked and knowing eyes. “It’s Fern.”

“How nice. I love ferns.”

“No, not the plant.” She scowled. “It’s short for Fernanda.” She stuck out her tongue as though the name were a bad taste in her mouth.

“Well, it’s a lovely-sounding name.”

“Fernanda means adventurer. My mamá told me.”

“I like that.”

“But everyone thinks Fern is just a plant.”

“It’s a great plant.”

The girl squinted at Agnes. “I’m looking for something very secret and special. Can I trust you?”

“Of course.”

Fern pulled out a map from under her shirt, where she had fabric wrapped around her torso. “Aquí es donde guardo todo,” she whispered. She smoothed the map out for Agnes. The girl had drawn it. Under her scrawls was what looked to be an old bus schedule. There were upside-down W mountains, lakes of blue Us and Vs. Forests of green circles atop thick brown lines. It was of no place, but it could be any place.

She pointed to a big bold X. “This is the Place.”

“And what’s there?”

Fern looked up with silver moon eyes. “Everything good,” she said with reverence.

“Well”—Agnes smiled—“let’s try to find it.” She stood up and took the girl’s hand. As they walked the girl kept up a nervous chatter, and Agnes hmmed and listened for danger in the bushes.

For a day, they wandered in the night calling to the others. Eventually, in an open valley, they heard a response. In an abandoned coyote den, she found some of her companions huddled. The whites of their eyes shining from the starlight that could reach that far down into the earth. Jake and a boy they’d found who said his name was Egg. Val and Baby Egret. Debra and Pinecone. The Twins now had Joven and a stranger’s child they were caring for. There were others hidden not too far away. Everyone had a child now. The children had appeared to them over the course of their walk, wandering alone in the Wilderness, somehow surviving longer than those caretakers who had brought them here.

Agnes was relieved to see them all but couldn’t help thinking they were living a terrible life. Compared to what their lives had been like not long ago, this seemed like an awful way to live. Then she thought of Fern’s mother and sister in the woods. At least they were alive. They were together.

They wandered the Wilderness, pretending to look for the Place in Fern’s map, a place they came to imagine was the very last place they could go. But in reality, they were only trying to evade Rangers. They encountered more people. People who shared news, news of others, news of Administration changes, news of Ranger sightings, people who offered lifesaving food and water, shared their hiding places. People who were likely eventually captured or worse. There were so many people in the Wilderness.

The Rangers were like bounding cougars who never seemed to tire. In the old days, before the Roundup, Agnes had thought the Rangers had seemed official, in charge, but also a little hapless. They split their time between the Wilderness State and behind a desk at Post. But now it was as though they rode their horses on the tailwinds of the runners. Spurred on like apex predators would be. Bounding after them, never seeming to tire. The Originalists, the Newcomers, these Trespassers, people who now formed this entirely new Community, Wilderness refugees, were just deer in a herd with no option but to push on. They would run out of a will to live before they ran out of land to live off of. The Rangers had governed them with rules. The tedium of paperwork and bureaucracy had hidden what relentless hunters they were.

Eventually the new Community could no longer stay together, even spreading out through the forest, calling to one another, only coming together in brief moments. They had to split up in a real way. They decided it had to be groups of two. An adult would travel with a child. Everyone needed a buddy, they told the children. They tried to make it seem fun.

“It’s like hide-and-seek,” Agnes explained to the children who were each standing next to their buddy, while their buddies were anxiously snapping their heads toward every errant sound. “We’re all hiding now, and then we will find each other,” said Agnes.

Pinecone looked skeptical. He’d aged into a stickler of a boy who cherished rules. “But only one person does the finding in hide-and-seek, and they try to find everyone,” he said in a scolding voice.

“Well,” Agnes said, “in this game we find each other.”

“Or we could just stay together,” said Fern.

“We can’t.”

“Why not?”

“That’s not part of the game.”

“But staying together sounds more fun.”

Agnes felt her throat clench. “It’s too dangerous,” she said.

Fern leaned toward Agnes and whispered loudly, “I thought you said we were playing a game.”