“And hey,” Carl said, “if you left anything behind, you better retrieve it.” Carl looked right at Bea when he said it, his lip curling.

Bea looked around, trying to feign ignorance, as if to say, Who is he talking about? She caught Dr. Harold’s eye and nodded sympathetically. He looked down in shame. She’d meant to deflect, but perhaps she’d uncovered a secret. The doc hid things too! She looked around, and a number of them stared at their feet, or off into the distance at a stand of trees or other small outcroppings, perfect places to tuck secret belongings. Carl stood haughty, his arms crossed. Of course Carl wouldn’t have hidden anything. But she saw Val alternate between indignant and sheepish looks, and when they scattered, Bea saw her slink off. Carl could fume at the Community’s tenacious hold on the past, on its secrets, but Bea was enlivened by the idea that each of these people who she’d shat, pissed, and nearly starved with, who she’d heard fucking, who she’d had endless Community meetings with, might still have managed to keep something private. The Wilderness, and the people in it, seemed interesting again.

Bea returned to her cave and chomped through both lollipops. The last thing Agnes needed was to remember what sugar was. Bea watched the others secret off to their own favorite spots. How stupid to think she had been the only one attached to the past.

Bea’s blood revved from the green sugar. Her heart flitted. She felt like she could run for miles. She giddily skipped back to her hiding spot and discovered her pillow and magazine were gone, replaced with yellow re-vegetation tape. The delight from the sugar was instantly replaced by a headache. The yellow tape felt like a slap. How could they have found her stash? She felt watched. She squatted tightly at the mouth of the cave and held her knees hard, trying to quiet herself so that she could match the landscape. It was a form of protection to be like the land and animals that hid there. Were the others quietly mourning their losses? Were they feeling as trapped as she felt?

From her stoop in the cave entrance, she watched Glen swiftly moving toward the place where Madeline had lain. In camp, she spotted Agnes circling Carl with a length of the re-vegetation tape, torn from the stakes. They stood in the middle of the cordoned-off patch. Agnes stomped and shrieked, and Carl pretended to be tied to a pole, death by execution a certain future for him. His pleas for his life lilted up to Bea, small whispers in her ear, and she turned again to Glen.

He stood gazing down, toed something, knelt to inspect. Then stayed squat, running his hands over bushes, over the dirt, looking out at the view Bea had chosen for Madeline. She hadn’t thought the spot was visible from the cave. She wondered if he was in the wrong place, hadn’t gone far enough. Or, she thought, perhaps she herself had not gone far enough to be out of view. Maybe Glen had watched her bury their daughter, while she thought that it had been a private act.

Bea looked back toward camp, searching for Agnes. Her little survivor. Her strange, vibrant daughter. She was lunging at Carl with a stick. He groaned, clutched his stomach, pretending to be stabbed. With her last lunge, he fell to his knees.

“I’m dying,” he cried, overacting, his voice a ghost’s moan, his hands raising, swaying.

Agnes tilted her head at this eager, jolly, dying man. She became still before yelling, “Then die!” She spit on the ground in front of him.

Carl roared, fell over, and died.

Agnes giggled with delight as she pantomimed slicing his abdomen open and pulling out his entrails.

Bea’s eyes darted back to the horizon, looking for Glen, but she couldn’t find him. He didn’t have anything hidden, she was sure.

Bea noticed she was anxiously digging fingernails into the dirt, and now the tips were raw, slippery with fine dust. She sucked them clean and then spit brown. Before she knew it, they were right back scraping the dirt.

The Community had been on long walks before, walks they thought would never be matched. One walk in their first year had prompted someone to leave. But even though they walked almost every day, day after day, they’d never strayed into other quadrants. They’d only visited three Posts, the three that lined the map’s eastern border.

They were given their first map just after Orientation had ended, when they were packing up for their official entry into the Wilderness. Ranger Corey had driven up and tossed it from his truck window. It was a strange document that seemed to lack any sense of scale. It was covered in symbols that made it look like a child had dreamed it up.

“What are these black circles?” they’d asked him.

“Places not to go,” Ranger Corey had said with a smirk. His affect was steely and amused, but his face was young and inexperienced.

They pointed to a flat-topped mountain and an orange flag, messy and colored out of the lines. It was a Post. “How far is this?” they asked.

Ranger Corey smiled. “Dunno, haven’t figured that out yet.” He dug into his pocket and pulled out a silver disk the size of his palm. “Who’s the leader here?”

“Well, we’re not going to have a leader,” Glen had said proudly.

Ranger Corey’s eyes rolled skyward. Then he surveyed their faces. “You,” he said, holding the disk out to Carl.

Carl took it and stood taller, alert, happy to be identified as a leader. “What do I get to do with this?” Carl asked, turning it around in his hand. He pressed a button along the side and it clicked. He pushed again. Click. Push. Click.

“Tell us how many paces from here to Post,” Ranger Corey said. “One click per step.”

Carl’s face instantly raged. “Are you fucking serious?”

Ranger Corey acted surprised, but he wasn’t. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I’m fucking serious. Do you have a problem with that? Because you could also tell me how many paces to the nearest exit.”

Carl squeezed the clicker, trying to crush it, and lunged at the Ranger. But Ranger Corey ducked his head back into his truck and rolled the window up till it was open just a crack. “A click a step,” he cried, revving the engine and peeling away.

No doubt the Rangers had far better ways to determine distances. This was busywork, a way to turn a nice walk into a slog. To make their lives slightly less free than the Ranger assumed they wanted.

They picked a direction and walked, and within days found themselves in vast grasslands full of antelope, sitting with their legs daintily tucked beneath them or wrapped back. Some places the grass got so deep Bea could only see their ears pricked up and pivoting above the undulating expanse. There were a few hawks in trees, not riding the nice breeze on what was an unusually warm and sunny day. A few energized antelope rose up to run in frantic circles, as though chased by regret. The Community just kept walking. They were new enough then that they hadn’t understood: These were warnings. Something was about to happen. Had they turned around they would have seen the grasses flatten and reach forward, as though each blade was trying to run for its life. Once they were exposed in the middle of the parched plain, the hail and wind hit them suddenly, as though the weather had been straining behind a door that had just been opened.

They hunkered in place, flung their packs over their heads and clung to one another and to the ground, mimicking the flattened grass. Spiderwebs glistened in front of their noses, lightly wafting as though in a gentle breeze because these human bodies blocked the worst of the wind.

Around them they heard the pathetic whines of the antelope signaling to one another above the roar, until they were drowned out by the storm. And they heard the crack and crash of some reedy cottonwoods nearby splitting.

The hail was brief, but the wind lingered. The sun had begun its descent. They knew the worst was over when the hawks took flight again, whipping across the sky, their flat wings straining in the gusts. It was a game. They were showing off for a future mate or daring a rival. They flew shakily against the strong wind, then caught it and zipped away. Then they’d stop and hover as though painted there, while on the ground, Bea could barely stand up against the wind.