During the Roundup nearly two thousand unauthorized people were found and extracted from the Wilderness State. There were only ever supposed to be twenty.

This history was called the Great Wilderness Roundup. During an unexpectedly progressive and brief moment in time, it was referred to as the Ranger Rampage. And someday, when those of us who lived there—who ran from the Roundup so we could remain there—are dead and gone, I’m sure it will cease to be known at all.

They told me I lasted thirteen years, the last three on the run. When they finally found me, I had Fern in my care. A little girl who had only ever known the starry sky I grew up with. Who only knew the warmth of elk hide and the joy of the rare wild plum, the jolt from walking through a field where wild chive secretly grew, the green and bitter scent in her nostrils. I’d tear a bit and put it in her mouth, and she’d smirk with distaste and also with knowing. All natural things are known and understood somewhere inside a natural being. Those were good years, being on the run with Fern. I thought of her as my daughter even though she called me Agnes.

When I had first arrived in the Wilderness, the uncommon bustle of twenty humans had brought prairie dogs out of their holes to watch. Deer snapped their heads up from the grasses. Hawks made tight circles above our heads. Nothing made a sound. Though I’d been young, it was something I never forgot.

When we left the Wilderness, it wasn’t really a wilderness anymore. From the back of a Ranger truck, we watched the Valley we had spent our early years in come into view. The one with my family’s cave. The one nearest to Middle Post. The one with the Caldera overlooking it. The one that had been the first place that felt like a home. Madeline’s Valley. Yellow tape fluttered in the wind, marking off squares of land as far as I could see. Some squares were dug up. Many contained buildings in some state of construction.

“What are those?” asked Fern.

“Those are houses.”

“What are houses?”

“They’re buildings that people live in.”

“Like in the City?” Fern had only heard of the City with its skyscrapers. Who knows what she pictured in her mind.

“No, you wouldn’t find these in the City. Only a few people will live in these. Maybe even just one.”

“Did you live in a house?”

“No, I lived in the City.”

“Well, then, how do you know about them?”

“I’ve seen them in magazines.”

“Who is going to live in them?”

“Important people.”

Fern’s eyes got big. “Are we going to live in them?”

“No, cari?o, those houses are not for us.”

We drove by a squat large stone building. A perfect rectangle with large windows flanking a grand doorway, Hidden Valley Elementary School carved above it. There was no one out. Perhaps no one lived here yet. Or maybe it was one of those holidays when families hopped into the car to drive the Boundary Road. We drove by a town center, a main street with a small grocer and other shops, past a park and a playground, and the Hidden Valley Library too, just before we turned onto a road that stretched away from town and out of the Wilderness. Everything was laid out according to some fabled map of how things used to be a long time ago. So this was the Wilderness State’s new mandate. It turned out there were Private Lands after all.

The road out was clean and paved black. A fresh yellow line painted down the middle. At the end of that road was a gate and a barbed fence like we’d seen across the Poisoned River. When we looked back at the gate sliding shut, we could see the Caldera standing sharp and white over the rooftops of the town.

*

In the Resettlement complex on the outskirts of the City, where Fern and I are housed, I don’t recognize anyone, though supposedly we have all been picked up in the Wilderness. There was one boy I thought might be Baby Egret, but the boy was a toddler now and the years in between had been full of changes. I thought he looked like Carl and Val, but he barely spoke and his hands shook as he picked up the wooden blocks he seemed determined to stack. He did not appear to remember me when I knelt in front of him. An older woman was caring for him. I asked her about Val, but she just shook her head. No. The woman answered no to all of my questions, even when they were contradictory. Is she here? No. Was she captured? No. Is she dead? No. I couldn’t be sure if the woman even knew Val, or if the boy was even Baby Egret. So I left the woman and the boy alone after that.

“Is there another complex?” I asked a guard after I’d explored and asked around after Jake, Val, Celeste, and the others we had met on the run, in hiding. The guard glumly shook her head. Everyone that got picked up was here.

It’s not that I believed the guard, but I didn’t know what to make of their absence. I felt somewhere in me that my companions had to be somewhere, alive. At least a few. At least Jake. I felt it. Felt him. Though what good is that feeling if he isn’t here with me?

Other Wilderness refugees in the complex swear they are missing people too. And they swear those people are alive. People swear they’ve heard of other Resettlement complexes elsewhere in the City, flung far from one another along the City’s border. Which means we’re all here; we just aren’t together. Some find this enraging. Some find hope in it. But who can say if it’s even true?

I looked for my mother but never found her. She would have heard of our capture because we were reported on for a while, but she never came to claim me. I don’t know if she made it out. I like to imagine my mother, as much a friend as the Rangers ever had, might have been shown some mercy.

I lost almost everything in that Wilderness. I lost everyone. I lost Jake. Twice I bled heavy and late, and those were losses to me. I even missed Pinecone sometimes. This wild Fern, this girl I call my daughter, was someone else’s daughter in the Wilderness. She lost her mother, a sister, and ended up with me. I’ve watched loss daily, but sometimes it’s my mother I miss the most.

*

Now it is just me and my Fern.

She is probably seven years old now, as scraggly as a coyote pup and as curious too. When she was young and in the Wilderness and we were on the run, sometimes she didn’t bother to walk. She just sprinted on all fours as fast as any of us were walking. She loped alongside a coyote we encountered once by a stream, and the coyote, convinced of her feral canine-ness, yipped and bounced around her.

Here, in the City, she takes all of this concrete, bustle, decay in with interest. She’s inquisitive as she wanders around, as though it is just another wilderness to explore. Another part of the map we had yet to unfold. A thing to become part of. She calls it her New Wilderness. “It’s yours too,” she says to me. But I know it isn’t.

She has her bad nights, dreams of her mother, her sister. Dreams of all the messages she grew up hearing from the coyotes, the wolves, the elk, the magpies, the peepers, the crickets, and the snakes. Here, the message is untranslatable. It’s an ever-present hiss, gurgle, hum, and then a scream. It comes from the Refineries. But Fern listens hard to it, as though someday she’ll know what it’s saying.

“It has to be saying something, Agnes,” she says. “It’s making noise.”

Here’s what I’ve discovered. If you follow the fence from our Resettlement complex out to its farthest point, where it meets another fence at ninety degrees, there is a hole cut there. We squeeze through the fence hole and then we are in a marsh. The marsh borders the Refineries. It absorbs the heat from the machinery, and at night it steams against the cold air. At night, just like my mother said, there is life in the marsh. In the day you’d think it was dead. But that’s because the creatures know they are rare, and rare things never last. We go through the fence and wait until the curfew alarms screech and the sun finally sets, and then, quietly, a frog will croak. A mallard will moan.

Someday, someone who doesn’t want the hole to be there will find it. They’ll close it up and there will be no way in. The fence is high, its top barbed and electrified. I’m squirreling money away for wire cutters so that when this happens I can make a new hole, and when that one is covered, I can make another.