Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There is absolutely nothing special about the morning it happens. Nothing. Taissa wishes otherwise. Taissa wishes she could comb through the details and come up with an answer. Something, anything, that would make a lick of sense.

She needs her life to make sense. But her life, maddeningly, just keeps on spiraling out of control.

Evidence the first: she is standing in a bedroom when it happens. Not her own bedroom. Not even the bedroom of a friend, a family member, her son. When it happens, she is standing in a bedroom she should know jack shit about.

Van Palmer’s bedroom.

Van Palmer’s bedroom, in an apartment over a VHS rental shop, in Ohio.

Van Palmer’s bedroom, belonging to a version of her ex Taissa hasn’t seen in twenty years.

The weirdest part is how natural it all feels. Standing in Van’s room, wearing Van’s clothes, her arms wrapped around her own torso, she could so easily trick her brain into thinking it has time-traveled. Sent her hurtling straight back to 1996. Sent her hurtling straight back to a version of Van who, like the rest of her life before the crash, made all the sense in the world.

Van’s room now, like back then, is small. Not neat, but somehow organized all the same. The posters are in classier frames, not just blu-tacked to the walls, but they’re still announcing all Van’s favorite movies. The clothes are duplicates of what Tai remembers: striped t-shirts and white tank tops, ripped jeans and carelessly-tossed cargo shorts. Van still sleeps half-buried under a pile of clean laundry, though she’s learned to make her bed. She’s an adult.

Like Tai is an adult.

Adults don’t just stand around in their ex-girlfriend’s bedrooms. Adults don’t just linger, fingertips tracing the remnants of the person they once knew while that same person hides out in their shop. Adults don’t show up unannounced, asking for a shower, a change of clothes, a rational hand on their back as they weep into a too-familiar chest.

Tai is an adult. She knows better than this. She is better than this.

She needs her life back. Her sanity. She needs the world where she practices law, where she runs for office, where she decorates a pristine home with her beautiful wife and their wonderful child. She needs the world she poured blood, sweat, and sacrifice into sculpting for herself.

Instead, she’s here. In Van Palmer’s bedroom.

And Van Palmer, behind her, is swearing.

Tai whirls on the spot, because she knows that voice. She knows it, and it isn’t the husky tone she heard grumble about having work to do downstairs. It’s a voice that carries about twenty-five years’ less baggage. A voice that used to cackle right in her ear, familiar as the sun.

“Holy shit,” that voice says now. Quite loudly. Quite shrilly. Quite a lot, actually, like a scream. “Holy fucking shitballs, where am I?”

And Tai knows without a shadow of a doubt, her life is officially out of control.

***

It wouldn’t be the first time one of them started hallucinating, Van reasons. Lottie. Mari. Akilah. Shauna. Hell, maybe she should have started feeling left out long before now.

Is this what dying feels like?

Christ, she hopes she isn’t dying. She doesn’t want to imagine what will happen to Tai if she dies.

“Where am I?” she repeats, speaking half to the woman across the room, half to herself. Mostly to herself, if she’s honest. If this is a hallucination, then there isn’t a woman there at all, which makes asking her anything pretty fucking pointless from where Van’s sitting.

She might be going insane of starvation, of exposure, of grief, but that doesn’t mean she can’t apply at least a little narrative logic to the occasion. Talking to the objects of your imagination always just makes the situation worse.

Can the situation get worse?

“This,” she says slowly, listening for bizarre reverb in her own voice, for the strains of a backing score, for anything that might give away the game, “isn’t right. I know this isn’t right. I’m in the Wilderness.”

When did she start thinking of it with a capital letter? When she did start believing with her whole heart, as Lottie does, that there’s something out there holding them hostage? Long time ago. When Javi fell through the ice. When the queen appeared back in the deck. When Shauna lost the baby. When Jackie froze to death. When the wolves tore her face open, and the flames lapped at her flesh, and still, she kept on going.

Doesn’t matter when. It comes as naturally as her own name. Wilderness. That is where she is, where she has been for months. Long enough to learn who she is, when all the food and warmth and safety is scraped from her bones.

She is in the Wilderness. Not a bedroom.

With a woman.

“Tai,” she says, and the woman goes rigid. Strange. Hallucinations shouldn’t give a fuck what she’s saying. “Tai. Tai will know what to do. How to snap me out of this. Just gotta find Tai.”

“Van,” says the woman. “Van?”

“Nope.” Van makes a point of turning away, angling her eyes toward the wall. “Nope, we do not chat with figments of our own insanity.”

This room is…nice. Really nice, actually. Not overdone, not absurdly beautiful or anything, just…warm. Homey. The walls are painted a comfortable blue, covered in film posters and art prints. There’s a dresser—a bookshelf—an expansive bed, as if the owner of this space opted to splurge on their sleeping habits in particular. She scans the headboard, supporting a reading lamp, a stack of paperbacks, a notepad. Someone lives here. Someone loves their space, right here.

Someone has about five pillows too many, and holy fuck, she misses pillows. Misses sleeping in a fucking bed.

“Maybe I really am dying,” she mutters. “Jesus. Would that be so bad?”

“Yes,” the woman snaps. Van’s eyes dart toward her, the rest of her body holding perfectly still.

“Been through this,” she says firmly. “Not chatting with ghosts or mirages or whatever the fuck. If this is dying, I’m doing it sane.”

That’s rich, and she knows it. Sane? Sure, she’s sane. Sane enough to stand her ground. Sane enough to refuse, point blank, to argue with the walls. Some days, she looks around at the hollow eyes and sallow faces and thinks she’s one of the last bastions of sanity left.

Comparatively speaking. Which isn’t saying much lately.

“You’re not dying,” the woman says. Her voice is hoarse, but solid enough. As solid as Van’s own, she’s disappointed to note. Hallucinations would be so much easier to ignore if they didn’t feel so goddamned realistic.

“Well, I’m not doing great,” she whips back before she can stop herself. “Clearly.”

She holds out her arms in demonstration, spinning in place. Her sneakers are barely holding together. It’ll be a wonder if she makes it out of this winter without losing a few toes.

“’Cause, see, this? Is not where I was just standing. The walls kind of give it away. And the bed. And the fact that it doesn’t reek of a dozen starving, unshowered kids.”

Are there even a dozen left? She’s stopped letting herself count.

“Van,” the woman says again, and her voice is…anguished. It’s enough to break Van’s concentration, jerking her gaze to the woman’s face. A beautiful face. Older than Van by a decade or two, she’d guess. Soft brown skin framed by dark curls. Brown eyes. Incredibly, impossibly sad eyes.

She knows those eyes.

“Fuck,” she whispers. “No. Nope. This isn’t—you can’t—”

Death, she’s always imagined, would play games. Would be whimsical. The Death of the Sandman comics. The Death who, in The Seventh Seal (which she made Tai watch when they were fourteen; bad idea, turned out, but formative), sits for a chess match. Bill and Ted’s Death, clearly pulled from that same mold.

Death would be, in its own way, clever and witty. Maybe compassionate. Maybe not. But willing to see the story through? Sure. She can believe that.

But not like this.

“It isn’t fair.” Her voice is strengthless. Her chest feels as though it might cave in if she speaks too loudly. “You can’t use her against me. Not her. Please.”

The woman’s brow furrows. She looks good, Van has to admit. Older, but the way she’d always known Tai would grow up. Van’s mom would call it aging gracefully (always with a sneer, because Vicky Palmer doesn’t know a goddamned thing about the matter from personal experience). Tai would call it a benefit of melanin.

Tai. Holy shit, Tai.

“What do you think this is?” the woman asks. Van flings up her hands.

“How the fuck should I know? Five minutes ago, I was in the woods.” Where I belong. “And now I’m—and you’re—and you can’t be—”

“Me?” The woman sounds incredulous. Van refuses to look at her.

“I’m not playing this game. You want my soul, you do it wearing another face. Any other face.”

It wants us all, Lottie keeps saying. It wants us all.

Well, it can’t have her. Not like this.

The Hunt is a fucked up ritual; she can admit it freely. It’s fucked up that they’ve taken to pulling chore cards in order to chase one another down. It’s fucked up, that they’ve grown used to the violence, the blood, the stench of charring human meat.

It’s fucked up. But, also:

It’s taught her how to run like the devil.

Without sparing the older version of Taissa Turner another glance, Van Palmer turns and sprints for her fucking life.

***

“You’re running?” Tai hears herself call after the retreating teenager. “Seriously?”

She shouldn’t follow. Right? Surely, no good can come of chasing down her ex-girlfriend again—this time while said ex is somewhere around nineteen years old, in the spry prime of her life, and utterly terrified.

And she thinks Tai is going to take her soul? Shit, Tai should stay right the fuck—

She’s been doing more running over this last month than in the past ten years combined. She should do something about that. Morning jogs. Join an intermural league. Anything that doesn’t involve batshit chase sequences.

“Van!” She shouldn’t yell. Yelling is just going to scare the girl more.

And what about me? I’m not supposed to be scared? My fucking life is in shambles, and my teenage ex just materialized out of the void, and I’m not supposed to be scared?

“Don’t talk to yourself, Tai,” she mumbles, diving through the beaded curtain. “Talking to yourself is some Lottie shit. Van!”

“What?”

She tumbles into the shop, slamming headlong into Van Palmer. Her Van Palmer. Or—no, that’s not the way she ought to be thinking, just: the adult Van Palmer, and Jesus, this is going to be confusing—

“Tai, what the hell—” Van catches her by the shoulders, leaning back just in time to avoid getting headbutted through sheer momentum. “Why are you shrieking for me like my house is on fire? Fuck—dude, tell me my house isn’t on fire.”

“No, it’s not that.” She wishes it was. That would be out of control, but at least it would be a normal person’s out of control. “I—something happened up there, and you’re not going to believe it.”

Van’s blue eyes narrow. “Try me.”

Tai can’t explain it. Not with words. Words simply are not big enough, not expansive enough, to cover this particular brand of fuckery. Instead of trying, she squirms out of Van’s grip, taking her gently by the elbow and steering her into the heart of the shop. Then she just: points.

Van Palmer—eighteen or nineteen, with unwashed hair hanging loose around her hunger-stark face—stands with her head craned back. Her eyes are ravenous, shoveling details in. Her hands are loose at her sides, fingers curling and uncurling in unconscious grasping gestures.

Van Palmer—forty-three, dressed in a clean pair of jeans and jacket, brow furrowed—lets her mouth tumble open.

“What the shit is this?”

Tai makes a helpless flapping motion. “Tada?”

“Tada?” Van hisses. “What the fuck—don’t tada me, Tai! What did you do?”

“I?” Tai parrots blankly. “What did I do? I was just standing upstairs, minding my own goddamn business, and this blast from our hellish past suddenly fucking materializes and starts babbling about how I’m not going to steal her soul!”

Van blinks several times in rapid succession. She looks like she might pass out, and Tai unthinkingly wraps a hand around her hip to steady her. Together, they stare at the girl Van once was, who is now taking slow, predatory steps toward a display marked “LGBTQ+ Faves” like she thinks it will dart away from her at any moment. She reaches out a hand, fingers visibly trembling.

And then, out of nowhere, a body soars out from behind a shelf, crashing into Van’s back and clinging tight.

“Van!” gasps the teenage version of Taissa Turner. “What the fuck is happening?”

Young Van wheels in her arms, grasping at her with palpable desperation. She buries her face in young Tai’s shoulder, her fists clenched against Tai’s back. Standing in the middle of While You Were Streaming, heedless of their older selves staring slack-jawed, they cling to one another for dear life.

“Oh,” older Van says dimly, “my god.”

“House on fire sounding pretty good about now?” Taissa asks. Without looking, Van reaches out and punches her in the shoulder.

***

Tai is here. Tai is here. Tai is in her arms, familiar and safe and as solid as any of them can be these days. Van can breathe again.

Van can breathe, and she can find the next steps, because Tai is right here, wherever here is. If this is a hallucination, if this is dying, if this is another fucking planet altogether, Van can deal with it—so long as Tai’s hand is in her own.

“I don’t understand,” Tai is saying in a low voice against her ear. She seems unable to break contact, unable to let Van out of her embrace, like letting go for an instant will wrench them apart again. “I was outside, gathering wood, and then I was here. Watching her.”

Her. Van frowns, turning in Tai’s arms. There, standing a healthy distance away, is the woman from upstairs. The Taissa from upstairs. And beside her, a second woman: shorter, with red hair, blue eyes, a scar winding down the left side of her face.

The same scar Van feels tugging whenever she smiles, whenever she opens her mouth, whenever Tai kisses her particularly hard.

“See?” Older Taissa makes a gesture, as if showing off the Van Palmer display model at her side. “This is how I know you’re not dead.”

“Oh,” Tai says thinly. “Oh, hell no. This isn’t happening.”

“Kinda seems like it is,” Van mutters. What had seemed like a hallucination is resolving itself more and more with every passing moment. The ground is so solid beneath her feet. Tai’s arms around her are undeniable. The smells are overwhelming: her own pungent aroma, and Tai’s familiar skin, and the distant catcall of coffee. The very particular, unnamable scent of VHS tapes in their clamshell packages, of plastic bags and receipt tape.

“I don’t believe this,” Tai says, shutting her eyes. “I don’t believe this. Misty dosed us again.”

“With what?” They haven’t seen mushrooms in months. Haven’t seen berries, or spoiled meat, or anything but the slimmest pickings plucked from their own camp. Tai knows this.

And, anyway, this wasn’t what it felt like, before. No matter how high, how drunk, how hungry they become, the world isn’t this…routine. It shivers and twists. Trees dance. The air spins into purple-green silk before their eyes.

Not like this. Not like a gay Blockbuster with two adults staring at them with their own fucking eyes.

“I think,” Van says slowly, “we’re here.”

Tai starts to shake her head, and Van reaches up to gently lay a palm against her cheek. The bones of her face are growing ever more prominent. Lately, touching her has felt like a cartographer coming home to find her town has been rewritten by an earthquake. Van is forever remapping spaces she had for so long taken as permanent truth.

“I know,” she says, her voice pitched so only Tai—this Tai, her Tai—can hear. “I know it’s crazy. I know how you feel about crazy. But…look at them.”

Applying the barest pressure, she turns Tai’s head, coaxing her eyes away from Van’s face. Forcing her, as gently as she can, to really drink in this place and those people.

Those people, who are them.

She watches the older version of herself raise a hesitant hand in greeting. Watches the way her gaze zeroes in on Tai’s face, on the close crop of Tai’s curls and the caverns beneath her eyes. On Van’s pale fingers against the ashen pall of Tai’s gaunt cheek.

That seals it for her, without a shadow of doubt. Not the eyes, not the hair, not even the scars. The fact that, in any life, at any age, Van Palmer is looking at Taissa Turner and trying to smile.

“We’re here,” Van says. “We’re here twice.”

Tai grimaces. Across the room, older Tai—Taissa, Van resolves to think of her, for some semblance of clarity—mirrors her expression perfectly.

“So,” she says to Van’s older counterpart. “Now that we’re all on the same supremely fucked-up page: what do we do with them?”

***

If she just doesn’t think about it too closely, it’s a little like picking up strays on the side of the road. Just a couple of wet kittens on the highway, tucked away out of the cold. Taissa can deal with caring for a sodden, miserable creature for a little while.

Hell, maybe it’ll do her some good. She hasn’t exactly been the picture of compassion lately Maybe this is some karmic retribution for Biscuit, for Simone, for Sammy.

For whatever she’s inflicting on Van, just by showing up here in the first place.

They bundle the kids upstairs, back into Van’s loft. It isn’t easy. Young Taissa doesn’t seem remotely interested in going anywhere with them. Young Van is less reticent, more distracted by every single element of the shop she will one day build. She pauses after each step, running her fingers over shelves and stock, lights and poster frames.

“This is…ours?” She’s staring at herself, wide-eyed. She looks so young, it makes Tai want to weep. “We did this?”

“Yeah,” says Older Van. She looks a little uncomfortable, hands in her pockets, but the unease seems to be slowly ebbing. She’s starting to smile, watching herself trace a shelf labeled “Nature: She’ll Fuck You Up”. Young Van brushes over Twister, The Day After Tomorrow, Deep Impact.

“I could live here.”

“You do,” Taissa says, a bit impatiently. “Upstairs. Come on, don’t you want to grab a shower?”

Two pairs of eyes—agonizingly old in such young faces—zip to her with obvious surprise.

“Shower?” Tai repeats, a word in an unknown language.

“Holy fuck,” Van breathes. “With actual water pressure.”

“Well,” the older Van mutters, “it’s not like—great, but—”

They ignore her, rushing past in a flurry of joined hands and churning legs. Taissa watches them take the stairs two at a time, feeling a flare of sympathetic pain in her knees.

“God, remember that? Having joints that work without employing black magic?”

“Barely,” Van says. With her younger self no longer engaged in her wares, she’s starting to look uneasy again. “Tai, what the hell are we supposed to do with them?”

“How the fuck should I know? I didn’t exactly get a master’s degree in time travel theory.” She prods Van lightly in the shoulder. “If anything, this feels like your area of expertise. How many time movies did you try to explain to me over the years, like, fifty?”

Van opens her mouth to argue, and her younger voice rings out.

“Hey! You coming?”

“God, that’s weird,” Van mutters. Even so, Tai thinks she catches a glimpse of delight in her eyes. “I’ve Marty McFly-ed myself.”

“Just don’t sleep with your own mother, you’ll be fine.” Tai grins. To her surprise, Van laughs.

“So not going to be a problem.”

They’re waiting in Van’s living room, both of them gazing around in obvious wonderment. Van seems to want to touch everything. Tai seems unwilling to touch anything. Neither one seems to consider letting go of the other’s hand an option.

God, Taissa remembers that. How it felt to hold Van’s hand, fingers threaded so perfectly, it was like they’d been made to intersect. How it made her heart race the first time, how she’d been so sure that feeling would wear off—and how shocked she’d been when it didn’t. When weeks turned into months, when the calendar stopped applying altogether, and still, the collision of Van’s palm sliding along her own stole her breath.

“You’ll want to borrow clothes,” her Van says, taking charge the way she always has when life starts feeling like a storybook. “Something clean. Without, y’know. Holes.”

“Is it borrowing?” young Van wonders. “If I’m you, and all of this is yours, doesn’t that also make it mine?”

Older Van mulls this over. Younger Tai shakes her head.

“These conversations are going to feel like an acid trip the whole time?”

She isn’t smiling, Taissa notes, but there’s a softness stealing into her expression all the same. She’s looking at young Van, her eyes skirting to the older variant only occasionally. Like she doesn’t think she’s allowed to take that one in. Like she feels looking at Van’s adult self would be cheating in some way, flipping to the back of the book.

Oh, baby, you have no idea what cheating is, Tai thinks. Her stomach clenches, her thumb moving instinctively to probe her wedding ring. She watches young Van’s eyes snag on the motion, watches her whole demeanor relax.

“Hey, at least we’re still—” She gestures between herself and her Tai, then the older women. “Thank god for that. Alive, and clean, and together. That’s like…the dream.”

The bottom drops straight out of Taissa’s chest, her heart plummeting into borrowed boots. She opens her mouth.

“Shower,” older Van says, a touch too loudly. She isn’t looking at Tai. She points to a stack of towels and clothing mounded on the couch, then back toward the bathroom. “Who wants to go first?”

They stare at her, faces impassive. Obviously, Taissa thinks. Obviously, they’re going together. If they can take a single shower, they will. If they can clean up without ever breaking contact, they will.

She remembers that feeling, too. The sense of safety, of driving toward something, that only seemed to exist around Van out there. The rope around their wrists, burning through raw skin. The way sleep only came—only stayed—with Van wrapped around her like a cloak.

“Right,” older Van says. “Duh. Take your time.”

She waits for them to vanish into the bathroom, for the door to slide shut and lock behind them. Taissa is just contemplating the absurdity of that lock, of girls who have grown so unused to privacy actually locking themselves out, when Van steps into her space.

“We can’t tell them.”

Taissa stares at her. This is the closest Van has stood of her own accord, the nearest she’s let herself be since last night—since holding Tai as she broke open, sobbing against her chest. The memory jerks her along, a balloon at the end of an extensive string, threatening to drag her off her feet.

“Tai,” Van repeats, her voice low and urgent. “We can’t tell them.”

“Which part?” Twenty years hadn’t seemed like such a long time, stepping through that door yesterday. Twenty years had seemed like a heartbeat, gazing upon Van’s face, seeing the woman who had kissed her, held her, understood her. The one who made her feel it in the most genuine sense, for so long and with such completion, she thought it would kill her.

Now, she recognizes the eternity that is two decades. Those girls know things now no teenagers should know, but they’re missing out on so much more. On college. On heartbreak. On building anew out of the ashes.

Van’s hands flex as though wanting to reach for her, wanting to clutch her arm. Tai doesn’t budge, hoping—like a child waiting for a butterfly to risk landing on an upturned palm—she’ll make contact of her own accord.

“We can’t tell them anything,” Van whispers. “Anything at all. We don’t know what this is. We don’t know what kind of rules we’re dealing with. What if we change something?”

“Would that be so bad?” Tai demands. “Fuck, Van, you saw them. They’re in the worst of it right now. They’re—”

“Exactly,” Van interrupts. Her hands turn to fists, held resolutely low, away from Tai. “They’re in the worst of it. We don’t know what could happen if we say the wrong thing, step on the wrong butterfly. What if we tell them something that means when they go back, one of them pulls that queen?”

Bile fills Taissa’s mouth. She swallows it down, feeling dizzy.

“But we’ve already—I mean, they’re here. They’ve seen us, they’ve seen this place. There’s no bottling that back up.”

Van looks strained. For the first time, Tai can see how tired she’s been. How those bills are stacking up. How this place she’s so proud of isn’t supporting her the way she needs.

“We have to do our best. Which means we can’t tell them about—” She does touch Tai now, grabs her left hand and holds it up with grim viciousness. Her thumb grazes the gold ring, and her whole face threatens, for just a beat, to crumble.

Tai wishes she’d let go. Tai wishes she’d hang on tighter. Tai wishes she’d push in closer, all the way into her space, all the way until their bodies are as intertwined as those girls in the bathroom.

“We say only as much as we have to. We wait it out. We have to be on the same page with this, Tai.”

She doesn’t trust herself to ask what that means, what it really encompasses. When was the last time she and Van were on the same page? What did it do to them, to be so aligned?

She nods once, a quick jab of motion, and Van drops that hand like she’s been scalded. She rakes her hands through flame hair, exhaling through her nose.

“Good. Great.”

“And if they don’t?” Tai asks. “Go back? If they’re just stuck here somehow?”

Van’s mouth twitches. Not a smile. Nothing close to a smile.

“Then I guess we’ll rewrite that map when we come to it.”

***

The common shower, Van thinks, is the greatest of man’s inventions. Antiseptic, burgers, pillows—all great. But nothing matches the first shower taken in over nine months.

“Oh, fuck me, that’s perfect,” she groans as the spray patters down. Tai, crammed into this little tub with her, grins.

“Okay, don’t hog it, let me in.”

Van shifts aside as best she can, though every nerve is screaming to stay right where she is, where the water can sluice over her head and down her back forever. Pouring frigid lake water over your own head is a particular element of their nightmare she hates more than most. It barely does the job, and makes her feel like her skin’s going to peel off her bones every single time.

This—steam pouring off the water, the slide of ceramic tub under filthy feet, the steady swirl of grime circling the drain as skin determinedly makes itself known for the first time in ages—is bathing. This is humanity. She watches Tai crane her head back, eyes shut, lips parted in a sigh of orgasmic relief.

“Good, right?”

“I want to marry this shower,” Tai groans. “Whole ceremony. Cake and everything. How do you feel about polyamory?”

“You kidding? I’m proposing to this bitch first,” Van says. “Seriously. Move over, I need more of the good shit.”

Tai shuffles back, the faucet catching the back of her leg. Van turns, reclining against her chest, the water buffeting them both in awkward hitches. She remembers this—showering with Tai—as if trying to recall a movie she watched once, half-asleep. Locker rooms. After hours. Skin on skin, the whole party much less about the water and the heat, much more about Tai’s mouth and hands.

Now, she thinks she’d give up sex forever if it meant staying right here. Tai’s arms encircling her, Tai’s body cradling hers, the water turned up to its most blistering degree. She closes her eyes, breathing in thick steam, feeling it wash away months of icy, punishing winds.

“This is crazy,” Tai says softly, nuzzling her ear. “Isn’t it? We can’t actually be here, much less with…ourselves.”

“Since when has life cared about crazy?” Van presses more firmly back, head bowed, water running off her hair to splash at her feet. She doesn’t want to think about reality right now. The world is water, heat, Taissa, in that order, and she can’t imagine needing anything more.

Tai, however, can’t stop worrying at it. “What are we going to do?”

“Shower,” Van mumbles. She’s starting to feel sleepy. “Shower until the Wilderness is but a distant memory.”

“But we have to go back,” Tai says. “If we ever even left, which I really can’t believe. Van, what if this is some kind of trick of the mind? What if we’re…y’know, like Jackie?”

Pain, distant, brushes sharp fingers across her conscious mind. Van swallows.  

“Then at least we’re together. Right?”

Tai says nothing for a minute. Her arms tighten across Van’s chest, her face nestled against the back of Van’s neck. She drops a lingering kiss against the knob of her spine.

“I can’t explain it,” Van says after a few moments of listening to the water ring against the tub. “But I really think it’s…real. All of this. I think we’ve somehow traveled—”

“Don’t,” Tai groans into her neck. “Van, don’t say—”

“—in time,” Van pushes on, raising her voice slightly to quell Tai’s protests. “I think we really did. I don’t know how or why or how long it’ll last. Maybe it’s just, like…a bubble we stumbled into. A wormhole.”

“You know how that sounds.”

No crazier than the bear, or those symbols, or the thing in you that understands the Wilderness in ways you won’t admit. She swallows it all down, turning in place until she can look Tai in the eyes.

“We’re here. And we can see our future. Our future, Tai. We have a place! We have a life! You saw yourself, you look fucking amazing. I don’t know, maybe this is…a gift, right? The Wilderness giving us a reason to keep going, knowing we’re going to wind up here.”

Tai gazes down at her, unconvinced. Van reaches up, arms looping around her neck, pulling her down into a warm, luxuriant kiss. It’s a relief when Tai opens to her, tongue brushing into her mouth, hands framing her hips.

“Tai,” she says against the pliant curve of lips as droplets trace between them. “You know what this really means? We get rescued.”

Tai makes a noise, thin and hurt and hopeful. She kisses Van, hands sliding up her back, body coaxing. The water sheets down, growing gradually cooler, no less wonderful for its changing temperature.

“We get rescued,” she whispers at last. “We fucking make it.”

“We fucking make it,” Van confirms, her knees nearly buckling with the relief of it all. “We make it, Tai. We’re going to be okay.”

***

Some part of her believed it would all be over, a brief fever-dream. That the bathroom door would unlock on its own, and they’d push it open to find piles of Van’s clothes, unworn. No teenage girls. No walking yearbook photos commemorating the worst experience of their lives. Just an empty room and an inexplicable shock, there and gone like lightning.

When the door slides open and they appear—Tai’s cropped hair wound into a towel, Van’s dripping recklessly down her back, both of them clad in sweatpants and band t-shirts—she has to admit it to herself. They are here. They’re here, and they’re clean, and they’re still holding hands with a desperate kind of zeal she remembers too well.

“So,” she says.

“So,” young Van replies. She’s sitting on the couch, her knee bumping young Tai’s, her face less guarded than it had been when they’d gone into the shower. Taissa tries to keep her mind away from that closed door, away from what might have happened behind it. They’d been in there such a long time.

They’d been in there, these versions of herself and Van who are so miserable, and yet, somehow content. Somehow more…reasonable. There are questions in their world, but those questions are husked out. Simplified. What to eat? How to get it? Where to sleep? How to stay warm?

Who’s next?

She’d never thought she could miss that time of her life, but the whole time they were showering, scraping clear all the dirt and blood and horrors of the past, what, ten months? Tai was out here. Trying not to watch Van buff the living shit out of her kitchen counters. Trying not to watch the flex of Van’s forearms as she bore down with a sponge, her eyes fixed on her work.

Trying not to remember what they’d been like at eighteen, left alone together for any amount of time. Trying not to remember how, in lieu of talking, they had so often fallen into other methods of passing the time.

“We talked,” young Van says, as if reading her mind. Her face is pink, the ridges of her scar standing out in sharp relief from the pale tones of her skin. Taissa has grown used to the healed version, the way the arches of damaged tissue began receding over time. It’s jarring to see her now, those wounds still fairly fresh.

“We talked,” young Van says again. “And we’ve decided you shouldn’t tell us much.”

Taissa’s eyes jump to her Van—adult Van—in surprise, but Van’s expression is perfectly level.

“We figured the same. Don’t want to—”

“—step on any butterflies,” young Van finishes. Her mouth curves up, a ghost of the smile she’d killed to stay alive. Taissa is overcome with the mad impulse to stretch out to that smile, run her fingers along its length, beg Van to keep that part of herself intact against all odds.

She squeezes her hands under folded arms. “And you have no idea how you got here? No idea what happened?”

“We were thinking,” young Van says, looking at her with those bright eyes, “maybe you’d know, actually.”

“Me?” Tai recoils. “How would I know?”

“Either of you.” Young Tai this time. She isn’t looking at her older self. Her eyes are fixed solely on Van, as if she can reconcile only one of the women staring her down. Only one of them can be real.

Because, Taissa registers with a stab of identical logic, it unbinds her to think otherwise. To think of another version of herself standing in this room. Too akin to the Other she’s already dealing with in her sleep, to the part of her that keeps taking the wheel without her consent. Of course Tai isn’t looking at her. She’s almost glad of it.

“We thought, since you’d already been through it…” Van trails off. That bright gleam in her eyes is hope, Taissa realizes. Her throat burns.

“Bad news, kid,” says adult Van. “I don’t remember this at all.”

“We don’t,” Taissa corrects. “I don’t think it ever happened. This is…new.”

Insane. Impossible. A sign of a shattered psyche, after killing my dog, scaring my son, hurting my wife—

“Damn it.” Van sags back against the couch. She pushes wet hair out of her face. Across the room, her adult self makes the same motion without seeming to realize.

Two of them, Tai thinks dazedly. Two of them, who are one of them, one and the same of them. It’s double vision of the most bewildering kind. The girl she remembers loving, and the woman she’s not allowed to touch, both of them watching her with concern in their eyes.

She needs to sit down.

“Well,” young Van says, rather dejectedly. “I guess we stick with the first plan, then. No fucking with the timeline. I…kind of love how this all shook out, actually. Wouldn’t want to mess it up.”

“No,” young Tai agrees, though there’s a shadow over her expression. She gazes around, eyes flicking over the walls, the art prints, the rare photos.

Photos, Taissa knows, that don’t include her own face. She knows, because she’s inspected every inch of Van Palmer’s home while Van was off “doing inventory shit”. There are pictures of her, of them both, but they’re not neatly framed. They’re hidden in desk drawers. They’re jammed between pages, forgotten bookmarks. They’re out of sight until Van can’t take it anymore and needs to draw them out, like she’s ashamed of herself for the weakness.

Tai knows this, because her photos of Van are the same. They’re protected. Carefully kept away from where her wife or son might stumble upon them. They’re where she needs them, when she needs to remember the way Van used to grin, the way her cheek would press alongside Tai’s.

Young Tai is taking inventory of her own. Silently, somberly, she is drawing conclusions she is not sharing with the girl whose hand she so firmly grasps.

Talking, thinks Taissa, never was our strong suit.

“So, we don’t remember it happening. Which doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.” Older Van is pacing, hands tracing the air as she thinks aloud. “Might be a quantum thing, right? Like part of the magic or the science of it—”

“Magic?” deadpan both Tais at once.

“—or the science,” Van repeats, glaring at the older version (which Taissa finds rather unfair). “It might erase any memory of the event, right? To prevent the very thing we’re worried about. If we don’t remember the future, we can’t fuck it up.”

“Which means we could ask you anything we want,” young Van says, eagerly leaning forward. Older Van raises a finger in warning.

“If we’re right. If we’re not, who knows. Might cause the whole timeline to fracture.”

“What if we just agree to not?” Taissa says, a little too sharply. Two pairs of blue eyes fix on her, a pair of brown reluctantly following suit. “If we don’t know what we don’t know, we shouldn’t fuck with any of it.”

“Then what do you propose we do?” This, shockingly, from her younger self. Her younger self, whose eyes have snagged on Tai’s ring finger. Whose eyes are sliding to Van’s hands—rings aplenty, a damning space on the third finger of her left one. Whose mouth is twisting with obvious disappointment.

She knows, Tai realizes. She knows what young Van doesn’t. That every notch of this loft, of the belongings, of the shop beneath, screams Van Palmer. Every inch, every scuff, every bit of it.

And not a single item, including the clothes on her body, even whispers Taissa Turner in return.

Don’t, she thinks helplessly, staring into her own eyes. Don’t tell her. Don’t do that to her.

Almost imperceptibly, the teenage Tai nods.

***

They order in. It seems the best course of action, according to both Vans; the odds are pretty good no one would look closely enough to notice the similarities, but they don’t need to risk it. Taissa and Tai could easily be mother and daughter, but that explanation falls apart pretty fast when applied to identical scars. Better to stay in.

“What,” Van asks, feeling her eyebrows climb her face in bewilderment, “is that?”

Taissa holds up a shiny rectangle. “This? Phone.”

“For fucking real?” She knows she shouldn’t ask, knows she shouldn’t even look at unfamiliar technology, but the idea that a phone could be so trim, all chrome and glass, is too astonishing. “Dude, can I see it?”

“It’s not that great,” her older self mutters. “Also, no. Don’t touch anything you don’t recognize.”

“Please,” Taissa says, rolling her eyes. “An iPhone is not going to reverse the polarity of the universe, or whatever bullshit you keep saying like you know what it means.”

“Hey, you’re the one who told me this was my area.” Older Van shakes her head. “Just place the order, okay? Lunch rush around here sucks.”

Van expects Taissa to press the rectangle to her ear and order a pizza. Instead, slim fingers drift across the screen, dragging and tapping. Then she holds out the phone to Van, pointedly ignoring the way the older variant flings up her hands in disgust.

“Pick whatever you want. As much as you want,” she adds when Van opens her mouth. “I know you’re…I know.”

Hungry. She shies away from the word like it’s dirty, like letting it into her mouth would drag her straight back to the woods. Van accepts the phone with uncertain hands, comforted when her Tai leans over her shoulder to read the screen.

“Postmates?”

“Meal delivery app,” Taissa says. “They’ve got everything. Go nuts.”

There was a time when Van wouldn’t know what to do with the phrase go nuts. When money was carefully counted and stashed away, when she knew down to the tax cent the cost of a number four combo at Burger King. She knew, back then, how to be careful.

Now, the idea of a meal—any meal—sends her brain into overdrive. Her eyes scan the too-bright screen, her fingers beginning to learn the art of selection with a press, a slide, a tap. Tacos. Burgers. Thai food. A place that only seems to serve smoothies.

“God,” says her older self, snatching the phone and scrolling through the cart. “They’re going to think we’ve got a whole team here.”

“It’s fine,” older Tai says, her voice warm. “It’s good.”

They eat themselves sick. Van isn’t surprised to find her stomach rebelling against all but the most basic fare. She hasn’t given it enough in months. She hasn’t given it spices or seasoning, grease from a fast food grill, sauces or stir fries. She’s given it plants. Charred animal fat. Bugs.

Human flesh.

She stops midway through a burger, her throat threatening to close. Suddenly, she isn’t chewing onion and pickle, mustard mixed with ketchup. Suddenly, she’s feeling gristle give between her teeth, fat running slick down her gullet, the primal effort of feeding when the very act shuts down the mind.

A hand rests on her shoulder. Taissa’s, she registers. Taissa’s hand, foreign and domestic all at once, pressing into the thin cotton of her shirt.

“It’s okay,” she says.

“We remember,” older Van adds. She’s standing across the counter, her fingers whisper-light against the back of Tai’s shoulder. Tai, whose face has gone rigid, a grayish cast to her skin as she pushes a tray of chicken wings away.

“It gets better,” Taissa says. “I promise.”

Van nods shakily. Sets down the burger, reaches for a fry instead. Her free hand rests on the counter, close enough for Tai to grab if she needs to, and even that is overwhelming. They haven’t had a table of any kind since the cabin burnt to the ground.

Eating makes her feel kind of awful, but she can’t stop. Some part of her mind screams to shovel it all in, pack it away, store it up for when they’re deposited back into the snow. They’ll need the energy. They’ll need whatever they can keep.

“Easy,” her older self cautions. Her hand is still barely grazing Tai’s shoulder. Her eyes are on Van, pained. “Take it easy. It’ll be here later.”

We might not be, though, Van thinks desperately. She wants to bag it up. She wants to bring it back to the team. Lay it at Lottie’s feet, at Natalie’s, and say, We provide.

Look, guys, we don’t starve. Here’s proof. Here. Eat.

Tai looks like she might cry. Her fingers curl around Van’s, slippery with grease. Van squeezes back.

“Maybe,” Taissa says in a voice so motherly, it doesn’t sound like her at all, “we take a break. Take a nap? We’ll be just out here, if you need us.”

Five pillows too many, Van remembers. A headboard with a shelf built in. A warm, cushioned bed.

Her bed. Her home.

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, sounds good.”

The bed is so enormous, it almost feels unholy. She stands beside the mattress, a freshly-washed hand drifting back and forth across the covers as her adult self shoves armfuls of laundry to the floor.

“Sorry,” she says. “You know how…we are…”

Yes, Van does. Van knows this room as she couldn’t have imagined knowing it when first she appeared within its borders. This is her space. It’s exactly what she would do with an adult budget, without constraint of her mother’s rules. Everything, down to the artsy portraits of women in various embraces, is her, even if she’s never seen it in her life.

“Hey.” She reaches out, stopping herself before her hand can reach her older self’s sleeve. An alarm rings in her head at the idea of making contact. Better not. “You did really…good. We did, I mean. This is amazing.”

Something complicated dances across her older face, something Van recognizes as the feeling of wanting to shrink away from a well-meaning, poorly-executed compliment. Her older self scratches the back of her neck, her lips twitching.

“Get some rest,” she says. “And don’t, uh—don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

She pulls the door shut, and Van hears her pad off down the hall. Across the room, Tai gingerly steps around a stack of cassette tapes.

“You’re so weird.”

“I know,” Van says, pride blooming in her chest. “Isn’t it awesome?”

Tai smiles. She presses in close, letting her hands trail into Van’s hair. “You get to grow up,” she says softly, like giving the thought too much voice might crack it down the middle. “We get to grow up, Van.”

Van hugs her close, shrieking a little when Tai laughs and pushes her backward onto the bed. If anyone had asked her even a day ago, she’d say she was grown up. That they’d all grown up the second they opened a door to find Jackie frozen solid outside. That they’d grown up, watching Shauna lose the baby. That they’d grown up, chasing Natalie into the wild.

But this is different. This is grown up with rent to pay, with a job, with a life. This is decades older, decades of history, of cinema, of music Van couldn’t imagine before today. There are so many movies downstairs she’s itching to watch. So many places she’s itching to go.

Has she made it to New York? Has she taken Tai on that carriage ride? She can’t ask, but the idea that she ever got the chance—long after she’d given up on believing any of them would get out of those woods alive—is a lantern flaring behind the cage of her ribs.

She tucks under the blankets, Tai’s head on her chest, the scent of fresh sheets filling her senses. Tai’s every breath coasts over her skin, her hand dipping under Van’s shirt to rest against her side. They lay, intertwined, in a beam of afternoon sun, and Van knows she won’t sleep. Knows neither of them could possibly sleep in a bed this soft, this cozy, this—

She is unconscious before she finishes the thought. The bed takes her weight like it’s known no other. Van Palmer sleeps without dreams.

***

“It’s almost crueler,” Tai says. “Isn’t it? To give them a taste of normal life before tossing them back out there?”

Van shrugs. “Maybe that’s why we don’t remember. Maybe it would have broken us.”

She says it like that’s just a natural part of living: breaking. Shattering. Like they haven’t done it again and again. Like she expects to do it again tomorrow.

“I think I know,” Tai says. Van’s eyes snap to her, assessing, and she makes a grumpy motion toward the bedroom. “Not me. Her. I think she knows that we’re not…that it didn’t work out.”

Van bites her cheek. “You think she’ll tell me?”

“No.” It’s not a thought; it’s a certainty. The teenage Taissa barely believes what she’s seeing. A shower, a feast, a nap in a real bed: none of that is enough to erase the potent bit of her rational mind that simply refuses it all. She may have put the pieces together, but she doesn’t believe her future is set in the kind of stone she could reach out and touch.

That Taissa, like all Taissas, loves Van too much to tell her. She won’t say a word.

Van blows out a long breath. “Good,” she says. “I know it’s not going to change anything, but she looks…better than I remember. Before the rest of it happens. I want her to have that.”

She’s speaking of the teenage Van like she’s the adult Van’s younger sister. Like she’s one of the kids who frequents While You Were Streaming, looking for a queer cinema guru. Tai should find it funny, even absurd, but she understands the sentiment.

She looks at that younger, softer version of herself, and knows that girl thinks the worst has already happened. The worst anything could be. That girl thinks she understands loss on a visceral level, and that she’s as strong as she’ll ever need to get to deal with it.

She has no idea. None. And Taissa finds herself wanting to keep it that way. To keep the pair of them in this loft, bundled in soft clothes and warm food. Protected from the people they will too soon have to become.

“They’re happy,” Van says soberly. “They don’t think they are. They shouldn’t be. But compared to the rest of it? That’s what happiness was.”

It’s revolting, that truth. Happiness was being filthy and frozen, fearing exposure, fearing illness. Happiness was a boy left to die so the rest of them would live. Happiness was a team forced to contend with rituals just to keep moving. It was ugly, and nasty, and trickled away a little more every day.

But it was other things, too. It was the light in Natalie’s eyes when she realized she would live. It was the zeal in Lottie’s face as she let the burden slide from her shoulders. It was Shauna trusting her knife. It was falling asleep with Van tangled around her, waking Van with a kiss, knowing at her core that no one got her the way Van did.

She looks at Van now. Van, with oxy in her medicine cabinet, who wolfed down a breakfast of a donut and a can of Mountain Dew this morning like she does it every day. Van, who stares back, unrelenting.

“Go on,” she says. “You can say it.”

Tai shakes her head. She can’t. She can’t admit what Van’s asking of her. Not even with Van edging nearer.

“Go on,” she repeats, a challenge in her husky voice. “You came here, remember?”

Because I always could sleep better around you. Because the face in the mirror made me. Because it’s you. It’s always been you.

She shakes her head again. In the bedroom, she hears the faint creak of bedsprings, imagines the girls they were folded around one another in sleep. The first time Taissa Turner has ever touched that bed, and it’s her teenage self. That just seems…wrong.

Wrong. A word with no shortage of definitions these days.

“Tai.” Van’s eyes are so blue. The stubborn set of her mouth is tantalizing. Tai can’t reach for her, can’t touch her.

Can’t not.

A paradox, she thinks. That’s what this is. A self-contradiction. Two things that cannot be true at once, and yet, somehow are.

Van Palmer and Taissa Turner are in love.

Van Palmer and Taissa Turner are shattered.

Van Palmer is Taissa Turner’s home.

Van Palmer belongs nowhere near Taissa Turner.

Around and around, the thoughts spin. Van looks at her with unwavering solemnity. That, too, is wrong. She misses the girl who gazed with wonder at rows of VHS tapes. She misses the girl who reached eagerly for an unfamiliar phone. She misses the girl who laughed with her whole body.

“I can’t miss you,” she whispers. “I can’t.”

“Because you don’t want to?” Van asks in a similarly faint voice. “Or because I never left?”

Time travel. Those girls, the ones sleeping in Van’s bed, are here. They are real. And if they are real, so is the love between them.

But these women are here, too. They are real. And so is the love broken.

Van left.

Van never left.

Tai pushed her away.

Tai pulled her close.

“They think we’re married,” Van whispers. She isn’t quite glaring. Isn’t quite smiling. “I do, anyway. I think we’re together. Isn’t that ironic? I think we’re together, and you know we’re not.”

“Van—”

“And here, the two of us, these versions? We’re the opposite.” Her jaw tightens. She’s painfully sexy, looking at Tai like a dare she can’t resist. “You think we’re together. I know we’re not.”

“Van,” Tai says again, hollowly. Her heart is skipping beats. Soon, it will lose the thread entirely. It will forget how to start back up again.

“You came here,” Van says, accusatory. “You came here, and then they came here, and I’m just supposed to be okay with that. I’m supposed to be okay, knowing you don’t—knowing you’re not—”

Tai takes her face between trembling hands. A room away, two girls sleep on, safe. Here, two women stand, in greater danger than they can fathom.

“It’s not even that simple,” Tai says. She wishes it were. Wishes she wasn’t thinking this way. It’s crazy, thinking this way.

But she just can’t shake it. The way young Van had looked at her, the two of them alone. The way young Tai had so clearly been hunched just out of sight, watching Van.

She swallows hard. Van isn’t pulling away from her.

It wants us all, Lottie used to say. It wants us together.

“I think,” she says, holding Van’s face, memorizing the angle of cheekbones under her hands, “you would have turned up even if I was back in Jersey. I think I would have turned up wherever you were. I think that’s the point. I go to you. You go to me.”

We were going home.

“What does it change?” Van asks. She’s leaning into Tai’s hands. Her own hang uselessly at her sides. “What does any of this change, Tai? It never happened.”

“Or it did. And we just don’t remember.” Van’s skin is warming under her touch. The ridge of her scar, smoothed out all these years later, is firm under her thumb.

It’s happening again. All of it. The sleepwalking. The violence. The intricate pull of Van Palmer’s thread around her heart.

I go to you. You go to me.

She doesn’t believe in It. She doesn’t believe in the Wilderness-capital-W shit. She doesn’t. She never has.

But she believes in Van. She believes in the weight of Van’s head in her hands. The angle of Van’s crooked half-smile, the bones of a lighthouse that no longer remembers how to shine.

“What now?” Van asks. She isn’t leaning up. She isn’t backing away. She is leaving this—herself—entirely in Taissa’s hands. “Tai. What does it change?”

Tai doesn’t know the answer. Not yet.

She can’t bring herself to let go.

***

Van doesn’t want to wake up. Is there a word, she wonders, for nostalgia for a dream? Wanting with your whole heart to remain in a specific fabricated reality forever?

It had been such a good goddamn dream.

She presses her face against Tai’s back, eyes stubbornly shut. If she tries, if she really tries, she can convince herself she’s still in that room. Her room. Their room, warm and cluttered and perfect. Their bed, with a truly stupid number of pillows and blankets pulled up to her chin, and…

Her body is warm. Her body is warm, and the ground beneath her is soft. One might even call it plush. One might even call it a—

“Still here,” she murmurs, not daring to believe. “No way. Tai, we’re still here.”

“Nnngh,” says Tai, directly into a pillow. She flaps a hand backward, groping for Van. “Shh. Sleepin’.”

“We’re still here,” Van repeats, more loudly. She had been so sure sleeping would break the spell. That they’d wake as they have every morning for weeks: in a pile of shivering limbs, struggling to preserve what warmth they can in their meager shelter. That they’d wake with the memory of an apartment she hasn’t yet decorated, a shop she doesn’t yet possess, a life not yet lived.

Tai cracks an eye, muffling her groan into the pillowcase. “Is this how you’re planning on waking me up for the rest of our lives?”

A thrill zips through Van at the notion. If this really hasn’t happened before—if it really is brand-new—who’s to say they have to go back at all? Who’s to say this isn’t it? Their new normal. Sleeping and waking with Tai in an actual bed, in an actual home, with food in the cupboards and that glorious shower a room away?

Don’t, a battered part of her warns. Don’t get excited. Paradoxes, remember? There can’t be two of you in one place.

She ignores it. If they can’t be in one place, fine: she’ll move. She’ll leave the elder Van Palmer to her life here, taking Tai to New York, or Michigan, or Vancouver, and start over. She can be flexible if it means being free.

“You have notes?” she asks, pressing a kiss to the curve of Tai’s cheek. “Preferences? Consider my suggestion box wide open.”

“Ew,” says Tai, though she’s laughing. Her voice is husky with sleep, warmer and sweeter than she usually allows. She rolls onto her back, one arm draping lazily around Van’s neck. “Scale of one to a billion: how fucking weird would it be to have sex in adult-you’s bed?”

“Scale of one to a billion?” Van shrugs. “We’re time-travelers, lady. I think we’ve blown the scale out of the water.”

Tai snorts. “You really think that’s what’s happening, huh? Quantum Leap?”

“Well, no.” Van lays a deliberate kiss into the hollow of Tai’s throat, provoking a deep sigh. “If that was the deal, we’d be in our own bodies. But, like, the old ones.”

“Fixing their problems,” Tai hums. “Right, I remember.”

She tilts her head back, allowing Van’s lips to skim her throat with abandon. Her hand curls around Van’s hip, tugging at her sweats. It’s exactly the image Van’s always had of how this was supposed to go after graduation. A bed. A room with a door no one else would ever barge through. A place, safe and entirely their own, where she and Tai could take their time.

“Do you think they need that?” Tai asks. Van looks up at her, the collar of Tai’s borrowed t-shirt between her teeth.

“Need what?” Her voice is garbled. Tai laughs, shrugging her off.

“Our help. Fixing their problems.”

Van frowns. “What problems? Like—they’re gonna lose the store unless two plucky lesbians swoop in from the Wilderness to stage a last-minute roof concert?”

Tai’s brow creases. “…Empire Records?”

“It’s a fucking modern classic!” And one of the only movies she and Tai have seen together in theaters without a minimum of four other people cramping their style. Plus: Liv Tyler. It’s a cinematic hat trick, in Van’s book.

Tai gazes up at her with amused adoration. “Right. Maybe that’s it. Maybe our lives have become that simple overnight.”

“A rom-com,” Van agrees. She dips her head back down, trailing unhurried kisses down Tai’s neck. A hand drifts into her hair, folding around the back of her head, urging her in. “With a killer soundtrack. A stacked cast.”

“A happy ending,” Tai murmurs, almost too quietly to be heard. Van lifts her head, a hand teasing at the band of Tai’s sweatpants.

“We’ll get that,” she says. “I swear it, Tai.”

Her stomach lurches at the look on Tai’s face. Not adoring so much as grief-stricken. Uncertain. Van might be able to convince herself they won’t go back, but Tai? Tai can hardly believe they’re here at all.

“I swear it,” she repeats. Tai stares at her for a long time, fingers absently stroking the base of Van’s skull. She swallows hard, nods once, and surges up to crush her mouth against Van’s without another word.

I swear, Van thinks as Tai rocks up, flipping her over onto the mountain of pillows. I swear, she thinks as Tai pins her hands above her head. I swear, she thinks as Tai elicits a sharp gasp with clever fingers.

If it kills me, I’m giving you a fucking happy ending.

***

They’re sitting as far apart as they can get on the couch when their younger selves trudge out of the bedroom at last. Taissa is pretending to check emails on her phone. Van is pretending to read a book.

Both of them are pretending they didn’t come daringly, horribly close to a kiss.

Both of them are pretending they didn’t, minutes later, hear themselves muffling sounds of pleasure in the back room.

They both deserve fucking Oscars, Taissa thinks, for the work they’re doing right now.

A woman truly does not know awkwardness until she’s heard herself having sex with her ex-girlfriend, who is at the same time sitting inches away. She hates her life, sometimes. She really does not know what she’s done to deserve this.

Murdered friends. Eaten people. Killed your dog. Tai, do you really need the whole list?

“Morning,” she says, a shade too brightly. Her younger self raises an eyebrow.

“What time is it?”

“Edging up on five.” Did she have to say edging? Heat crawls up her neck at the glance Van flicks her way. “You guys hungry?”

“Always,” young Van groans, tossing herself on the couch. “Does that ever go away?”

“Eventually,” Van says, and Taissa knows she’s lying. The stomach grows full, the body repairing itself over time, but the hunger remains a full-time roommate. Once you’ve known starvation, once you’ve stitched that horror into the fabric of yourself, it becomes unforgettable.

She eats, and it’s enough. She sleeps, and it’s enough. But there’s always, always something gnawing at her, deep in the recesses. There’s always a kind of hunger, waiting to strike.

She takes the excuse to step away, pulling leftovers from the fridge and heating them back up. On the couch, young Tai settles in her place, drawing Van into her lap. It’s like they live here already, Taissa notes with a stab of envy. It’s like they picked the place out together, selected every stitch of furniture and art as one.

They’re so at home, and Taissa feels an unkind pulse of loathing for it. Cast out of time, out of space, they belong here. And she doesn’t.

What does it change, Tai?

They pick at their plates, curled around one another. Adult Van watches from the corner of her eye, a stiff mannequin wedged as far from her younger self as the couch will allow. She hasn’t touched teenage Van, not even in passing, and Taissa realizes that same impulse has fueled her own momentum around the loft. She wonders what would happen.

She wonders, and is nearly overcome with the impulse to force it. To sprint across the room, grab her younger self with both hands, pull her in—for what? A hug? A blow? Shake her, rattle her teeth, until all the shitty choices in her future come tumbling out, unmade?

“How about a movie?” Van asks when the food has been mostly cleared away. They’ve been better this time, tackling the reheated fried chicken and pizza slices with caution. They still look a little green around the gills, but not too bad. Taissa knows full-well it’ll only take a month or two before food stops feeling like a luxury she doesn’t deserve. They’re on the right path.

It can’t last, but none of them are willing to say it out loud. None of them are willing to crack that fragile glass.

The younger Van bobs to her feet, looking eagerly around at the stacks of tapes. “God, yes. But—wait. Has to be something that’s already out, right? Nothing we shouldn’t know about.”

Van raises her eyebrows. “Can’t imagine a movie’s going to eat the proverbial mixtape of the universe. But, here, we’ll compromise.”

She strides out of the room, her boots thunking down the stairs. They hear the soft click of beads once—then, a moment later, again, as she comes tearing back up.

“Technically,” she says, flipping a tape between her hands, “this is breaking the rules, a little. Doesn’t come out until ’98. But I think it’s worth the risk. The Sandy Good collection always is.”

Taissa hides a smile behind her hand as Practical Magic kicks on and Van settles back onto her side of the couch. She hesitates, slapping a palm down on the last remaining vestige of cushion.

“C’mon, Tai. You love this one.”

She does. She does, because she remembers watching it for the first time with Van, just after they’d been rescued. The two of them still jittery as newborn horses, jamming the brims of their baseball caps over their eyes whenever in public, holding hands like they’d forgotten how to be apart for even a moment. She remembers walking into that Blockbuster, the one she led Van to in the hopes it would stir that old smile to the surface. And she remembers the way Van had slid the tape into the VCR, like she thought she might break it just by breathing wrong.

She remembers, and she’s watching the film of her life play out again right in front of her. In the way the younger Van leans eagerly toward the screen, a moth drawn helplessly to the flame of storytelling. In the way the younger Tai keeps an arm around her shoulders, fingers tracing abstract shapes through her shirtsleeve, watching Van’s profile more than the movie itself. In the way Tai’s eyelids begin, reliably, to flicker shut.

It took them three tries to make it all the way through, she remembers. They’d kept tumbling into sleep, drawn in by the security of a blanket, a couch, each other’s warmth. They’re sinking, even now, Van’s head tucked under Tai’s chin.

She glances toward the adult Van, wanting to comment on how cute they are, or how predictable, wanting to see if Van remembers as she does—but Van, surprisingly, is dozing, too. Her head rests on her palm, elbow jammed against a pillow, her hair falling into her face.

Tai should leave her. Tai should leave right now, sneak away, go back to a life that makes any kind of sense.

Tai should stop looking at her. This woman who seems so much younger asleep. This woman who stared at her with fire in her eyes, who asked what it would change. This woman she craves the way she’d thought herself capable of craving only the basics of survival.

Food. Water. Sleep.

Van.

The movie plays on, a story of sisterhood and magic, Bullock and Kidman riffing off one another with impeccable chemistry. To her right, the younger Tai and Van cling to each other, breathing deep. To her left, Van is tilting unconsciously in toward Taissa’s stiff frame. Her head brushes Tai’s shoulder, and her lips part in a silent sigh.

She should go. She should ease herself up and away, leave this all behind. Go home.

I go to you. You go to me. We were going home.

You can pick a place out with the best of intentions. You can pay your mortgage. You can furnish it with the utmost care. You can plan, and you can scheme, and you can force the puzzle pieces into shape.

But you can’t forget what you really need. What home really is. Home, the thing that comes not when you force it, but when you need it. Home, the thing that comes not when you force it, but when you let it in.

She’s asleep. She must be. She can feel the reality of her body sinking into this couch, Van’s hair tickling her cheek. She can feel the reality of two made one on her other side, their breath mingling.

And she can see it all. Van, young and not nearly as broken as she will be, resting slim hands on her shoulders. Van, older and not nearly as unforgiving as she should be, kneeling between her knees.

Tai, young and shrewd and so, so unaware of the darkness beating in her breast, looking at her from across the room. Raising her hand. Touching the space on her ring finger.

There is red hair in her mouth. Red hair on her skin. Red hair painting her in shades of a fire she’s never been able to quench. There are freckled hands tracing her throat, encircling, and freckled hands stroking her thighs, loving, and freckled hands holding her steady, always. There are blue eyes, boring into her from all sides.

There is Van—nineteen, forty-three, exactly the same—looking at her with adoration. With grief. With hunger. There is Van, in her lap, pressed against her back, teeth in her neck, teeth in her lip. There is Van, soothing. There is Van, begging.

There is Tai, watching. Blank. Heartbroken. Furious.

It was never going to be good for anybody, she wants to shout. She knew it, and Van knew it, and they had to walk away if anyone was going to keep breathing. They had to. They had to leave it behind.

Except we didn’t. Except it’s still right here. We brought it back with us.

There is Van, kissing her in strokes of vulnerability. There is Van, opening to her, body and soul. There is Van, wrapping that rope around her wrist until it cuts to the bone.

There is Van, all love, no self-preservation.

And there is Tai. Nodding. Reaching to frame her own face with both hands, a shadow play of an old mask. Moving with confident steps to place a palm on the crown of each Van’s head, the four of them bound in a single unbroken loop.

Her knee presses to Taissa’s leg. Just that one tiny point of connection. Just that one simple circuit closing.

Taissa jerks awake so violently, she nearly tumbles from the couch. Beside her, Van is panting. On her other side, the younger versions are gasping for breath.

“What,” teenage Van asks, “the fuck?”

“Dream,” the older Van says hoarsely. Her hand rises to her head, a violent clutch at her own hair. “Fuck. Fuck.”

Taissa turns her head slowly. The dark eyes she finds are empty. The face she finds is shuttered.

“It wants us,” the Other says through Tai’s winter-chapped mouth. “Together. It wants.”

Taissa should leave. Taissa should run. Taissa should get the fuck out of here while there’s still somewhere to go.

“This isn’t where we’re supposed to be,” she agrees instead. Her skin is still tingling, a blue-white ferocity of electricity pulsing through her bones. She can taste Van on her tongue. She can’t taste anything else.

“It’s time,” the younger Tai says, staring straight through her. “We have to go.”

Chapter Text

Natalie is supposed to be hunting. She’s sick of it, honestly. Sick of taking the gun out, filling her pockets with bullets like they’re going anywhere. Sick of the wind scraping her skin raw. Sick of the gnawing ache settled so deep in her belly, she’s not sure there’s space left for anything else.

She’s sick of hunting, but stopping would be admitting defeat. She ties back her hair, layers her clothes, accepts Lottie’s insane blood tea—which is really mostly blood water these days, melted snow tinged pink by the prick of Lottie’s fingertip. She sets off, knowing they’re all counting on her. Their queen.

She takes a step, anticipating the crunch of ice beneath her boot, her leg sailing straight through a sheet of ice—

The ground beneath her next step is soft. Grass, she realizes. Grass without a hint of snow.

“The fuck?”

She’s standing, not in a fresh fall of endless white, but beside a lake. Not her lake, not the one in which Javi Martinez drowned—the one she let Javi drown in—but one set just off the shore of…some kind of camp? With a wooden dock. With chairs. With the unmistakable signs of people.

“What,” Natalie says again, under her breath, “the fuck?”

She shuts her eyes, willing the world to slip back to the wilds. It’s bad there, no fucking doubt, but it’s her bad. She’s got maps in her head detailing all the surrounding areas. She knows where they’ve built shelter. She knows where to find the burnt wreckage of the cabin.

This? This is wrong. This is new, and Natalie Scatorccio cannot handle new right now.

“Hello?” she asks the open air. It’s getting dark fast, which is also wrong; when she left, it was just after sunrise. The sun turned the snowbanks glossy, almost too bright to look at head-on. No way has one step launched her all the way to early evening.

Where the fuck is she?

“Hello?” She cups her hands around her mouth, raises her voice. There’s still a rifle strapped to her back, after all. Anyone comes around to look at her wrong, she’ll bury a bullet between their eyes.

And get them back to camp. The Wilderness finally choosing someone else, for a change.

She hates the thought, the clarity of it. She hates the person she’s become since Javi’s death. Since Lottie Matthews set a crown atop her head.

She hates it, and she loves it, because that person has been keeping them alive.

“Hello?”

“Welcome!”

She wheels around, searching for the owner of this new voice. There’s something about it she almost feels she should know. Something bright and cheerful, like a long-lost friend. She can’t quite place it.

“A new visitor?” the voice goes on, sounding a little bit amused. “We didn’t have any arrivals on the list, but welcome all the same! I do have to insist you relieve yourself of your weapon. We don’t allow guns in this community.”

Relieve herself of the gun? Not happening. It’s taking everything in her not to swing it off her back, raise it to her eye, greet this person with a squeeze of the trigger.

“Where am I?” she asks cautiously. “What community?”

Sounds like a bullshit word to her. Like a word devised to trick people into letting their guard down, putting their guns away, before something nasty happens to them. What is a community, anyway? A trailer park where all the neighbors pretend you’re invisible? A family which falls apart when one thread is yanked out? Friends who trust you, who have your back, right up until they grow too hungry to think straight?

Where has community ever been when she’s needed it? Out in the woods, that’s the closest to community she’s ever known, and it still might eat her alive.

The voice says nothing for a long while. Natalie swivels left and right, searching. Maybe this person decided they weren’t willing to take their chances with her rifle after all. Maybe she’s grown too cold, her brain fizzling out. Maybe she’s been out way longer than she realized, and she needs to go back, go back right now, go back and let Lottie warm her up before her body gives up completely.

“Nat?” That voice again. The same one from before, but less…polished. Less  fake. “Natalie.”

“Lottie?” she asks, hoping she’s right. It doesn’t sound like Lottie, exactly, but there’s something of her in the tone. Something of her in the confidence. If she’s freezing to death right now, it might be garbling Lottie’s voice, twisting it around like a radio going out of tune.

“Oh my god,” the voice says, sounding totally normal now. “It is you.”

It’s a woman. Not a teenage girl, like Natalie, but a full-grown woman in her…forties? Fifties? Impossible to say. She’s stunning, with long waves of dark hair and gorgeous brown eyes. She’s dressed in a long marigold gown, her hands outstretched like Natalie’s an animal who might at any second dart into the brush.

Shoot, Natalie thinks absently. Shoot before the rabbit can run.

“This is impossible,” the woman says. She shuts her eyes hard, blinks several times. Then, as if to herself, “But…here you are. So…apparently not. And right after she…well. Sometimes things just line up, don’t they?”

“S’cuse me,” Natalie says. Some tiny part of her, barely functional at the best of times, striving for decent manners. “What the fuck is this? Who the fuck are you?”

“Oh, Natalie.” The woman is smiling. It makes Natalie’s skin vibrate, the way that smile settles around her. It makes her feel like she’s missing something big, something obvious. “Have I really changed so much?”

She stretches out a hand. Natalie, not quite sure why she’s doing so, reaches for it, and the woman clasps it tight. Not like a handshake. Like a post-game salute.

“Good game,” the woman says, no malice in her voice, a smile on her lips. “You fucking loser.”

And Natalie is back in the cabin, kneeling beside a bathtub, gripping Lottie Matthews’ undamaged hand. You’re talking shit? You little bitch.

“The Wilderness always did love you best,” the woman says, still holding her hand in an iron grip. “I guess this proves it once and for all.”

Bullshit. It has to be. There’s simply no way she walked away from this girl a few minutes ago, only for her to age twenty years in a few steps.

“Lottie?” Natalie asks with a bone-dry mouth. “How in the actual fuck?”

***

There are things in this world Lottie Matthews does not understand. She’s known this for the majority of her life. There were times she could ignore it, but in the end, it’s always been true. Things do what they will, regardless of human comprehension. Sometimes, she knows things before they happen. Sometimes, things come to her in their own time. Sometimes they’re fabrications; sometimes they’re horrendously real.

And sometimes she winds up with two versions of Natalie Scatorccio staying at her compound at the exact same time.

The one, she was prepared for. That one, she sent her people to rescue. That one is in her room, wary of everything Lottie’s said to her thus far, but safe. Safe enough, anyway, for the time being.

This one is a little more perplexing, if only because she is maybe nineteen years old. She can’t be, of course. Her birthday is a few months after Lottie’s. She remembers the parties thrown in Nat’s honor, packed wall to wall with jocks and burnouts alike. She is only a few months younger than Lottie, who is, of course, forty-three.

And yet, here Natalie is. Bleached blonde hair growing rapidly out to her natural dark shade. A black cord holding back her bangs. Several layers too many for the New York autumn. A teenager once again, like she never left it behind.

Natalie, with the gun on her back, the perfect picture of their huntress. Their queen.

Sitting in Lottie’s office. Staring at her like she’s looking at a ghost.

Really, Lottie thinks, their positions ought to be reversed. Before this week, she hasn’t laid eyes on Natalie—in any incarnation—in decades. The part of her she’s worked so hard to cultivate over the years, the easy-Zen calm version who dutifully takes her meds, attends her therapy appointments, is telling her things happen as they will, as they must.

The part of her that has always beat just beneath the surface, terrified of every vision as it crashes like a wave over her head, is screaming bloody murder.

She needs to keep that part of her in its box. Save it for her next appointment. That part will do her no good right now, and Natalie even less.

“Can I get you something to eat?” she asks. “Or drink? Tea?”

Natalie flinches. It’s a small thing, a bare recoil around her eyes, but very much there. Lottie frowns.

“Natalie?”

“Sorry,” she says, her voice exactly as Lottie remembers. That tiny Jersey lilt curving her words. That smoky rasp from too many cigarettes too early in life. “Just. Had tea already.”

She looks at Lottie, head canted forward, and Lottie realizes. She’d been on the hunt when she disappeared from her time and place. On the hunt, which Lottie never let her leave for without…

“Ah,” she says. “Of course. No tea. Whiskey?”

Natalie’s eyes narrow suspiciously. She is seeing an adult, Lottie reminds herself. Not a friend, not a peer, not a teammate. An adult, testing her bounds.

“It’s me, Nat.” She forces the cool out of her voice, scrambling back for the girl in the woods. The one who bowed to Natalie after a tragedy, bruised and bloody herself. The one before that, even, who loved the rough burr of Natalie’s laugh.

“Is it?” Natalie looks uneasily around the room. “I dunno, Lot. This doesn’t…feel right.”

Lottie smiles. “That’s usually my line.”

She’s calm. She has to be calm. She learned long ago that her emotions have the power to steer a situation back onto the road, or send it veering off into a tree. Help or harm: that’s always the question. Best to relax into it. Best to be calm, to let the feelings wash over her.

What happens will happen. Have already happened? Impossible to guess at this stage. She hasn’t seen this, but she’s seen other things. Masks. Rushing through the trees. A scream of adulation, a scream of misery.

Antlers, rising tall, a shadow skimming the earth. She’s seen it. She’s felt it. Real? Not real? She can’t say, not yet. She can’t say, and though a significant part of her wants to bury it beneath a chemical rush, looking at this girl in front of her feels iron-clad, somehow. She blinks, and she blinks, and still Natalie continues to take up space across the desk. Undeniable.

Natalie scrounges in her pocket, coming up with a package of ancient cigarettes. She taps the last one into her palm, grimacing down at it.

“I was saving this,” she says. “Guess it was for now.”

Lottie draws a book of matches from a drawer, striking one and lighting Natalie’s smoke. It’s a motion born of habit so old, she’s almost forgotten it entirely. She used to light cigarettes at parties, didn’t she? One for her, one for Nat, or Tai, or Jackie.

Usually Nat, though. Usually Nat, who would sit beside her on a deck or a porch swing, watching the others run rampant.

She’d felt so detached back then. At the time, it had felt like the natural byproduct of her parentage. She never quite figured out how to connect with the others, as she never quite figured out how to connect with her father or mother.

Life is different now. Better. So much better.

She isn’t alone.

Natalie doesn’t say anything for a while, concentrating wholly on her cigarette. She’s sitting almost perfectly still, save for the motion of her right hand, the purse of her lips, and the uneasy travel of her gaze from Lottie to the door and back again.

“You’re not being held hostage,” Lottie says gently. In another room not so far away, she imagines the other Natalie—the one who she had to rescue from eating her own gun—scoffing. Never mind. She’ll cross that bridge when she comes to it. This Natalie, this conversation, is all that matters just now.

“I don’t get it,” Natalie says, her voice thick with her next inhalation. Smoke trickles from the corners of her lips. “How did I get here? I mean—you must know, right?”

“Why would you think that?”

“Because you’re all—” Natalie gestures with the cigarette. An ember drops onto Lottie’s desk, and Natalie grimaces, brushing it away. “Sorry. You’re all grown up and shit. You know all sorts of things I don’t.”

“I don’t know this,” Lottie tells her gently. “I don’t think this has ever happened before.”

Natalie pales. It brings her complexion worryingly near what it might look like if she were to pass out.

“But—that can’t be right. What if I’m stuck here?”

“Would that be so terrible? Out of the woods. Back on solid ground. Admittedly, you’ve missed twenty-five years in society, but I’m sure we could catch you up—”

Natalie launches upright, knocking over her chair. “I can’t be stuck here,” she half-shouts. “I have the gun! They made me their—you’re all counting on me to come back!”

“Nat—calm down, it’s going to be—”

Before Lottie can think what to say, how to soothe this brand-new wound, someone raps on her door. A head pokes through, bewildered.

“So sorry, Charlotte. There’s been an…incident in Ms. Scatorccio’s room.”

“Whose room?” Natalie whirls to gape at the man. Lottie draws a deep breath.

“What’s the problem, Aaron?”

“Well, she seems to…think there’s a ghost in her room.” He gives an apologetic little bow, as if it’s his fault the adult Natalie is seeing things. “And…well, she’s calling for you.”

Lottie arranges her face into a serene smile she doesn’t feel. Teenage Natalie is staring at her with open distrust bordering on hostility, and that’s probably only a fraction of what she’ll get, walking into that room. Oh well. Some things can’t be helped.

“Thank you, Aaron. Nat? Don’t suppose you’d like to stay here and wait for me to get back?”

Natalie continues to stare, you fucking kidding? apparent even without a word. Lottie swallows a sigh.

“Right. Off we go to pay you a little visit.”

***

Ms. Scatorccio’s room, the guy had said. He’d even pronounced it correctly, leaving absolutely no room for debate as to who he’d meant. Her room. Another version of her.

Forget cigarettes; Natalie needs something stronger, something that will kick the teeth right out of this crazed dream she’s walked into.

“I should prepare you,” Lottie says. Lottie. Lottie, stunning in her adulthood, draped in rich jewel tones. The girl Natalie knows is in there, somewhere, but she’s not easy to find. Lot is ragged, bruised, perpetually exhausted. She isn’t…a goddess.

Natalie has been trying so hard for months to convince them all of that much. And now here Lottie is, so adult, so poised, so perfect it sends a shiver up her spine.

“What do you need to prepare me for?”

Lottie’s face creases in a smile. Too warm. Too open. Natalie’s never known what to do with that vulnerability in Lottie, that eagerness to help. Lately, she’s started to let it in, and it’s felt like…well, like jumping off a cliff, plummeting into nothing at all.

“The woman in this room,” Lottie begins.

“Me,” says Natalie. It’s insane, but she knows it in her bones. Lottie inclines her head.

“You. And not you. I want you to try to remember that.”

“Why?” Dread creeps in, prickling her scalp. “What’s wrong with me?”

She’s not sure she even wants an answer to that question, but it doesn’t matter. No sooner has Lottie opened her mouth, a bang rings out, sounding an awful lot like a body striking a door. Lottie’s face hardens, her arm swinging out to catch Natalie across the chest before she can power forward.

“Nat? I’m coming in.”

A muffled voice shouts something Natalie can’t make out. Lottie braces herself, fingers wrapped around the knob, and pushes.

There are two women in the room, Natalie notes immediately. One is slim verging on scrawny, with shaggy brown hair and eyeliner caked around a grim expression. The other is—

“Lot!” Natalie shoulders past the adult Lottie, making a beeline for the one she knows. Lottie—her Lottie, all bedraggled hair and wounded eyes, standing with her back furtively positioned away from the door—lets out a long breath.

“Hey, Nat.”

“Don’t hey, Nat like this is fucking normal!” Natalie swats her shoulder. Then, feeling as though she needs to apologize for something—maybe for walking out this morning and never returning—she drags Lottie down into a panicked hug. The gun swings down her arm, and she shrugs it back into place. “I can’t believe you’re here.”

“What,” says the brunette woman with eyes like her own, hair like a hurricane, and an expression that says she hasn’t counted out violence just yet, “the fuck, Lottie? What the fuck have you done?”

“This wasn’t me,” say both Lotties at the same time. The teenage Lottie looks pained, and more than a little frightened. The adult Lottie is still just a shade too calm for Natalie’s taste.

A universe where the teenage Lottie Matthews makes sense to her. Will wonders never cease?

“Bullshit it wasn’t you,” the other Natalie snaps. Her gaze flicks from one to the other, as if worried whichever Lottie she doesn’t keep eyes on will bum-rush her. “First, you fucking kidnap me—”

“For the last time.” The adult Lottie sounds like her patience is finally slipping. Good to know she still has that effect, thinks Natalie. “I was trying to stop you from—” Her eyes snag on the teenage Natalie, and she clears her throat. “—doing something…foolish.”

Adult Natalie ignores this. “Then you tell me Travis—”

“Travis?” Natalie interrupts. “What about Travis?”

“He’s here, too?” the younger Lottie asks. “Is everyone?”

“Natalie.” The older Lottie moves like a river, fluid grace and deadly-quick. She catches Natalie’s bug-eyed counterpart by the shoulders, holding her attention. “We can’t talk about this here. Not in front of them.”

“Them?” scoffs the other Natalie. “What even is this, some kind of fucked-up projection? Where’s the machine, Lottie? Where’d you manage to hide it? What kind of therapy is this, huh?”

“It isn’t therapy,” Lottie says. Natalie watches her back expand and contract under her flowing silk robe. She’s drawing long, slow breaths, just as her younger self has urged Travis and the others when panic threatens to bowl them over.

“Yeah? Tell me, then, oh great cult leader,” Older Natalie sneers. “What is this?”

“It’s a gift.”

Natalie snaps her head around. Teen Lottie, her Lottie, is staring straight ahead. Not at their older selves, but through them. Her hand twitches at her side, and Natalie presses the back of her own against the ridges of her knuckles in solidarity.

She doesn’t know what this, any of it, is, but if there are sides to be taken, she doesn’t want to be on adult Lottie’s. It doesn’t feel right. There’s something the older women aren’t saying.

“It’s a gift,” young Lottie repeats. “We’re supposed to…learn from it, I think. Right?”

She meets her own eyes, hopeful. The older Lottie beams.

“Yes, of course.”

“Of course,” Older Natalie mimics. She wags her head from side to side, hands splayed in front of her. “Christ, you never change, do you? I forgot how fucking annoying it was when you went all fortune cookie.”

She charges forward without warning, one hand shooting out. Natalie, acting on pure instinct, steps in front of her Lottie, the rifle twisting in her hands.

“Don’t,” she says. She doesn’t know what it is about this woman with her eyes, this woman who makes her feel ugly inside. It’s like there’s something radiating off her, some radioactive shit firing out in all directions. It’s like—

The way she felt in the weeks after her dad and that gun.

The way she felt in the weeks after Jackie’s death, with Javi missing.

It’s grief, she realizes. Grief, untamed and unkempt, running ragged over the woman with her bone structure and someone else’s tragedies. It swings out like a right hook, like a rocket launcher, aimless. Violent. Inarticulate.

The other Natalie regards the barrel of the gun with baleful eyes, a smile twitchy on her lips. “We’ve been here before, you know. I’d bet anything it wouldn’t take with this one around.”

She bobs her chin in the adult Lottie’s direction, never breaking eye contact with Natalie. She looks regretful and amused, like she’s seen this play and hates the ending. She doesn’t look a thing like Natalie, and yet, somehow, she could be no one else.

“What the fuck happened to us?” she asks hollowly. She watches the other’s throat convulse, her mouth pulling tight.

“We forgot to keep the tiger in its cage.”

Natalie wants to ask, wants to know, but Lottie’s hand is pulling her arm down. She lets the gun fall, belatedly realizing what her older self must have seen: a repeat performance of a watershed moment. Natalie pointing a loaded weapon at someone who doesn’t believe she’ll pull the trigger. Jesus, is this just her life? A series of repetitions until she’s nothing but a helpless shudder of grief and rage?

“This isn’t doing any good,” adult Lottie says calmly. “Natalie. Put the gun away, please.”

She wants to tell her to fuck off, wants to shove her until that clean façade drops away. Over her shoulder, teenage Lottie says quietly, “She’s right, Nat.”

“You can’t possibly know that,” Natalie grouses, obediently swinging the gun back over her shoulder. Lottie gives her a tight smile.

“Trust me?”

If she’d asked a few weeks ago, Natalie would have rolled her eyes. A few weeks ago, their lives made an awful kind of sense. Now?

Now, she does trust Lottie. She’s bewildered by her, and she sometimes still wants to slap her, but Lottie has kept them all from panicking straight into the grave. She looks to Natalie, and Natalie leans on her, and it’s actually hard to imagine life without her these days.

It’s hard to imagine growing up without her. Going down whatever path her elder self has traveled without Lottie’s hand resting on her back.

She doesn’t want to. Whatever her grown-up self has been through to make her this way, she doesn’t want any of it.

“How long?” Natalie blurts. “How long are we gonna be stuck here?”

Her older self looks confused. “You’re not here. This is—we never did this.” She looks to Lottie for confirmation. “I’d remember. We’d remember. We crashed, and we stayed lost for nineteen fucking months—”

“Nineteen?” The air slams out of Natalie’s lungs at the word. Nineteen months. They’ve nearly died after ten. They’ve been devoured, some of them quite literally, by that place after ten, and here’s adult Natalie telling her they’re barely halfway to the finish line?

“Nat,” the elder Lottie says again, cautioning.

“You shouldn’t say,” teenage Lottie adds. “I don’t…think we should know this. Any of it.”

“What the fuck difference does it make?” adult Natalie explodes. “This isn’t real.”

She’s backing away, all the way to the far wall. When she strikes wood, she slides down, wrapping her arms around her knees and burying her face.

“It is,” Lottie says. Her face is firming up, the soft woo-woo calm phasing out of it. She looks, at last, like Natalie remembers. Like a girl who talks exactly as much shit as you deserve. Like a girl who takes the punch, even when it was meant for somebody else.

She sinks down in front of the adult Natalie, her hands resting on Natalie’s bent knees. “It is real,” she says, like their teenage selves aren’t standing paralyzed a few feet away. “Nat. I don’t know what this is, or why, but I believe it’s for a—”

“Don’t say it,” Natalie groans. Lottie raises her voice slightly.

“For a reason, Nat. Everything’s been steering us back together, can’t you see that? Travis. You, in that motel room. It’s all happening because it has to.”

“You’re saying people die for a reason,” Natalie snarls. She lifts her head, glowering not at Lottie, but at the younger Natalie over her shoulder. “You’re saying I go from being that to this for a reason? Look at her! Look at what she could have become!”

There are tears on her face, teenage Natalie is shocked to see. Fat, glossy tears, rolling down her sharp cheeks. She looks horribly empty, horribly broken.

“You still could,” she says, anguished eyes fixed on Natalie’s. “You could be better. If you remember this, you can steer clear of all of it.”

Natalie can’t stomach the look on her face. That unresolved, shattered hope. She can’t stomach the feeling that whatever she becomes, she’s already walking that path—stepped onto it, maybe, the day they fell out of the fucking sky.

“We have to get back. We have to get back to them. It’s…” She looks helplessly to her Lottie, willing her to understand. “We’re responsible for them now. You and me. We made them.”

Lottie made them, and they made Lottie in return, and when the moment came to act rational, Natalie let them do the same to her. They need her. They need her and Lottie both.

Without them, they won’t survive another month, much less nine.

***

Lottie leaves the younger girls alone. It doesn’t quite feel right, doing so, but as long as they’re on the compound, there isn’t much trouble they could get into. At worst, someone might think the teenage Lottie her daughter. At worst, maybe teenage Natalie will find her booze.

It’s the adult Natalie she’s concerned with right now. The adult Natalie needs her.

And Christ knows, Lottie hasn’t been there to help for far, far too long.

“Here.” She presses a chilled glass into Nat’s hand, grateful when Natalie doesn’t promptly chuck it back at her.

“There blood in this?”

“No, there is not.” What is it with Natalie of any age and the blood thing? “Just good old-fashioned top shelf.”

She waits for Nat to swing her arm up, toss back the amber liquid sloshing against the crystal. Instead, Natalie cups it between her hands as though seeking warmth, hunching her shoulders. She stares out across the lake, her eyes tracing the mountain peaks beyond.

“This place is nice,” she says. It’s not utterly without sneer, but Lottie senses sincerity all the same. Which, of course, Natalie neatly obliterates with her next sentence. “Daddy’s work?”

Lottie chips her a half-smile. “It might shock you to hear this, but my parents and I are not on the best of terms.”

“’Cause they sent you away to Electric Boogaloo: Swiss Edition?” Natalie guesses.

“That didn’t help, yes.” She sighs. “Nat. Can we be honest with each other?”

“I don’t know. Can we?” Natalie raises the glass to her lips, then lowers it again. Her throat never moves.

There’s a lot Lottie could say to her in this moment. Helpful things, about how strong Natalie is, how capable. Hurtful things, about how Natalie never visited, never even tried to look her up. Hateful things, about how Natalie has never done herself any favors, sinking into the black, expecting the others to fish her out.

Honest things, about how Natalie is one of them, the core of them, and that will never change. That, which was Lottie’s fault, which changed her irrevocably.

Is Lottie sorry? She doesn’t know. She did what she had to, what they all needed to survive, and it worked. They made it out. They were granted a chance at new life. Should she be sorry for that?

“I want us to,” she says at last. “Be honest. I want us to be friends, Nat.”

They weren’t always, and she isn’t going to pretend otherwise. No one knows their story like Natalie does. How good they could have been, if not for the crash. How good they were, even despite it. How hard it was in-between, when Natalie blamed her for all the hope she herself could not see.

How wonderful, when Natalie finally let her in. The crown on her head. The trembling way she’d leaned into Lottie’s touch. The way the candles leapt and frothed the first time they’d come together, lips soft, desperation palpable.

That was then. That was so long ago, they might as well be different people altogether. Natalie’s gone through so much over the last twenty-five years, and Lottie has been on her own path. Solitary. The both of them have been so goddamn alone.

Nat drags a finger back and forth across her nose, scrunching up her face. The glass hangs loose between her knees. “You won’t let me tell them about Travis.”

It isn’t a question. Lottie won’t treat it as one. “You know that’s a bad idea,” she says gently. “You can feel it.”

Her eyes swing up, narrowing in ferocious distaste. “I don’t feel anything. Travis is dead. Shauna’s out there putting a knife in blackmailers. Taissa—”

“Shauna is what?” She needs Nat to slow down. She needs a play-by-play if she’s going to be able to help. But Natalie, damn her, just picks up the pace.

“Taissa’s out there going for senator, Misty’s out of her bugging little brain, who even knows what happened to Van. And now I find you. With a fucking cult, with that fucking—” She gestures with the glass. Not a drop spills. “Symbol everywhere. And you’re tying me to beds—”

“You stabbed a girl,” Lottie reminds her. “Lisa, by the way, is very sweet, and you might have undone weeks of progress with a fucking fork—”

“Who cares?” Natalie shrills. She leaps out of her chair, head thrown back. She’s feral, all leather pants and skittering hands, and Lottie wants to grab hold and keep her from blowing away. “Who cares about any of it? I mean, there’s a little baby version of me wandering around this campus right now, so what does any of it even matter?”

They were hardly babies, Lottie thinks. Hardly children at all, by this point. They were something so beyond adolescence, so beyond adulthood as anyone else could ever define it. They were ephemeral. They were eternal.

They were wild.

“Natalie. Natalie. Look at me.” When Nat does, Lottie tries to smile. “I don’t pretend to know what’s happening here, what those girls are doing out of time. I don’t know.”

“Don’t you always?” Natalie snaps, and once again, there’s something less than blistering behind the words. Something almost entreating. Lottie shakes her head.

“I don’t. On this, I’m as in the dark as you are. You know that, deep down.”

“Bold assumptions,” Natalie says. “As always.”

She looks at the glass in her hand, uncertain. Then she’s looking at Lottie, and she is that girl. That young, sweet-faced girl who tried so hard to convince them all she was tough. That girl with the steady hands, with the unerring eye. A girl chosen by the Wilderness to keep them all fed.

“I missed you,” Lottie says, too quickly to stop. “When it got…bad, when they did things I couldn’t…I thought of you. What you’d been through. How you stayed strong anyway.”

Natalie’s mouth jitters to the side, like her lips want to peel apart and unload all that unlovely truth she’s been carrying. She pulls herself visibly inward, wrapped in a flowing blouse, head shaking.

“What are we doing?”

“About us?”

“About them.” She grimaces. “About our ghosts, wandering the world like it’s Halloween and someone did a fucked-up séance.”

It’s just a Natalie thing to say. It doesn’t mean anything. And yet, Lottie can’t repress a shudder at the idea. Our ghosts.

She feels certain there are ghosts here. Feels certain they’ve followed her out of the woods, hovering just out of sight. She sees them from time to time: Laura Lee, especially, shuffle-staggering in that clean dress as the flames engulf her skull. There are ghosts, and she decided long ago to stop trying to make sense of them. They aren’t real. They’re just her subconscious processing the trauma. She knows it. She knows it, and she almost believes.

But the idea of them being haunted and haunter in equal measure frightens her. Destabilizes something in her. The idea of that girl with the wounded eyes, the skin around them just now healing from a beating that nearly ended her out there in the wild, being here to show Lottie something she’s forgotten? Terrifies her. Terrifies her like it terrified her, watching Travis rise ever higher at the end of that crane.

Terrifies her like a vision of a broken hive, gore-slick, its queen devastated at the center.

She looks to Natalie: beautiful, dangerous, unkempt. She looks to her and sees the shadow of antlers rising out of her mussed hair, the vestige of a veil draped over her tired face.

“We have to take care of them,” she says. “We have to protect them.”

Natalie snorts. “Isn’t it a bit late for that?”

“Not as long as they’re here.” She has to believe that. She has to believe things can improve, even at the lowest low.

With Natalie staring her down, she has to believe it more than ever.

***

“I can’t believe you grow up to stock your closets in purple.” Natalie holds out her arms, staring in disbelief at herself. The sweater. The pants. The shoes. It all rides the rails past a bit much, landing somewhere in the realm of lost extra from the Muppet Show.

“It’s not that bad,” Lottie says uncertainly. “Is it?”

“It’s purple,” Natalie deadpans.

“You wear purple! You literally have a purple t-shirt, with the stripes?”

“I do not grow up to start a motherfucking cult.” This seems like the most important point. The point they both need to capitalize on, because she grows up to be some kind of broken-hearted freak-out on legs, and Lottie grows up…

The kind of gorgeous that makes Natalie’s head spin.

The kind of gorgeous that gets god only knows how many people to follow her without question.

Lottie crinkles her face, dragging her hair back into a loose ponytail. She could use a shower, but neither of them felt comfortable with the idea of splitting up, and so both have simply settled for a change of clothes. They’re high-quality, Natalie has to admit. Comfortable, warm, actually properly sized.

They smell clean. God, she’s missed clothes that smell of laundry detergent, not melted snow and body odor.

“Where do you think the others are?” she asks when Lottie doesn’t take the cult-shaped bait. “Shauna, Tai, Travis?”

Lottie lifts and drops one shoulder. Natalie’s chest constricts.

“You don’t think they’re—I mean, you don’t think we’re the only ones who…”

“No,” says Lottie, so quickly, it feels like a slap. Natalie rears back on her heels, and Lottie’s face goes abruptly soft. She hesitantly touches Natalie’s cheek, the tips of her fingers free of their usual stains.

“If they are,” Natalie begins, and Lottie shakes her head again.

“They’re okay. I—I can feel—”

“Are you just saying shit now?” Natalie demands. “To make me feel better?”

She watches Lottie’s mouth, the little upward quirk that says Lot is fucking with her. She watches Lottie’s mouth, her own going dry.

“I can’t take that,” she says. “The heebie-jeebie bullshit thing. Not today, Lot. Okay?”

A flicker crosses Lottie’s face: disappointment, or shame, or the slightest hint of anger, Natalie can’t tell. She can’t read Lottie, no matter how hard she tries.

“Okay,” Lottie says at last. “Okay. I’ll try.”

Try not to be weird. Try to keep it in. Try not to say anything upsetting, or deranged, or impossible.

Say less, Lottie. A lot fucking less.

“No,” Natalie tells her, guilt flooding her mouth with copper. “No, I’m sorry, it’s just—this? This is nuts. Even for us. And I need…you. Okay? I need you.”

It’s new, saying that out loud. It’s new, admitting it to anyone, especially Lottie. It trips off her tongue, plummeting to the floor like a glass primed to shatter.

Lottie catches it in cupped hands, braced on either side of Natalie’s face, and leans in. Her lips are cool, her skin naturally warm. She tastes of mint, the toothpaste the elder Lottie supplied them with before disappearing. She still kisses with a fragile enthusiasm, always waiting for Natalie to break away.

Natalie, in turn, kisses her hard. This thing with Lottie, this thing that’s gone from mutual respect to something bordering on revulsion to true connection in less than a year, isn’t easy. Some days, she can’t shake the rage that Lottie put that crown on her head. Some days, she can’t stomach the thought that Lottie actually did it because she believes in Natalie above all else.

Belief is the crux of them. Lottie has it. Nat is trying. It doesn’t come naturally, sits too heavy on her shoulders. Kissing Lottie, though, soothes that ache. Kissing Lottie, she can convince herself they have nothing to do with wood sprites and ritual hunts. That they might always have gotten here, eventually, given enough time.

And now that time’s the last thing guaranteed to anybody, she wants to spend it with someone who genuinely sees her. Who genuinely believes in her. Not because they were guided to it by a pretty speech, but because they just…do.

Lottie just does.

Lottie breaks from her with a tiny sound of regret. “Sorry,” she mumbles. “I just—can’t shake this feeling.”

“Bad?” Natalie asks. Lottie hesitates.

“No. Not bad. Just…like there’s someone else here. Something watching.”

She looks guiltily at Natalie, waiting for her to decry the heebie-jeebie bullshit again. Natalie brushes a hand down her arm, folding her fingers around the purple sleeve cuffed at Lottie’s elbow.

“Okay. We’ll…keep an eye on it, I guess.” Easy to say. She has no idea what has taken root in Lot’s head over the past months, no idea where it’s pointing her. She believes Lottie believes it. That’s as close as she can get, most days.

“Can we, uh—go for a walk?” Lottie rubs her arms with restless hands, hugging herself. “I don’t like this room.”

“Maybe you should keep that in mind,” Natalie quips, moving to push open the door. “When it comes time to decorate in twenty fuckin’ years.”

She’s grinning. Lottie, walking past her into the cool afternoon, doesn’t grin back.

“Do you think this is like…fixed?” she asks. “What we’ve seen. Who we become. Do you think this is just…it?”

“Shit, Lot, I hope not. Did you see me?” Now’s the moment, she figures, where Lottie will say what Natalie’s been thinking. When she’ll point out all the little shards that make up that woman with Natalie’s eyes, all the damage that took root under her skin.

To her surprise, Lottie presses a hand to her own mouth. “You’re not the one I’m worried about,” she says, her voice low. Natalie draws up short.

“You serious? Dude, did you see you? You’ve got a fucking Rolex! A whole camp! You’re all…hot cult leader Barbie!”

“I’m hiding something,” Lottie says grimly. “She’s…there’s something wrong there, something she’s pretending not to be.”

Natalie rolls her eyes. She can’t help it. “Lot, hate to break it to you, but we’re all pretending not to be something. Flat-fucking crazy, mostly. I mean, shit, we—” She lowers her voice as they pass a group, relieved when not a single one spares them a glance. “We ate our friends to stay alive. That shit fucks you! Like, for life!”

“It wants us to,” Lottie mutters. It’s become a call and response, a natural conversational order. Whenever they veer too close to the horrors of the wild, Lottie starts spouting this shit. Some days, Natalie believes her. Some days, it makes her want to scream.

“Whatever,” she says impatiently now. “It isn’t the point. We got out of there, and we’re still…fucking off. You really think you’re any worse than the rest of us?”

Lottie smiles. It doesn’t reach her eyes. She wears it like a carnival mask.

“No,” she says. “Guess not.”

Another swell of that sour guilt. Another swell of that urgent uncertainty. Natalie hates it. Natalie hates this impulse, this lack of trust. Because Lottie is warm, and hopeful, and only wants to help. Lottie has only ever wanted to help.

And right now, today, no matter how she tries:

Natalie doesn’t believe her.

***

“Great,” Natalie groans. “Just fucking great. We get a visit from the Ghosts of Plane Crash Past, and we fucking lose them.”

Lottie doesn’t dignify this minor tirade with a response. Natalie has been tirading for several minutes already, ranting away about the possible ramifications of two Natalie Scatorccios (“and, more important, two of you, Looney Tunes”) running around a single compound. It’s getting tired.

It’s also her way of processing, Lottie reminds herself, grinding her teeth. And therefore is completely fine, and healthy, and not at all driving Lottie up the fucking wall.

“Think,” she says. “Close your eyes.”

“Uh uh,” Natalie says, “nope. We are not doing this right now—”

“Close your eyes,” Lottie repeats, enunciating every syllable to keep herself from throttling her old friend. “Put yourself in her shoes. Where would you go? Nineteen, on reprieve from the worst hell of your life. What’s the pull?”

Natalie rolls her head from side to side, shaking out her shoulders, making an entire production of what Lottie considers a pretty reasonable question. She purses her lips, hands outstretched to the heavens, and then…stops. Her eyes pop open.

“Stupid,” she mutters. “Obviously. Where’s the fucking food in this place?”

“Shit,” young Natalie says when they round the corner in the kitchens and find the pair seated on the ground, surrounded by tubs of ice cream and packages of jerky. “Busted.”

She doesn’t look particularly surprised. If anything, Lottie registers the expression on her face as impressed that it took the adults this long to piece together.

“Sorry,” young Lottie adds, though there’s something brazen in her eyes. “You know how it was.”

Nat pops a cluster of grapes into her mouth, six or seven at once, and lets her cheeks swell like a chipmunk. Her adult counterpart sighs.

“You want something less…organic?”

“I don’t think giving them the contents of a vending machine will improve matters,” Lottie says. She watches her teenage self stuff a handful of granola in her mouth, her face impassive. Natalie raises her eyebrows.

“Does that even taste like anything?”

Slowly, teen Lottie shakes her head. She swallows with some effort. “It’s better than dirt.”

“Right.” Natalie drags a hand through her hair. Pats her pockets. Glares at Lottie. “You had to confiscate my fucking cigarettes, too? Killjoy.”

Not the time, Lottie thinks. She drops to her knees in front of her younger self, ignoring the unpleasant crick in her hip as she passes her center of gravity. She stretches a hand across, fingers splayed, but before she can make contact, the younger Natalie is slapping her away.

“Sorry,” she says, eyes wide. She actually sounds like she means it. “Sorry, just—don’t do that. Don’t touch her. Okay?”

Adult Natalie raises her eyebrows. “Why not?”

“I don’t…know.” Frustration leaks into her pale young face, Nat rocking her torso from side to side. She raises a slab of jerky to her mouth, tears viciously in, chews. “Just know you shouldn’t.”

“Christ, you sound like her.” Natalie doesn’t sound upset. Just tired. She slides down the cupboards, letting her legs fold beneath her. “Where are you? This point in the game. It’s after coronation night, right?”

Lottie shoots her a warning look, but the younger women are nodding.

“Cabin burnt down,” Nat says. “Couple of weeks ago, we think. Maybe as much as a month? Harder to tell out there.”

“We’re trying to use Shauna for that,” Lottie adds. “You know, with the journaling? But it’s hard. She’s…distant.”

And she’ll stay that way. She’ll stay distant for the rest of their time in those woods, because something in Shauna Shipman broke the day Jackie left them, and that loss was only compounded by the baby. By the time the cabin was gone, so was much of Jackie’s mark on the world, the room in which Shauna gave birth, the floor upon which she’d battered Lottie to within an inch of her life.

Shauna Shipman learned the art of distance out in the wilds. Lottie suspects she never quite unlearned it again.

“You can’t tell us what comes next,” young Lottie says again. Her voice is firmer now, a certainty setting like concrete since last they spoke. “You have to let us live it, or we might…I don’t know. Change something.”

“That could be good,” Natalie says urgently. “It could be important.”

“It could kill all of them,” Lottie interrupts. “If whatever did this wanted things changed, it would have brought more of them to us. It brought them. Me to you, you to me. There’s a reason for that.”

“Or,” Natalie argues, “it’s just another in a long line of fucked-up chaos brought to us by a fucked-up universe. Lottie, what if—” She drops her voice, though any word in this space echoes. “What if this changes Travis? Or me? What if it fixes me?”

“What’s so wrong with you, anyway?” Nat asks. She’s shredding a plastic wrapper, her fingernails still crusted with dirt. “Tiger in the cage, what does that even mean?”

Young Lottie reaches, laying a hand on her knee, and Lottie is overcome with sense memory. The way Nat had come to her in the snow one night, fighting through a knee-high bank. The way she’d fallen, letting the cold seep into her pants. The way she’d looked at Lottie with helpless terror, and Lottie had known only how to hold her close, how to kiss her face, how to let the candles in her mind flare high.

She’d loved Natalie so much, she’d thought it might rewrite it all. She’d loved her with a fealty she hadn’t known she could give. And she’d been ashamed, too, because the weight on Natalie couldn’t be carried by one girl alone, and Lottie had done that to her.

Teenage Natalie is watching her grown self with stubborn curiosity. “Seriously. I can take it. What’s your deal?”

“Natalie,” both Lotties say. Two hands raise, one with dirt under the nails, the other trembling slightly.

“You will…suffer,” Natalie says. “The shit you’re going through right now, the shit that’s coming, that’s part of it. But the coming back is worse. You know that feeling you have right now, where you’re scared shitless every second of every day?”

Nat nods. Natalie’s mouth coils into a bladed smile.

“That feeling sticks around. Even after the rescue. You wake up, and you’re terrified. You go to sleep terrified. You try to talk to the others, but they’re trying to forget—or they’re gone.” Her eyes flick to Lottie, flick away again. “So you start putting those feelings where you can. Bad places. Stupid places. You know what I’m talking about.”

Nat nods again. Lottie remembers all too well the glaze in her eyes at practice, the smell of liquor on her breath, the stagger in her step at a party.

“You get sick,” Natalie says with dogged solemnity. “You get better, for a while, and then you get sick again. They start to give up, those few people who stuck around. They start to think you’re just going to let them down again. And again. And that isn’t it, you want to tell them. It’s not about the drugs, or the sex, or the booze. It’s not even about the anger. It’s the fear. It’s the fear that you found who you were supposed to be, out there in the winter, and now the world doesn’t know where to put that girl. Now it’s just…you. And your fear. Forever.”

Nat says nothing. Her eyes are wet. They weren’t babies out there, weren’t even allowed to be kids, but right now, she is a child. A child aching to be held by an adult who can banish the monster back under the bed.

And that adult is looking her dead in the eye, telling her the monsters are real. The monsters have her number. The monsters will be banging down her door just as soon as she thinks she’s finally safe.

And this, Lottie thinks with a stab of frustration, has always been the problem with Natalie Scatorccio. Not the addiction, not the anger, not the fear. The honesty. The horrible, scraping need to be honest. To tell Travis his brother must be dead. To tell the others there is no point to hoping. Natalie is a blunt weapon, the one of them who finds no solace in a pretty lie.

Natalie needs to know. Natalie needs to spread that knowledge. Natalie doesn’t want a story, or a dream, or a prayer.

Just the truth. No matter how deep that blade can sink.

Natalie sags against the cupboards, her head hanging. “That,” she says, “is what’s wrong with you. You lost your fucking purpose, and no matter what happens, you can’t find your way back.”

***

She wants to go home. She wants to go home so badly, she doesn’t know how to live with it.

Worst part is, she doesn’t know where home is. The trailer, with a mother who loathes the sight of her? The team, half of them thinking she’s some kind of queen? The wilderness, to a darkness she can’t wash clean?

She kicks the door shut with all her might. Kicks it again and again, comforted by the dull wooden crash.

Behind her, Lottie says, “I told you we shouldn’t know stuff like that.”

Natalie rounds on her, hands balled into fists. “I had to. Okay? You saw her—me—she’s, like, fucking suicidal. She’s busted. And I had to know, because I can’t be that, Lot.”

“She isn’t you,” Lottie whispers. She draws Natalie close, kissing her temple. “She isn’t. Not yet. She’s just an option.”

“This isn’t a Choose Your Own Adventure, Lottie!” Natalie cries. “This is a flash to the fucking future! Maybe it’s fixed, maybe it’s not, but she’s living it. Somewhere out there, I get rescued, and I’m too damaged to go back!”

She feels Lottie squeeze her tight, trying to wring the misery out of her like a Natalie-shaped tube of toothpaste. She buries her face in a purple shirt, her breath hitching.

“I don’t want to be that,” she gasps against Lottie’s chest. “I don’t. Lottie, help me.”

“I will,” Lottie says. “I will, I swear.”

And this, Natalie believes. She doesn’t know how Lottie plans to do it, but if there’s anyone on this earth who will rewrite reality itself to keep Natalie safe, it’s Lottie Matthews.

Lottie draws back to look at her. “One thing at a time, right? We need to figure out how to get back. We need to figure out how to stay alive. Everything else waits.”

She’s right. The only thing that matters just now is arming themselves as much as possible to make the inevitable snap back to the winter less horrendous. Which, Natalie realizes with a jolt, is so obvious. It’s so fucking obvious.

“Supplies,” she says. “All that fuckin’ food back there. Clothes. What else do we need?”

“Nat, we don’t know it’ll come—”

“We don’t know it won’t,” she argues. “Don’t we owe it to them to try?”

Change things. Change whatever tiny thing she can. If that woman, the one who wears misery like a stain on her skin, went so wrong, any little thing Natalie does now might make it right.  

Tools. Medicine. Food. Lottie’s grown-up self is running a whole community here, a whole contained little world. She must have everything a person might need.

Natalie turns around, banging right back into the kitchen. The women they’d left behind look up, startled, guilt painting the elder Natalie’s expression.

“We need stuff,” Nat says, ignoring the lurch of disquiet in her chest. “Clothes, food, as much of it as you can spare. We need to replenish everything that burned.”

“What?” Lottie looks strained. “Natalie, you have to know the odds of…whatever it is that brought you here letting you take anything back with you are…”

“Don’t care,” she says shortly. They aren’t the enemy, she has to remind herself, but it’s a hard thought to put any weight behind. What adult has done her real good? Not her parents. Not her teachers. Not Coach Scott, who she’d thought she understood.

She can rely on herself, on Lottie, on the others back at their frigid little camp in the woods. No one else.

“We have to at least try,” her Lottie says from the doorway, and relief bursts like a balloon over her head. Even if she doesn’t think it will work, Lottie has her back. Lottie, her teammate. Lottie, swearing endless devotion.

She loves her for that. She loves her more than she ever could have expected.

Older Lottie looks at them for a long time, this united front she once held. Her face is shaded in sadness, in memory, in the tiniest amount of joy.

“All right. Yes. We can get some things together. Antibiotics, lighter fluid, blankets. We’ve got First Aid kits, you can take as many of those as you like.”

“Food,” Natalie says, daring her to argue. “Anything shelf-stable. Anything that might—” Keep us from hunting and killing our own.

Lottie doesn’t need to hear it. Lottie is already standing, brushing off her dress. She turns to the older Natalie, reaching down a hand.

“Come on,” she urges when Natalie just stares at her with haunted eyes. “We have to try. We need to take care of them.” She hesitates, weighing the damage her next words might inflict, and says them anyway. “You’re looking for your purpose. Isn’t this it?”

For a second, Natalie thinks her older self will lunge at Lottie, tackle her to the floor. She waits for it, this signal that her future is nothing but the power to tear down every shelter built in her honor.

Adult Natalie clasps Lottie’s hand, pops to her feet. Smiles the first real smile Nat has seen on her lips. It makes her almost beautiful.

“What are we waiting for? You could zap through your weird little wormhole any minute.”

Natalie releases a long sigh of relief. This is what she knows, what gets her out of bed every morning. When everything else is boiled away, she’s actually pretty simple. A fucking scavenger hunt is enough to make sense of the whole day.

It’s actually fun. The air is cool, but compared to what she’s been living through, it might as well be summer. She pushes the sleeves of her sweater up to her elbows, letting the sun stroke her skin as it darts in and out of cloud cover. Beside her, Lottie hoists a bag higher against her chest, letting her head fall back into the light.

“You know,” Nat says, “as creepy as this whole thing is, it’s pretty sweet. Like, I’m not saying I think you should start a cult—”

“Community,” Lottie corrects mildly. She hip-checks Natalie, who playfully knocks her back.

“Cult. But hey, if you gotta do it, at least you picked somewhere…what’s the word? Picturesque.”

“Nice,” Lottie laughs. “You wanna get a game of Scrabble going after this?”

“Oh, your ass definitely stocked this place with board games. Should we grab a few? Bet they burn like a mother.”

“That’s what we really need to survive,” Lottie deadpans. “A nice round of Monopoly. You know they made us play that in Home Ec once, to ‘simulate calculated spending’? Misty won, and I thought Tai was going to flip the board.”

It hurts a little, how easy it is to paint the scene. Natalie thinks of them crowded around a lab table, bickering over who gets the top hat, who gets to be banker. She thinks of Lottie’s hair blown dry, the gleam of manicured nails, the lean of her over the table to stamp her claim on Boardwalk.

She thinks of how those girls no longer exist, how Lottie’s hair can be pristine, and her gowns fabulous, and her jewelry glittering, and still, still, there is something not quite right about her.

They might be able to change shit. They might be able to set wrongs right. There might be a chance, but Natalie can’t shake the feeling that it’s already too late. That the people they could have been, the potential they all possessed in such abundance, have already been erased.

“Hey,” says Lottie, reading her with a look. “Come on. Should move quick, just in case.”

The hunt, Natalie thinks wryly. The hunt, whether it be for game or for supplies, is all that keeps her going. The hunt, and Lottie’s staunch belief that it’s all for some glorious end.

Whatever else changes, she worries that will stick for good.

***

For years, Lottie has let herself be steered by a gut feeling. Even before the crash, before she lost the medicinal blanket her parents had tossed over that part of her, she let her gut take charge. It led her on the field. It led her at parties. She knows what she feels, and what she feels—if not always right—rarely steers her astray for long.

She feels in her gut that this collection of supplies is a Band-Aid slapped over a gunshot wound.

She feels in her gut that these girls need it, anyway.

It might change nothing, but it still matters. Because the girl she was, the girl Natalie was—god, especially Natalie at that age, freshly crowned and freshly dedicated—can’t sit still. Can’t just wait right now, with the others so far away and the future clouded.

And, frankly, it’s doing the Natalie of here and now a substantial good, too.

“Don’t suppose you’ve got a weapons cache,” Natalie chooses this moment to say. “For the apocalypse or whatever?”

“We aren’t doomsday preppers, Nat.” Lottie winces. “And I really don’t think more guns is the solution.”

“Nah. Guess not. None of you could hold the fucking thing steady, anyway, even when we weren’t starving to death.” Natalie tucks her head back into a storage cupboard, musing over jackets. She rummages through a box of scarves and gloves, tossing items recklessly over her shoulder. Lottie bends to pick them up, folding them neatly into a clean rucksack.

“Nat…can we talk for a minute?”

“Probably not,” Natalie tells the inside of the closet. Lottie grazes the back of her shoulder, and she flinches. “You’re just going to tell me I was an idiot, right?”

“When was the last time I called you an idiot?”

“Pretty heavily implied, with the whole…” Natalie twists at the waist, miming a shotgun between her teeth. Lottie scowls.

“Well, yes, when you’re doing something especially stupid.” She forces herself to soften. “This is different. This wasn’t stupid, it was—”

“Unwise,” Natalie taunts. “Daft. Moronic—”

“Hopeful,” Lottie says. A shadow drops over Natalie’s brow.

“Same fucking thing.”

“It isn’t. And you know it. You hoped, by telling that girl what happens to her, you could fix your own timeline. Right?” She’s gripping Natalie’s shoulder too hard. Strangely, the contact seems to calm Nat’s volatile energy, set her feet more firmly against the floor.

“You’re going to tell me it won’t work.”

She won’t. She feels it, but Natalie doesn’t work on feelings alone. Natalie needs truth. Natalie needs to know.

“I’m telling you,” Lottie says gently, “I admire what you did. I think it was the kindest thing you’ve done for yourself in a long, long time.”

Natalie bites her lip. “And if you were right? If it kills the rest of them?”

It wants us, Lottie thinks. It wants us together. We are bound. We are forever.

Real. Not real. She doesn’t know. She has to be okay with not knowing.

“What will happen,” she says evenly, “will happen.”

“Yeah?” Natalie straightens up. “And will it happen the same way? Will you be swept off to another country, never to be seen again? Never to answer so much as a goddamn letter, Lottie?”

And there it is. At last, the root of Natalie’s rage.

Lottie, like the rest of them, worse than the rest of them, left her alone. Doesn’t matter that she had no control at the start. Doesn’t matter that she was strapped to a gurney, convulsing to the beat of high-voltage “medical care”. Doesn’t matter that she didn’t want it.

Natalie needed her. She had sworn to Nat she would be there for her, that they were bonded. And then she’d gone away for twenty-five years.

“Go on.” She isn’t putting her hands behind her back this time, but she can see in Natalie’s face the understanding as it dawns. “Let it out.”

Natalie’s jaw works. She starts to shake her head, starts to step away. Stops. Shuts her eyes.

“I loved you,” she says. The words are raw, dragged forth with effort. “And I should’ve known, right? Because loving people has always gone pretty fucking bad, for me.”

“For all of us,” Lottie says quietly. Natalie grunts.

“Yeah. Sure. All of us. But I’m not talking about all of us right now, Lot, I am talking about me. And you.”

Good. “Keep going,” Lottie tells her. Like they’re just in the Sharing Shack, airing grievances. Like there isn’t too much between them to neaten up, shuffle into a deck, deal back out again.

“I loved you,” Natalie repeats. Her voice cracks on that past-tense syllable. “You believed in me. The others, they would have done anything you said, and you used that power to keep me alive. You used that to save my fucking life, Lottie. Do you know what that did to me?”

Lottie wants to deny it. Lottie wants to say Javi saved Natalie’s life. Lottie wants to say Natalie saved her own life.

But Natalie has never valued a pretty lie. Natalie, of all of them, treasures truth.

 “You made sure I’d live,” Natalie says. “You did that.”

“It chose—”

“No,” says Natalie, “no, do not do that, Lottie. You did it. You told them what they needed to hear, you made sure that card would never end up in my hands again. Why?”

“You know why.” Lottie feels so young, so like that girl with bruises all over her body. Natalie’s lip curls.

“Tell me anyway.”

“Because I needed you,” Lottie says. “Because I loved you. Because you saw me as a girl when the rest of them saw a messenger. Even the ones who didn’t believe. You talked to me like I was still me. I needed…someone who still could.”

You felt like home, she wants to say. The good parts of home, the routine, the comfortable ribbing. The after-school scrimmages, the bus rides, the potency of someone shouting her name with laughter limning their voice.

To the others, she was a game to win or to lose. To bet on. To sink their teeth into.

To Natalie, she was just a girl who was too tired to keep going alone.

It wasn’t real. Or maybe it was. Maybe it’s all real, right down to the time travel mindfuck.

Natalie is real. Natalie—the ache of her, the instinct to stab, the instinct to run—is real.

“Why,” asks Natalie, “didn’t you write? Or call? Or fucking email?”

“Because,” whispers Lottie. “I wanted better for you. I wanted to keep it away from all of you.”

Real? Not real? Did it matter? It always wanted her most of all. It always crept in when she wasn’t looking, showing her things she didn’t want to see. It always has. Maybe it always will.

“I wanted,” she says, barely mouthing the words, “to keep you safe.”

Natalie is standing too close. The nearest she’s been to any of them in decades, and of course it would be Nat. Of course it would be Nat she says this to, letting her in on the ugliest kind of secret.

Lottie can be okay, without them. She has to work harder than most at it, pour on the medication and the talk therapy and the distractions, but she can do it. She can be okay, if they aren’t around.

But she’s so fucking lonely. So fucking empty. And the visions, as if smelling her fear, smelling her weakness, are coming faster than they have since she left the woods.

“I wanted to keep you safe,” she repeats, a little stronger this time. “But I don’t think I can keep doing this alone. I don’t…with them here, I’m so afraid it…can’t be enough.”

“What can’t?” Natalie cocks her head, a hunter to the last, listening for signs of rustling in the underbrush. Lottie’s lips tremble.

“Me.”

It’s the first she’s admitted it in years. The first person she’s said anything like it to, and if she had her honest choice, she wouldn’t pick Natalie for it. She owes Nat too much. She owes Nat everything, and putting this on her—letting her see the weakness that’s been pulsing under Lottie’s skin since she was just a girl—goes against everything she’s built the past two decades on.

And yet, when Natalie smiles, it feels like a sunburst cracking open. When Natalie smiles, grins, laughs, it’s like pushing open the front door to find all the furniture exactly where you left it.

“You? Not enough? That’s the stupidest shit you’ve ever said.” Natalie licks her lips. “Well, actually, hang on, there’s a pretty long list—”

“I’m serious,” Lottie tells her. “I thought I could keep it at bay, but if those girls are here, if It sent them—”

Natalie takes her by the shoulders. “Hey. What was the trick?”

“I’m…sorry?”

“The trick,” says Natalie. “To getting it right out there. To keeping everyone as safe as possible. Was it fuck off on your own, shut everybody out, do your level best?”

Reluctantly, Lottie shakes her head. She can hear Nat in her head. Not this Natalie, but a much younger one, a much softer one they’d all thought hard for the wrong reasons.

“What was it, Lot?”

“Play like a fucking team,” Lottie whispers. “And win.”

“And win,” Natalie agrees. Her smile sweetens, an almost bashful light coming into her eyes. She rubs Lottie’s shoulders lightly. “It’s not your job to take care of us, Lot. Whatever the voices in your head have to say about it. We take care of each other. A team.”

“But—”

“A team,” Natalie repeats. She’s so close. Lottie could kiss her, could wind a hand into her tousled hair and crash into her. She wants to, more than anything.

“Okay,” she says softly. Not quite believing it, knowing that at least fifty percent of faith is wanting to believe. Maybe the wanting is enough, for now. “Okay. We’re a team.”

“You, me.” Natalie bobs her head from side to side, acknowledging the madness of the current situation. “And the rugrats. A winning combination, for sure.”

Lottie snickers despite herself. Nat gives her shoulders another squeeze, seemingly unable to bring herself to let go.

“It hasn’t worked so far,” she says. “Going at it alone. All the stuff I’ve tried over the years. You?”

Lottie shakes her head. She sees the masks, the hive, Laura Lee’s grotesque scream. “No. I would love to say—but, no. It hasn’t.”

“Then maybe we need to go back.” Natalie gestures at her side, miming a head shorter than herself. “Maybe we need to remember what it was like, being them.”

What we were like, she doesn’t say. Lottie twists her hands together. Pictures those girls standing protectively near one another. Pictures the way her own eyes tracked Natalie’s frame around a room. She’s been protecting Natalie for years. Keeping her as safe as possible. She’s always done that.

But, back then, she’d let Natalie protect her in return.

She holds out a hand. Nat clasps it tight, a post-game salute.

It feels, somehow, like the start of a new era, and for the first time in ages, Lottie feels something in her chest unbind.

***

They aren’t disappearing.

The hours slide by, one into the next as neatly as a river rushes. Natalie has grown less accustomed to time as measured by conventional means; even just seeing the watch on the older Lottie’s wrist makes her skin itch. Time is a matter of sunrise, sunset, the warmest time of day and the coldest. Time is not an elective by which to measure workshops and games. Time is life and it is death.

And it is passing. Fast.

Without them.

“What if it’s even worse there?”

“It’s been less than a day,” Lottie reminds her. Which doesn’t mean much. It took less than a day for Jackie to freeze to death. Less than five minutes for Javi to drown. A lot can happen in no time at all.

“What if it’s going faster there?” Natalie presses. She can feel Lottie’s eyes tracking her as she paces back and forth. It’s doing nothing to ease her nerves.

“Why would it be going faster?” her adult counterpart asks. Natalie throws up her hands.

“Why would we appear to you guys out of fucking nowhere? I don’t make the rules!”

“Okay, okay.” Lottie catches her wrist, thumb tracing the pale skin in shallow arcs. “Stop. We’ve done everything we can, right? We’ve got the supplies. We’re ready.”

“As you’ll ever be,” adult Natalie mumbles. Lottie cuts her a sharp look.

“As we can be,” she concedes. “We’re ready, Nat. Now we wait.”

Wait. Sure. Natalie’s least favorite activity of all time. The shit that can happen when a person is waiting. The shit that can go horribly, irreparably wrong. She has no idea how anyone functions, sitting and waiting.

But the others are looking at her like she’s losing it—even the other her—so she sits. She sits, and she lets the elder Lottie push a plate laden with a sandwich, an apple, and a fresh-baked brownie into her hands. She eats.

And, slowly, reluctantly, she finds herself beginning to relax.

The adults are having an odd effect, she realizes. When last they’d been apart, there had been something in the air between the older Nat and Lottie. Something like the shock of ozone around a storm.

It isn’t gone now, but it’s changed. Whatever conversation they’d had without their teenage selves present, whatever they’d done—it’s smoothed the edges, somehow. Sheathed the blade that had been rotating above their heads. They’re sitting closer, their knees bumping. Natalie wonders what they talked about. How they hashed it out.

Natalie wonders if she’ll need to have that same conversation with her Lottie in twenty-five years. She wonders how many conversations they might have, different incarnations of the same story revolving around and around. Does Lottie love her in every timeline? Do they fall apart each time? Or, in the spirit of infinite realities, is there a Natalie and a Lottie who have it all figured out? Who never missed the mark at all? Who never lost out on time, on trust, on a community of two?

“Dude,” she says. “What was in that fucking brownie?”

The adult Lottie laughs, and there’s still something about her Natalie can’t quite make sense of—but it’s lessened. Her shoulders are looser. Her hands aren’t making weird little shapes, steepling together.

She isn’t playing the role, Nat realizes, the way she has been for so much of the day. Whatever performance she’s been putting on, it’s been so seamless, she almost didn’t notice it dropping away.

“Chocolate,” Lottie says. “And a dash of caramel. No special additives beyond that, I’m afraid.”

“When was the last time you slept?” the elder Natalie asks. When Nat starts to respond, she holds up a hand. “Really slept. Dreams and all.”

Natalie doesn’t remember. At the cabin, probably. When Javi was still alive, and none of them knew what it felt like to see that queen make her violent debut.

“Rest,” her older self advises. “Beds here aren’t all that bad, and it’s the best you’ll have for—”

“Another nine months,” says Natalie hollowly. Her stomach rolls over on that sandwich, threatening to send it back up for a second hello.

“A while,” older Nat agrees. She, too, seems a little easier. A little less on the edge of some cliff the rest of them can’t process. “Might as well snag it while you can get it, right?”

No. Not right. She really expects Natalie to sleep? Her friends are out there waiting, freezing, starving, and she expects Natalie to pretend she’s weekending away at a fucking hotel?

The older version of her nods slowly, as if reading her mind. “What’s that adage? Affix your own mask before attending to others?”

“What?”

“On a plane. You’re supposed to put your own damn mask on before trying to help anybody else.”

“Yeah,” says Natalie thinly. “I remember the masks pretty fucking well, actually.”

“Great. So.” The older woman bares her teeth, not quite a smile. “Put your damn mask on, kid. You want to help them? You want to save them? That’s noble. And never going to work if you burn yourself out. Believe me. If anyone knows…”

“She’s right,” the teenage Lottie cuts in. “We have no idea when we’ll get a chance like this again. We should take advantage of it.”

Rest. Rest, in an actual bed, with Lottie stretched out beside her. It feels wrong. It feels like surrender.

She wants it so badly, she almost can’t breathe.

She shuts her eyes. When she opens them, her older self is kneeling before her, careful not to make contact.

“Sleep. For a while, at least.” She looks to the older Lottie for confirmation. “We’ll keep watch.”

They’re given Lottie’s own quarters, Lottie’s own bed. Nat stands awkwardly in the doorway, gazing around with wide-eyed wonder.

“When I imagined sleeping in your room for the first time,” she says, “I assumed it’d be, y’know. Less trippy.”

Lottie darts her a small smile. “You imagined sleeping in my room?”

“Yeah, at, like, college or whatever. Some fancy rich dorm room with satin pillowcases. Not…” Natalie gestures at the symbol on the wall, the one they can’t seem to get away from. Why has Lottie carried that symbol with her all this time? “That’s fucked up, you know.”

Lottie doesn’t answer. She rubs her arms, shivering. Natalie moves to her, hands skating up her biceps, urging warmth into her skin.

“You feel weird here, too?”

“Just tired, I think.” She rolls her eyes at herself, a breathy laugh coasting past her lips. “Or I’m just freaked out.”

“You and me both.” Natalie leans up to kiss her cheek, unsurprised when Lottie turns her head and snags her mouth. She relaxes into the familiar press and release, the comfortable splay of Lottie’s hands around her body. She’s suddenly aware that this is the first time she and Lottie have been properly alone like this, with no one nearby to hear them, to ask questions. A swarm of butterflies goes full rager inside her stomach, flutter-bouncing off the walls.

It's different with Lottie than with any of the people who came before her. It’s more complicated. More complex. She looks at Lottie, and some part of her still thinks they’re engaged in that endless competition. Some part of her still thinks they’re on different sides of an unintended war. It turns her kiss a little sharper, her hands a little fiercer.

Lottie seems to sense the fight in her, that rapturous impulse to lash out at something she can touch. She gives in to it soundlessly, letting Natalie lead her to the mattress, letting Natalie steer. She stretches back on the plum duvet—probably worth more than Natalie’s whole bedroom back at home—gazing up with unapologetic appreciation when Natalie strips the sweater over her head and chucks it across the room.

She waits for a second, waits for that glaze to come over Lottie’s expression the way it sometimes does in the silences. The one that says she’s going to say something Natalie can’t possibly understand, usually followed by blood, by birds, by bears.

“Is this resting?” Lottie asks, pretty mouth pulling in a teasing smile. Natalie laughs.

“It’s restorative. Think that counts for something.”

“Oh, definitely.” Lottie’s hands are tracing her ribs, her waist, the slim hitch of her hipbones before they vanish under her waistband. Her eyes are glittering, so utterly present that Natalie can’t help but adore her.

“I’m glad,” she murmurs against Lottie’s lips, “I went to you. Even if you are a cult leader.”

“Community,” Lottie replies. She pulls Natalie’s lower lip into her mouth, sucking gently. Natalie groans.

Sometimes, when they’re together, she gets the sense Lottie is coming to her out of a devotion she doesn’t entirely like. That the Lottie moving between her thighs, kissing her as the starlight gleams off her skin, is pledging herself to the queen, not Natalie. Sometimes, she reaches down, pulling until Lottie will look at her, and she wonders what Lottie’s seeing. Who she’s seeing. How real it could possibly be.

Now, in a bed that won’t belong to her for years to come, Lottie looks at her like a girl at the end of an especially wild party. There is a languor in her hands, in her kisses, a perfect balance of exhaustion and lust. She is graceless, her fingers tripping over the juts of Natalie’s spine, stumbling into the ditch at the small of her back. She is wanting, and she is slowing, and Natalie looks at her with no small amount of amusement.

“Are you actually falling asleep while we do this?”

“No,” Lottie says, hair a messy twist against the shock-white pillowcase. Her eyes are closed, her lips pleasantly pink. Natalie pokes her in the side.

“This has literally never happened to me.”

“I’m here. I’m super here.” She’s starting to breathe deeper, her hands pressing against Natalie’s back until she melts against Lottie’s taller frame. “See? Just. Getting comfortable.”

She’s just a girl, Natalie thinks. Not a devotee, not a prophet, not a mouthpiece for the wild. Just a girl who could have gone too hard on the weekend, who collapsed into bed with a person who could be her girlfriend, in a life where words like that matter. Just a girl who might wake in an hour, picking up right where they left off, or might sleep until sunrise.

Just a girl, with bruises mapping her smooth skin, with bones that poke too near the surface. Just a girl, falling asleep in Natalie’s loose embrace.

She tries not to see the symbol on the wall, all the signs of a future she hopes they can both avoid, and, finally, Natalie lets herself rest.

***

“Something’s coming.”

She senses Natalie sitting up straighter, a cigarette dangling from between her fingers. “What?”

“I don’t…” Lottie closes her eyes, listening. She shouldn’t entertain this, she knows. Shouldn’t play these little games. She should go take a pill, wash away the idea of knowing, of seeing, of visions.

Natalie’s hand is braced against her arm, fingers coiled above her bracelets. The thoughtless touch sends her heart into a gallop. “Lot.”

Just the one word, the single syllable, so sweet in its simplicity. As sweet as the idea that, if they just cast back for their teenage selves, this won’t be too big to handle. Somehow. That, together, they are stronger than the darkness that seems to follow wherever they go.

She doubts Natalie really believes—the way Lottie can’t help believing—that It is responsible for all of this. She doubts, but with their teenage selves so near, it’s impossible for even Natalie to deny that something is going on. Something wants their attention.

And it’s getting louder.

“They’re coming.” Lottie hears the words leave her mouth, feeling a million miles from her own body. Her mind flashes: Natalie with a gun in her mouth, Travis at the end of a crane, Laura Lee’s rotting visage. Her whole body clenches.

“Who?” Natalie gives her arm a sharp shake. “Lottie. What are you talking about?”

She’s afraid to open her eyes. Terrified of what she might see, of what might not go away when she blinks. She focuses all of her attention on Natalie’s hand, each one of Natalie’s fingers pressing into her skin. She listens for Natalie’s breath, struggling to match her own to that quickening tempo.

“Lottie,” Natalie says, her voice unexpectedly rich with compassion. “Listen to me. You’re not alone anymore. Okay? I—I can’t see it like you do, but I’m not going to leave you with…it.”

Lottie breathes out, in, out. The air is freezing, battering at her skin. She can taste snowflakes. She can taste fresh meat.

“They’re coming,” she repeats. “We need to get to the gate.”

She can’t talk Natalie out of taking the gun. Her head is too loud to even really try. The best she can do is hold steady against the sudden barrage of  input, the sudden certainty dragging her forward. She knows, whether she wants to or not. She knows there is something waiting for them on the other side.

It wants us together. It always did.

It shouldn’t shock her, seeing four people just outside the compound gate. Something flares in her chest, bright as dozens of candles lighting an endless tunnel.

“Of course,” she murmurs. “Of course it would be you.”

“Hey!” Natalie sights down the barrel, the gun wedged against her shoulder. “Who’s there? I’m warning you—”

“Put the fucking gun down, Nat,” Taissa’s tired voice calls out. “Jesus, is this just how you say hello these days?”

“Tai?” She blinks, obediently lowering the rifle. “Who’s that with you?”

“Hey, Nat.” A white hand, rising out of the dark. Van is hunching in her jacket, looking profoundly uncomfortable. Her eyes drift to Lottie, widening. Her mouth falls open. “Lot?”

Lottie wants to rush to them, wants to pull them into her arms, these girls who knew all of her and none of her for so long. She wants to—but there are the others to consider. Two more shapes standing hand in hand, staring at her in unabashed wonder.

“Ho-ly shit,” the teenage Taissa Turner breathes. “Look at them.”

“This is where you took us?” Van grips her hand tighter. She looks exactly as Lottie remembers. Both of them. Tai’s short curls, her terse expression, eyes that would roll one moment and flicker in silent prayer the next. Van’s scars, her bright blue gaze, the unconscious way she leans into Tai’s side.

“I’ve missed you all,” Lottie says. “So fucking much.”

She wrenches the gate open, and they gape at one another in the dark. She wishes they were still those girls, those champion-grade kids who thought winning a game was the peak of victory. She wishes they could crash into one another, jumping up and down, clamoring in their certainty that they were and are and will always be a team.

Instead, they stand: the Vans and Tais on one side, Lottie and Nat on the other. Staring at each other like strangers.

“I know this is insane,” the elder Taissa begins, her voice that perfectly charismatic kind of level that wins elections. “But they just…showed up yesterday. We’ve been driving all day, hoping you could make some sense of it.”

“You,” Natalie says. She’s staring at the young Tai, the way she keeps Van just slightly behind her, protective. “The last time I saw you two together, it was—”

“Shauna’s wedding,” the older Van interrupts. “Yeah. Been a long time, Nat.”

She fixes Natalie with a glare Lottie can’t decipher. Natalie raises her eyebrows.

“Sure. Yeah. Great party. You look…good.”

“It’s not just them,” Lottie cuts in before that conversation can grow any more awkward. “We’re here, too. The—old us, I mean. The younger me showed up in Nat’s room, I found young Nat by the lake—”

Van straightens. “You didn’t come to yourselves?”

“No. Did you?”

Van makes a crisscross gesture with one hand, drawing invisible lines from herself to the teenage Taissa, the adult Tai to her own younger counterpart.

“We figure it’s part of it,” young Van says, almost calmly. “We went where we felt most safe. Most at home.”

“The most love,” adult Taissa says softly. Lottie doesn’t miss the way the older Van looks at her, a laceration of a stare with an undeniable current of hope underneath.

“Yeah, but why?” Natalie demands, blowing past all of this like looking at it for even a moment would send her spiraling. Lottie supposes she can’t blame her for that.

“Connection,” Lottie muses. “Like you said, Nat. We were always strongest when we worked together. Whatever brought you here—you and them, us—must know it.”

“So putting them back together?” Natalie guesses. “That’s what will send them back?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.” She shivers. She can still feel it, that late-winter wind yanking at her from a lifetime away. “We should get inside, wake the others. They’re going to want to see this.”

She ushers them through, noticing the way the older Van angles her shoulder away from her younger self, the way the older Taissa keeps brushing her hand against the side of her leg like she’s trying to rid herself of a phantom itch. Can they feel it, too? Can they hear the trees singing, the distant hum of frozen melody?

She moves to close the gate, to lock up for the night, and stops. A fresh set of headlights is sweeping up the drive, a rough turn off the road that comes perilously close to striking the barrier between camp and the rest of the world. Lottie shields her eyes, holding out a hand on instinct.

“Wait!” a voice calls. “Wait for us!”

“Shauna?” Taissa yells back. “Are you fuckin’ kidding me? What are you doing here?”

Shauna Shipman—older than Lottie’s ever seen her, a manic energy fueling her every step—rushes out of her minivan, a shadow at her heels. Lottie squints in the dark. Did she actually bring her daughter? The child she was so fortunate to have after the nightmare was behind them, the one that must bring her so much joy?

“No,” she hears teenage Tai whisper, the word carrying on an icy gust of wind. “No way.”

“Can’t be,” Van’s young voice adds, quavering. “Am I—am I seeing this?”

Shauna hunches over, resting her hands on her knees, breathing like she’s just finished a wind sprint. She motions for the girl to pass her, letting out a long breath. The others take a collective step back, even Lottie.

“Everyone,” Shauna pants. “Hello. Thanks for having us. What the fuck is going on?”

“You were right, Shipman,” says the ghost of Jackie fucking Taylor. “They don’t look like they’re handling this well at all.”

Chapter Text

Shauna Shipman awakes in a nightmare.

This in and of itself is not special. She’s been having the same nightmare for twenty-odd years. A nightmare rooted in suburbia, in homebody boredom and maternal expectations. A nightmare where her closest friend is Taissa Turner, a woman she sees so infrequently, she sometimes wonders if Tai is even there at all. A nightmare where her second closest friend is the vision of the girl she fucked over so thoroughly as a teenager, that girl actually died of the trauma.

Not what happened, Shauna, she thinks, as she always does, but it never matters. She knows what happened. She loved Jackie, and she betrayed Jackie, and she was too stubborn to fix what was broken between them. And now Jackie is dead, and Shauna is living in a nightmare where the mortgage is paid for by furniture sales, and Jeff’s things are everywhere no matter how often she cleans, and her own daughter is an unrepentant asshole.

A nightmare where she has an affair, and promptly winds up disposing of a body, because that’s just the kind of life Shauna Shipman leads these days.

She is a mess. She figures most everyone she comes across knows it.

Most of all the ghost at the foot of her bed.

“No,” Shauna groans. Jeff’s gone already, Callie off to school. This is supposed to be a time of quiet reflection, of waking up in a lazy haze. Of not thinking about Adam Martin’s belongings in her safe.

“No?” Jackie asks. “What do you mean, no?”

“I mean no,” Shauna repeats into her pillow. It smells musty. She’s overdue for laundry day again. “We don’t have to do this today. Really, we don’t.”

“Mm, I disagree.” Jackie gives that patented head tilt, jutting out her lip. “It’s been too long, Shipman. You didn’t listen to me, and now look what happened.”

Shauna swings her legs out from under the blankets. Her head is pounding. “I’m not doing this with you. I need a shower, and I need breakfast, and I need—”

“To think before playing your next round of Where’s My Knife?” Jackie asks brightly. Shauna shuts her eyes, flapping both hands in her direction.

“Go away.”

She’s grateful for the solitude of the shower, the water sheeting off her back. Sometimes, Jackie doesn’t even allow her that much. Sometimes, it’s like they’re fifteen again, Jackie hoisted up on the sink, reading the quiz options in their favorite magazines through the curtain.

Except the quiz is usually a hundred ways to fuck up your life, and Shauna always seems to rank dangerously high.

She palms the hair out of her face, letting the water run cold before venturing out of the tub. She dresses quickly, waiting for that familiar voice to ring out an observation. She misses it when Jackie goes away for long stretches. Misses it, and feels unworthy of the temporary peace.

But, god, when Jackie comes back these days, it’s always with a vengeance. It’s always a punch to the gut, brutal as it is affectionate.

Because it’s all in your head, she tells herself coldly. She imagines herself in Taissa’s shoes, confident and proud. Then she remembers Taissa has been sleepwalking again, steered by god knows what force inside her own head, and thinks better of it.

None of them are well. None of them are doing well. Misty wants to crash-course every cop drama of the last fifty years with her, and Natalie’s on the high-wire after Travis, and Shauna is…

Shauna is Shauna. Toting a last name that doesn’t fit her, preparing bland dinners that go mostly unnoticed, and waiting for the police to put two and two together.

Sometimes—not often, and never aloud—she almost misses the woods. Life was simpler out there. You ran, and you chased, and you ate. You didn’t apologize. You didn’t forgive. You just existed.

Sometimes—not often, and god, never aloud—she almost wishes they’d left her out there for good.

She whips up some eggs, microwaves a few slices of pre-cooked bacon, and eats while staring blankly out the window. The grease on her lips doesn’t turn her stomach like it used to, but as she bites into a crisped piece of bacon, it’s impossible not to remember the body in the tub. The gore of it. The way the muscle peeled apart beneath her blade.

Shauna swallows and leans her weight against the countertop, her forearms braced beside her plate. She could leave, she thinks for probably the six hundredth time that week. She could leave, take the van, never come back. Callie would be better off, probably. Jeff certainly would. She could pretend it was the plan all along.

“Hello?”

“No,” Shauna answers without turning her head. “I told you, I’m not up for it today. Come back later. I promise, the guilt will still be minty-fresh.”

“Hello?” Jackie’s voice repeats, even less certain this time. Shauna sighs, peering upside down through the gap between her arm and the counter.

“Seriously, it’s just not a good day for a mental breakdown. Can’t you go…wherever it is you go when you’re not terrorizing me?”

“Where am I?” Jackie replies with none of her usual verve. She moves her head like a bird, gaze roving over the furniture like it’s been transplanted from another galaxy. “Is this…is this the afterlife?”

“Not funny.” Shauna turns, hands on her hips. “Not fucking funny. What are you—”

She stops. Jackie isn’t looking at her from beneath the juvenile haircut that says she just came from freshman year, or wearing her Yellowjackets uniform, or even draped in that horrible deathday outfit Shauna could happily never see again. She’s wearing a green dress. There’s a crown in her hair.

She looks exactly as she did the night Shauna and the rest of them lost their minds on ‘shrooms. Doomcoming. The night Jackie lost her virginity, and she lost Jackie.

“Am I dead?” Jackie goes on, her voice shrilling. “Is Hell New Jersey?”

“No!” Shauna blurts. Then, considering: “Well. Yes, sort of. But no! It’s just…my house. You’re in my house. You’re? In my? House?”

“No,” Jackie says, like she’s the crazy one—and, Shauna has to admit, that has historically proven to be true. “No, I’m in the woods.”

Where you will remain forevermore. Shauna shakes herself. Raises a hand to her own cheek and delivers a single sharp slap.

“Hey!” Jackie bleats. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Just…making sure,” Shauna mutters. She moves slowly, carefully, rounding the table, to where Jackie is standing. “You’re…here. For real this time.”

“What do you mean, this time?” Jackie casts another shell-shocked look around. “This is all so…”

“Familiar?” Shauna supplies. Jackie wrinkles her nose.

“Kitschy.”

“Hey!” Don’t get hung up on the wrong shit, Shauna. “Never mind. What are you doing here? How did you get here?”

“Still really not clear on where here is.” Jackie runs the tip of one finger along the back of a chair. Actually touches it, Shauna notes with another unpleasant shock. Jackie is always sitting on furniture, wandering around the house, but she’s never really interacting with any of it. It’s like Shauna’s mind fills in those gaps, trying to straighten the bedsheets as best she can.

But right now, that is Jackie’s hand, and it is touching Shauna’s chair. It’s casting a shadow, and when she draws it away, there’s a bit of dirt standing out on the oiled wood. Jackie grimaces.

“Sorry. I really, really need a bath.”

It’s the sorry that undoes her. Jackie saying sorry to her like it’s nothing, like she’s just some lady in a grocery store whose foot Jackie rolled over with her cart. Because, she realizes, Jackie has no idea. She’s not even looking at Shauna, not really. She’s too busy inspecting the walls, the décor, the—

The picture frames.

“Oh god,” says Shauna, staggering forward, “Jackie, wait—”

Wonder of wonders, Jackie stops. Turns on her heel. Raises her eyebrows.

“You know my name.”

“Of course I know your name,” Shauna says, exasperated as she has only ever been with two people in her entire life. And isn’t it so easy to find Callie in this apparition? So easy to see the smirk around her mouth, the tilt of her eyebrows that never fails to make Shauna feel unzipped.

They would have gotten along so well, her daughter and her dead best friend. Because this is just the kind of normal Shauna Shipman’s nightmare life has always been.

Jackie looks at her. Really looks at her, a dreamlike fascination that steals the breath from Shauna’s throat. Her lips part, surprise crashing home.

“Oh my god, Shauna? But—how? I just saw you, you’re…super pregnant.” Her brow tightens. She isn’t saying the rest, but Shauna sees it in her eyes. The way they’d been coming apart for months. The indescribable hurt of it.

The way Shauna had just let her go, long before that winter night.

“That’s your problem with this situation?” Shauna asks. She can feel the past rearing up, claws unsheathed, ready to rend the flesh of her back. “That I’m not pregnant?”

Jackie’s eyes flick down her body. “I mean. You’re not, right?”

“No, I’m—”

“And you’re old,” Jackie goes on, sounding inexplicably delighted. It’s the same way she grinned when Shauna turned up in full Emily Dickinson regalia on Halloween in the seventh grade, before anyone had told her cool kids didn’t wear their costumes to school anymore.

If she were still nineteen, she’d be able to punch back, a playful fuck you dancing on her lips. If she were still nineteen, and if there was a Jackie Taylor out there somewhere, bridging into her forties with a house, a husband, a life.

She can’t bring herself to do it.

The only thing she can do is run. Run the rest of the way across the room. Run to Jackie and fling her arms around her baffled, not-quite-dead best friend.

Jackie, perplexed, hugs her back.

***

“I figure I’m going nuts,” Jackie tells this sad adult version of Shauna. “I mean, that’s the only explanation. We’ve been starving, and I’ve finally cracked.”

Shauna makes a hmm sort of noise. They’ve moved into the kitchen—Shauna had taken her by the arm and practically dragged her in here, to this land of tile and way too many ceramic rabbits—and now Shauna appears to be rearranging her entire silverware drawer. Jackie suspects it’s the least Twilight Zone thing that’ll happen all day. She opts to just go with it.

“One minute,” Jackie says, “I’m walking away with Travis. The next, I’m here. Poof.”

Shauna makes a face. Jackie leans against the counter, amused.

“What? What is that?”

“Nothing,” lies Shauna. Shauna, who lies so badly, it’s almost comical. Shauna, who keeps trying anyway.

Shauna, who fucked Jeff. So what room does she have to talk about any of Jackie’s goddamn choices, anyway?

“You’re being just…worryingly calm about this whole thing,” Shauna says, twirling a butter knife absently in one hand. “If I’d time-traveled twenty-five years into the future, I think I’d have more to say than poof.”

“Time-traveled?” Jackie laughs. “Oh, I haven’t time-traveled anywhere.”

“How do you figure that?” Shauna actually has the audacity to sound annoyed.

“Uh, because life isn’t science fiction?” It’s part of the dream, clearly, needing to explain this. Shauna isn’t half so dense in real life.

Not that this can really be Shauna Shipman. This woman. This adult woman with the big sad eyes, watching Jackie so fixedly, she’s starting to feel a little uncomfortable. This can’t be Shauna. In this house? Standing around like one of their mothers, organizing spoons?

This isn’t Shauna. This is some insane fabrication of her own psyche as she starves, as she’s surrounded by trees and crazy and a best friend who doesn’t even tell her the truth anymore. It’s all just so—

“Hallucinatory,” she says neatly. “I’m hallucinating in the woods. You know. Our new normal.”

She rolls her eyes. Shauna straightens.

“Oh my god, of course. I’m so—” She makes a beeline for the fridge, hauling it open, and begins removing everything within reach. She scatters food across the counters: bacon, a half-eaten rotisserie chicken, a jar of pickles, three packages of lunchmeat. Jackie raises her eyebrows.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“You’re starving,” Shauna says, like she’s just discovered Mars. “I need to feed you.”

“You don’t,” says Jackie, though her stomach gives a violently traitorous grumble. She remembers the soup she’d cast into a bush the last time Shauna tried to feed her. Tries not to feel guilty about the abandoned slosh none of them could really afford to waste.

Shauna stops, a different wedge of cheese in each hand. “Are you kidding? If it were me, I’d be shoveling this fridge into my mouth whole.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not eating for two, am I?” It comes out nasty. It comes out cold. She sees the words strike Shauna across the cheek as cleanly as a slap, and refuses to feel bad about it.

“Jackie.”

“I’m not here,” Jackie snaps. “I’m in the fucking woods! What does it matter if I eat in a dream?”

She waits for the shutters to drop over Shauna’s expression, the way she always shuts down during a fight. Instead, Shauna takes a deep breath, crosses the kitchen, and touches her hand.

“I don’t know what this is,” she says, “but I don’t think it’s a dream. I mean. Can you do this in a dream?”

Without warning, she pinches the skin between Jackie’s thumb and forefinger. Hard. Jackie yelps, swatting her away.

“What the fuck was that?”

Shauna points at the dual crescents standing pink against the tan of her skin. “Pain,” she says simply. “Doesn’t happen in dreams.”

“You grew up psychotic,” Jackie grumbles, rubbing the marks. Shauna tilts her head from side to side and shrugs.

“Yeah, well. We’re all just doing our best.”

She sweeps an arm at the spread across the counter, and Jackie reluctantly approaches. A smorgasbord of leftovers would normally hold zero appeal, but right now? Right now, she can’t deny the pit in her stomach, chewing away at her. Right now, she’s looking at cold pizza, an apple, a pad of fucking butter, and she suddenly feels more alive than she has in weeks.

“A burger,” she says. “Can you make me a burger?”

Shauna moves around the kitchen with deft efficiency, and Jackie eats. She tears at the chicken with her bare fingers, stuffs hunks of cheese into her mouth, throws back her head and tosses olives down by the handful. She is bottomless. She is as empty as death.

And when the burger comes, she sinks her teeth in with a moan so over the top, she’d mock herself if she had the space. Shauna rests her hip against the counter, smiling.

“Good?”

“You could put Ronald out of business,” Jackie says, her mouth full. Shauna snorts.

“Tell that to my daughter.”

Jackie’s head snaps up. “You—the kid? Holy shit, Shipman, you actually have the kid?”

A shadow passes over Shauna’s features, a flick of misery so potent, Jackie feels uncomfortable even being in the same room with it. Shauna turns away, snatching the pan off the stove and dunking it into the sink.

“Different kid,” she says after a beat. “My daughter, Callie. She’s…”

“Can I meet her?” It’s all feeling considerably more real on a full stomach, and Jackie is suddenly eager. She imagines getting back, or waking up, or whatever. Strolling up to Shauna and leaning in to murmur, I’ve got a secret. Shauna would never believe her, but it wouldn’t matter. Maybe it could patch something in them.

Not that that’s Jackie’s job. Shauna is the one who fucked up, fucked her over, fucked her boyfriend. Shauna. Not Jackie. This isn’t her mess to clean up.

Still.

“Can I?” she asks again. Shauna has gone rigid, her back to Jackie, her hands in the sink. “Come on. This is so cool! Who gets a chance like this?”

“A chance like…”

“To see the future! Like all those silly games we play, but for real this time. You grow up to have a house, and a kid, and a—husband, probably?” Unless Shauna really has grown up to be her mother, this seems a fair guess.

Shauna doesn’t answer. Her shoulders are rounded against Jackie’s words. Her hands must be pruning under the water by now, but she seems in no hurry to turn away from her washing.

“Shipman!” Jackie raises her voice, rounding the corner to knock a fist lightly against the side of Shauna’s skull. Her hair has silver in it, she can see now. Silver threads intersecting the warm brown. “Hey. Why are you being so fucking weird about this?”

The soft curve of Shauna’s jaw tightens. She looks gentler than the girl Jackie knows, somehow. Like the bones of her have been removed and restructured around something less intense. She looks like a woman who has eaten well, slept well, lived well for decades.

“It’s weird,” Shauna says. “I’m being weird because it is weird. You being here. You—” She stops. Her throat bobs. “I haven’t seen you in a long time, Jackie.”

It’s a baseball pitched through Jackie’s bedroom window, spraying glass all over the rug. She feels her heart stutter-step, her lungs shrinking. Her best friend. Her best friend in all the world, no matter what Shauna’s done. And she’s saying—

“We aren’t friends anymore?” She hates the way the words comes out, small and fragmented, laid out on the counter like the jagged remains of that windowpane. If she arranges them just right, maybe she can glue them back into place.

Shauna’s lips part around silence. Her hand is shaking as she shuts off the faucet, drops her brush into the sink.

“It’s been a long time,” she says. “Things…happened.”

“What?” Jackie demands. The food is sitting like a brick in her gut. She wants to throw up. “What things? Christ, Shauna, was it Jeff?”

It hurts to say his name. More than she could have anticipated. It hurts, and all the worse when Shauna twitches back from her.

“I can’t talk about this with you.”

“Who can you talk to?” Jackie veers to cut her off when she takes a step. Shauna always used to be faster. Shauna always used to beat her at contests of pure speed, but Jackie is eighteen years old, and Shauna is somewhere approaching middle-aged. For once, Jackie has the upper hand. “Taissa? Can you talk to her?”

Shauna flinches. It’s all the answer Jackie needs.

“Fuck this,” she mutters. She veers out of the kitchen, away from this woman who is, apparently, no longer her friend at all. She grows up without Shauna Shipman. It’s like being clubbed over the head with a tree branch, and if she waits here a minute longer, she’s going to bleed out from the shock of it.

“Jackie,” Shauna says. Jackie ignores her. There’s a door here, somewhere. A door leading out of this nightmare, out of this view into a fucked-up world. Maybe it’ll bring her out onto the street, or maybe it’ll dump her right back in the woods, on the precipice of losing her virginity to Travis Martinez. Right now, Jackie doesn’t care. She needs out.

“Jackie,” Shauna repeats, a thread of panic buckling the word. “Jackie, don’t go—”

Jackie breaks into a jog, passing furniture without seeing any of it. She sets her teeth. Passes a wall lined with frames. A gallery wall, the photos neat and perfect against green wallpaper. She glances up, hardly caring, her eyes drifting across smiles frozen behind glass.

She stops.

Looks.

Holy fucking shit.

Shauna Shipman stole her fucking life.

***

On the bright side, Jackie hasn’t made it out the front door. Shauna has absolutely no idea where she’d go first, how she’d find her again, and that thought brings unmeasurable sorrow. She should know her best friend inside and out. She should know where Jackie would go in a crisis.

To me, she thinks hollowly. She should go to me.

It doesn’t matter. Jackie hasn’t gone anywhere. She’s standing stock-still, her eyes tracing the very photos Shauna had tried so hard to steer her away from. Her face is deadly pale, the lopsided crown in her hair tipping worse than ever.

“You,” she says, and her voice is the coldest Shauna’s ever heard it. Colder, even, than that last night. “You. Married him?”

“I can explain.” Except she can’t. She can’t even explain it to the mirror some days, much less to the teenage best friend staring slack-jawed at the poor choices Shauna has made.

“You married him,” Jackie repeats. “You married Jeff?”

Shauna is struck with the absurd impulse to lie, to call it all a practical joke: No, of course not, why would I marry your high school boyfriend? Except, of course, it’s all right there in technicolor. Her young face. His young face. The knife, biting into cake.

“You married Jeff,” Jackie says, and without warning, a table lamp is in her hands. She fumbles it slightly, finding it heavier than anticipated, and draws back.

“Jackie—”

The lamp smashes, the shade lopsided against the floor. Jackie stares down at it like she can’t quite conceive of the mess she’s made.

“You married Jeff,” she says. “And you had a kid. Two kids? How many fucking kids, Shauna?”

“One,” says Shauna, like it matters, and the grief of her lost little boy washes over her with hurricane force. She grinds it back, stuffs it down where it belongs, focusing all of her attention on Jackie’s face. “I can explain.”

“Oh, can you?” Jackie’s voice is shrill. She looks like she’s just turned the corner on her childhood home to find it ablaze. “Can you explain, Shipman, how you fucked my boyfriend, hid it from me, and then went home to finish the job?”

“It was the only way!” Shauna explodes. She feels her eyes grow wide, her hands clamping over her mouth. She wants to scoop those five words up, swallow them without chewing. Jackie’s eyes narrow.

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“I can’t,” says Shauna weakly. Out of the corner of her eye, she thinks she can see the outline of another girl. Another Jackie, with a high ponytail and her arms crossed over that number nine jersey.

“Someone’s going to get hurt,” not-Jackie says. Shauna turns away.

“Were we ever friends?” Jackie sounds so small. She looks like she wants to cry, or throw up, or break another lamp. Shauna wouldn’t begrudge her anything in this moment. She tries to imagine their positions in reverse, turning up twenty-five years in the future to find a world she no longer fits into.

“You,” she says with abject honesty, “are the best friend I have ever had. Or will ever have.” I don’t know where you end and I begin. More now than ever before.

Jackie sniffs, rubbing a fierce hand across her eyes. “But you don’t talk to me anymore. Was it because of—” She won’t look at the wall again. She gestures over her shoulder in the vague direction of the wedding photo. Shauna shakes her head.

“Other way around, I think.”

Jackie makes a face. Confused. Disgusted. “Do you really love him? Really?”

Shauna hesitates. She’s not supposed to entertain this thought. Not supposed to let it in. She remembers Taissa laying beside her, saying if she ever was with someone who made her feel It, it wouldn’t be good for anyone.

“No,” she says softly. “No, I don’t think I do.”

 Jackie coughs out a noise that might be a laugh, might be a curse. “There are easier ways to ruin a friendship, you know. You don’t have to…marry the ex-boyfriend to get back at me.”

“I wasn’t!” Shauna protests. She wants to pull Jackie back into her arms. She wants to dial back ten minutes and stop Jackie from walking this way at all. “I wasn’t doing anything to get back at you, I fucking missed you. I missed you, and he was—” The nearest thing. The nearest thing she had left. “He was there, that’s all.”

Don’t ask, she begs. Don’t ask me the next part. She can’t lie to Jackie. She’s never been able to lie to Jackie. She tried and tried—is still trying, some days—and it has never landed.

But it’s Jackie. It’s Jackie, and she’s eighteen forever, and so she asks.

“So? Where am I, then? Where is this?”

“Wiskayok.” The easier question first. The easier question as she struggles to find a way out of this trap before it closes around both of them. She has the sense of footsteps in the snow, of a pit giving way under her feet.

“And me?”

Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. “I—”

Jackie looks so young. Jackie, preserved in amber in her pretty green dress intended for a Nationals celebration. Jackie, who has never, could never, set foot in this house. Shauna shuts her eyes, the photoreel winding up, the could have been: Jackie, helping her find this house. Jackie, helping her unpack. Jackie, not Jeff, sitting on the couch with a glass of wine, growing up before her eyes.

“You don’t even know, do you?” The bitterness in her voice cracks. Jackie shakes her head. “I can’t believe this.”

I know exactly where you are. Shauna’s gorge rises. She manages to make a mm sound, her go-to when Jeff is rambling away just out of earshot.

“I got out,” Jackie is mumbling. “Must’ve. New York, maybe. Or Seattle. Think I’d like Seattle.”

The Jackie Shauna had known never mentioned Seattle. She’d never mentioned going anywhere, as though the tether of her mother’s expectation was a cuff around her ankle, and she—like an elephant trained young to consider a post too sturdy—could not fathom pulling free.

“Sure,” says Shauna blankly. “I bet you would.”

Jackie fixes her with a glare. “Can’t believe this. All the places I could go on my dream walkabout, and I land with my former best friend. We were supposed to do this shit together.”

“I…wanted to,” Shauna whispers. She wanted to so badly. If Jackie could only see. If Jackie had the first idea how Shauna spent those two months after her death, huddled in the meat shed, stewing in her own grief.

If I could go back in time. How often had she thought it? Made bargains with the universe, with Lottie’s insane dirt religion. If she could only go back to that night, she’d catch Jackie before she even walked through the door. She’d drag her upstairs, bundle her in close, keep her alive through body heat and force of will.

If.

If.

It’s crazy. It’s crazy, but Jackie is standing right here. Alive. Eighteen. Not so long before Shauna will make the worst decision of her life, the one she can’t stop living with.

“Jackie,” she says. “I’m going to tell you something. Something…really awful.”

“Oh good,” says Jackie snidely. “Something new and different for you.”

“Shut up. I’m serious.” If there were a mirror nearby, she’s sure she would see her teenage self staring back. She can hear it in her voice, feel it in the relaxing lines of her face: with Jackie, she feels like her old self.

Jackie softens. Just a little, around the mouth. She bobs her head.

“Okay. Tell me.”

If Taissa were here, she’d tell Shauna to pull it together. If Natalie were here, she’d tell Shauna to think. If Misty were here, she’d have worked out the whole tangled mess before Jackie could even reach the photo wall, but none of them are here. It’s Shauna. Shauna and Jackie, the way it always used to be. The way it should always be.

And she can’t let this moment go without doing something. She couldn’t live with herself. She’s had a hard enough time doing that for the last twenty-five years.

“I don’t know what would have happened to you,” she says. “If you’d gotten out of the wilderness.”

Jackie’s face slackens. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m—Jackie.” She swallows. Her vision is blacking around the edges. She feels like she might pass out. “Jackie, you didn’t make it out.”

***

It’s a blow to the stomach. It’s a fist stealing her air. It’s Shauna saying the worst thing, the absolute worst thing, and saying it with a straight face.

“What do you mean?” It comes out as a hoarse whisper. She barely recognizes her own voice. Shauna’s eyes glisten.

“I mean you died. Die.”

No. No. No no no no nononononono—“When?”

Shauna looks her in the eye. She doesn’t blink. She doesn’t twitch. None of her usual giveaways when she’s trying so hard to lie. “Soon,” she says, and makes that single word sound like devastation.

“Who else?” It’s not the question she wants to ask. She just can’t bring herself to admit she doesn’t care. Not right now, not with Shauna blinking back tears.

“Lots of us,” she says. “It’s…a bad winter. And then we, uh, then we stayed another…”

She trails off. Jackie’s chest is caving in.

“I don’t believe you,” she lies. Shauna can’t lie worth shit. Shauna isn’t lying now. “I can’t—”

She stumbles. She needs the bathroom. She needs to—

Shauna is kneeling beside her, a hand rubbing between her shoulder blades as she vomits. It’s so like the parties they used to attend; for a moment, Jackie disconnects entirely. She’s in someone’s house, some random kid looking to cash in on party cred. She’s in someone’s house, unfamiliar, and Shauna is waiting until after she’s done blowing chunks to snark about her drink of choice.

“I know,” Shauna says. “I know.” Not it’s okay, you’re okay like she’s supposed to. Because Jackie isn’t okay. Because Jackie hasn’t been okay for decades.

This is the end of the line. No Rutgers. No deciding once and for all what to do about Jeff. No telling her mom to shove it. Not even another soccer game, one more for all the glory.

Just this. The crash, the woods, a best friend pregnant with her boyfriend’s baby. A team that looks at her with less and less respect each day.

She gags again, retches, hands digging into the floor like if she just holds on hard enough, she won’t go spinning off into the grave. She can’t breathe. She can’t breathe, and Shauna is folding around her from behind, oddly maternal, soft and solid with arms braced across Jackie’s chest.

You don’t make it out. You died. You die.

“I’m sorry,” Shauna is whispering against her ear. “I’m so sorry. You have no idea. You have no idea what I’d do to make it right.”

This, Jackie understands with cold clarity. This is what she’d do. Tell the truth. Tell the god’s honest for the first time in so long, even knowing what it would do to Jackie to hear it.

She hates Shauna Shipman—no, Shauna Sadecki—in this moment. She hates her, and she’s clinging to Shauna’s arm with one clawing hand, and there’s nothing left in her stomach to heave up.

“Don’t go outside,” Shauna breathes. “Don’t go outside to sleep. Promise me, Jackie. Swear to me, no matter what we say, no matter how we fight. Don’t go outside.”

A chill rolls up her spine. What gets her outside? A bear? More wolves?

She doesn’t want to know.

“I swear,” she pants. “I swear.”

Shauna holds her for a while longer, as the shivers ebb, as Jackie begins to orient herself in the room again. Shauna’s room. Shauna’s house.

“We should get out of here,” Shauna says, leaning back on her haunches. She winces as she stands, wiggling one leg as if to unlock her knee. Jackie stares up at her with sightless eyes.

“And go where?” She smiles without mirth. “Give my mother the heart attack she so richly deserves?”

Shauna’s eyes flick up to the gallery wall, resting on the picture of herself, an older Jeff—god, the lines around his eyes, the weathering of his skin, his hair—and a teenage girl. She’s beautiful. She reminds Jackie powerfully of Shauna at that age, clever and sharp-eyed.

“You don’t want them to see me,” Jackie guesses. Shauna’s mouth quirks.

“You have to admit, it would be awfully difficult to explain.”

She supposes that’s true. Supposes it would be damn-near impossible to show Jeff the still-breathing incarnation of a girl he’d not even had the decency to break up with before marrying her best friend.

It’s almost enough to make her want to stick around. The awkwardness of it is the least of what he deserves.

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, okay. Let’s go.”

“Do you want a change of clothes first?” Shauna plucks at her dress. “Something a little less…Doomcoming, 1996?”

Jackie shrugs. In truth, she’s fine as she is, but something in the way Shauna keeps looking at her makes her uneasy. She wonders if she dies in this dress. She wonders if this is her ghost outfit, the look she’ll be rocking for the rest of time.

Shauna scrounges in her daughter’s room, coming up with jeans and a comfortable hooded sweatshirt. It’s so like the old days, the two of them buying clothes explicitly to share. Half of her wardrobe lived in Shauna’s bedroom growing up. She had at least three pairs of Shauna’s shoes in her closet when they left. It had been natural, unspoken, perfect.

This isn’t quite the same, isn’t quite right, but the clothes smell like Shauna’s detergent, and they keep her warm. Jackie hugs herself, face turned against her shoulder, and nods.

“Thanks.”

Turns out, Shauna drives a mom-mobile. So much of this would be delicious, If Only. If only it hadn’t gone quite this way. If only it hadn’t involved so much loss. If only Jackie could live to see it.

She sways in the drive, her hand flashing out, and Shauna is there in a heartbeat. She loops an arm around Jackie’s middle, hugging her close.

“You okay? Need more food?”

The idea is nauseating. Jackie shakes her head, stumbling to the passenger seat and sliding in. If she shuts her eyes, voids out the world as she can see it, she can pretend this is just Shauna picking her up for school. Just Shauna and her shitty taste in music, like always.

“Can you just…drive?” she asks, eyes still closed. Her head bumps against the window as Shauna turns out of her drive, gradually picking up speed.

“Anywhere in particular?”

Like where? To her parents, she is dead. To her boyfriend, she is dead. To her best friend, she is dead and alive, some kind of fucked up Schrodinger’s Soccer Player. Where on earth is there to go?

“I just want to rest,” she says. “Just for a little while. You don’t have anywhere to be?"

Shauna makes a sound of confirmation. Jackie sighs.

“Great. Shauna?”

“Yeah?”

Thank you? I hate you? I love you? Don’t let me die? “Nothing,” she says wearily, and lets the rush of the road beneath their tires lull her into dreams.

It should be the best she’s slept in months. She’s always slept well in cars, comforted by the trust that someone else—her parents, Jeff, Shauna—is watching the road. In fact, at the cabin, she sometimes curled in on herself, wishing for the subtle vibrations, the gentle rock of a sedan or a truck taking curves at a neat thirty-five miles per hour. Now that she’s finally in someone else’s vehicle again, she should be sleeping like a baby.

And maybe she is. It would explain the insanity of these dreams. It would explain the sensation in her ribcage, as if someone has thrust a fishing hook between the bones and wrenched. It would explain how her eyes burn, even shut tight, with blue-white electric heat.

All of her, in fact, feels like it’s burning. She’s relieved her eyes are shut, terrified her eyelids will liquify and run down her cheeks, forcing her to see what else is happening to her flesh. She wants to scream. She wants to flail for Shauna, but of course, Shauna is not here.

The others are, though. The others. She has to squint to recognize them, muddied by shadows. She spots Van first, distinguished by her flame of hair. Then Tai, standing at her side. Natalie, roots growing out, eyes shocked. Lottie, yellow-green bruises mottled all over her face.

And others still. The same others, some part of her—which burns, oh god, it burns—understands. Van, red-haired and scarred. Taissa, her curls tied back from her face. Natalie, hugging herself. Lottie, all but mystical in a billowing robe.

“Two of them,” she mumbles in her sleep. Two of each, standing in a circle. Hands joined. Nails digging into flesh. Blood dripping off of palms.

Light. So much light, it feels like it might burn her alive. Might melt her down to the bone.

She jolts awake, her forehead knocking painfully off the glass. Shauna’s arm swings out, instinctively barring her chest like a second seatbelt.

“Hey! Hey, are you all right?”

Jackie clutches a hand to her chest. Her heart thunders under her palm, struggling to punch free.

“What’s Camp Green Pine?”

“What?” Shauna shakes her head, eyes flicking from Jackie to the road. “I have no idea. Why?”

The hook is still lodged in her ribs, tugging. She leans into the window, trying to massage the sensation loose, wondering if this is some thrilling new kind of acid reflux. She did eat—and vomit—an awful lot. There’s been stress. Maybe she’s—

Maybe she’s having a heart attack. Maybe that’s how she goes.

“Jackie!” Shauna’s hand is on her knee, shaking hard. “Why are you asking about a camp?”

“Because it’s—” Lottie’s. “It’s—” Calling. “It’s somewhere I think we need to go.”

She knows how it sounds. Sounds like something out of fucking science fiction. But, then, so does traveling to your grown-up best friend in her grown-up house and having her tell you you’re a literal ghost. It’s all out the window now.

“Okay,” says Shauna, flicking on her blinker to pull into a parking lot. “Give me a second to research.”

***

It’s obvious Jackie isn’t doing so hot, if only because, when Shauna digs her phone out of her purse, she barely blinks.

“What’s that?”

“Tiny computer,” mutters Shauna, popping open a browser window. Camp Green Pine, predictably, has too many Google entries. Camp Green Pine + NJ area shaves a few off.

“Add Lottie’s name,” Jackie advises. She’s holding her ribs like someone kicked her. Shauna shoots her a sharp look.

“Lottie? What the hell for?”

“She’s there,” Jackie says. There’s a distance in her eyes Shauna has never seen before, not even when they had that last fight. “I think she owns it.”

“How can you possibly know that?” Shauna demands. Jackie shrugs.

“I just do.” She gives an uneasy smile. Shauna obediently adds Charlotte Matthews to the end of her search request, and just like that, she’s staring at a photo of their old teammate.

Their old teammate, once beaten black and blue by Shauna’s own fists, who had been consigned to a mental institution in Europe. Last Shauna checked, she was still there.

Shauna should have checked again.

There are a million buzzwords on this website, phrases like intentional community and experimental therapy techniques. It’s Lottie, of course, so it looks as polished and legal as such a place possibly can, but all the same: Shauna doesn’t know about this.

“The others are there,” Jackie says. “We have to go.”

“Jackie, this place is in New York, we can’t just—others?” Her brain is rushing to catch up, her eyes still fixed on Lottie’s picture. “Which others?”

Jackie says their names like she’s caught in a dream. Van. Taissa. Natalie. Lottie.

“It’s weird, though,” she goes on. “It’s not just them.”

Jesus, deliver me from Misty Quigley, thinks Shauna, but when Jackie speaks again, she finds herself wishing to take it back. Misty’s a lot, but she’s a known quantity. She makes her own deranged kind of sense.

Jackie saying there are two of each of their friends waiting at this camp—a teenage and a grown version each—sails right by deranged and lands somewhere in the territory of impossible.

“I don’t understand,” Shauna says. Jackie rolls her eyes.

“Join the club, Shipman, we’ve got membership badges.”

“Jackie, you have to know I can’t just up and leave. I have—”

“A family?” Jackie sneers. “A husband? A life?”

She owes Jackie this. She owes Jackie so much more than this. Shauna steadies herself, hands curling around the wheel.

“Okay, okay, just. Give me a minute.”

She calls Jeff. Jackie’s eyes bore holes in the side of her head while she settles the phone in its cradle, GPS to Camp Crazy Town already on the screen. She motions for Jackie to stay silent as his voice filters over the car speakers.

“Hey, babe, what’s shakin’?”

There’s a forced levity in every word, of course. Each time they talk, each time she calls, he’s expecting more in the Adam Martin debacle. The cops closing in. Shauna poking more holes in their simple, boring life.

If he only knew what was sitting in their minivan at this exact moment.

“Shauna?” Jeff asks. Jackie jabs her in the side, and Shauna snaps to attention.

“Hi! Yes, I’m here. Sorry, I was going through a…tunnel.” She winces. Jackie widens her eyes, mouthing, The fuck?

“You sound stressed,” Jeff says without missing a beat. “Need somethin’?”

“No, no, I’m great. Well. Good. All right.”

Jackie is staring at her. Shauna turns away.

“It’s just—I found out that Nat and Tai have, uh, gone to New York.”

“Oh yeah?” He sounds less interested now. Nat and Tai are safe territory. No imminent jail time to be found on that subject.

“Mmhmm. They, um, they’re going to a retreat. With Lottie.”

“Lottie-Lottie? Your old friend, Lottie?”

No, the other one. “That would be her. Yup. I guess she runs a little camp, and they’ve…gone to visit.” This sounds awful. If she couldn’t tell on her own, the acrobatics Jackie’s face is performing would hammer it right home.

“What, like a spa?”

“Uh huh. A spa. I thought it couldn’t hurt to go meet them there. You know.” She lowers her voice, injecting her most conspiratorial tone. “With all that’s been going on. Lately.”

She can practically see the lightbulb go off. “That sounds like a great idea! Don’t even worry about the house, Callie and I know how to hold down the fort.”

Something complicated jitters across Jackie’s face. Shauna shuts her eyes.

“It’ll only be for a day or two, I’m sure.”

“A girls’ night!” Jeff says happily. “Take your time, don’t even worry about it.” Go. Go away so the rest of us can find our footing without you screwing it up.

“Thanks, Jeff. I’ll talk to you soon.”

He says it—love you—and she disconnects before he can hear her hesitate. Jackie blows out a breath.

“Wow.”

“I know.”

“God, he sounds…”

“I know.” Shauna throws the van in gear, following the little blue line on her screen. “Believe me, if I’d known—”

What? How does that sentence end? If she’d known what he’d become? What she’d become? How boring life would be together? If she’d known that Jackie would reappear, totally alive and totally revolted by this turn of events, after twenty years of marriage?

“Whatever,” she mumbles. “I just—now we can go figure out what all this is about.”

They fall quiet for a while, Jackie still massaging her side. Every so often, she shakes out her hands. Shivers all over.

“Cold?” asks Shauna fearfully. What is she supposed to do if, like a cosmic rubber band, Jackie’s death springs back to meet her in this car? Getting rid of the body of an ill-advised affair was bad enough. Getting saddled with Jackie’s corpse again?

She’s relieved when Jackie shakes her head. “No, I’m on fucking fire for some reason. Is it hot in here?”

No. No, it isn’t. Shauna wants to slam her eyes shut. She can still see it sometimes. The pyre. The snow. The dark that didn’t do nearly enough to blot out what they were doing.

“Shauna?”

She reaches without looking, kicking the AC into high gear. Jackie sinks deeper into her seat with a sigh.

“Thanks. So. You’re still close with everybody?”

“Was I ever?” Shauna quips. Jackie snorts.

“I mean. Out there?”

“That was different.” In every way. “Nobody else could possibly understand—”

“I was there,” Jackie says. “I understand. We still…it still sucked.”

Shauna flexes a hand on the steering wheel, watching the knobs of her knuckles pop white. “No, we are not close. Taissa comes around every once in a while, when she’s…struggling. Nat’s been in and out of rehab for years, I barely see her. Lottie’s been off the map pretty much since we got rescued. So has Van. Misty’s…Misty.”

“Misty got out?” Jackie raises her eyebrows. “Okay, actually, that one makes sense. She knew what she was doing, like, a scary amount of the time.”

“My point is, we’re not close. None of us. It’s…hard.” Understatement of the century, but she doesn’t know how to put it any plainer. “It’s hard, going through something like that and then trying to just reintegrate like nothing happened at all.”

“Something like…” Jackie frowns. “I mean, it was bad, yeah. Worst thing that could have happened to us. But…”

Shauna knows what she means. Starving and scrounging and scuffling with one another—those are the things Jackie’s familiar with. Wolf attacks and surprise pregnancies aside, when planes aren’t bursting out of the air and legs aren’t being hacked off with axes…

“Those were the good times,” she says shortly. “The stuff you remember.”

Jackie blinks. “Wow. Okay. Hate that for us.”

“Yeah.” She can’t tell her. She won’t tell her. Painting someone’s death in broad strokes is one thing, but if Jackie ever found out what they did with her after— “So, yeah, things got bad. Worse. And those aren’t the kinds of bonds you take to book club later.”

Silence again. She hates the way it boxes them in. There never used to be silences with Jackie, not the awkward kind where both of them know someone should be talking. It used to be so seamless.

Hard to fall back on inside jokes with a girl you have thought about every day for decades. A girl you last saw riddled with bite marks. A girl whose bones you scraped your fingernails across—

“They’re not going to handle it well,” she says without thinking. “Seeing you. It’s going to be confusing.”

“Word of the day.” Jackie’s forehead wrinkles, her whole face collapsing in on itself as she considers this. “But they’ll be…happy? Like, they won’t—they didn’t celebrate when I—”

“God. No. No one celebrated.” Shauna glances away from the road. “How could you think that?”

“Well, I wasn’t exactly our lauded leader out there, was I?” She sounds so frustrated. “I didn’t thrive on it like Lottie or Misty or Nat. Or you.”

“I didn’t thrive on anything.”

“Oh, you know what I mean.” Jackie makes a sawing motion in the air. “I’m just saying, if one of us was going to kick it and have no one care, it probably was—”

“We cared,” Shauna snaps. “I cared, Jackie. You have no idea what losing you did to me.”

More silence. Jackie stares out the window. Shauna punches on the radio, ambles through a few stations, punches it off again.

“I miss you,” she says, watching the dividing lines scroll past beneath them. “Every day. I’ve never stopped thinking about that last night, the fight we had. It was my fault, you know.”

Jackie doesn’t answer. Shauna remembers her the night of the party, how she kept putting distance between them. How she clearly already knew something was up. How she’d looked, enormous eyes and furious slash of a mouth, when she’d been shoved into the pantry and locked in.

“I’m sorry,” Shauna says, her voice catching. “I’m so sorry, Jackie. For all of it. Jeff. Not having your back out there. Letting you…letting you die. I could have stopped it, I could have fixed it, and I just—”

A hand folds over her knee. Jackie is trying (failing, but trying admirably all the same) to smile.

“Hey. Shipman. I don’t know what happens out there to me, but I can tell you one thing for sure. You didn’t do it.”

Shauna starts to protest, starts to say that all of this is indisputably her fault, and Jackie raps a fist against her kneecap.

“You did some fucked up shit, yeah. What you did with Jeff? That was fucked up. And I’m gonna hold it over your head for basically the rest of time.”

“I know,” mutters Shauna, thinking of the ghost-girl and her smirk this morning.

“But me dying?” Jackie shakes her head. “Uh uh. No way would you have let that happen if you had a choice. You’re my best friend. And I see…I see it hasn’t been easy.”

It’s an olive branch. It’s a whole tree. Shauna wants so badly to accept it.

If Jackie lives, she tells herself. If Jackie makes it through this. Then she will forgive herself for all of it.

If Jackie lives, and not a moment sooner.

***

It’s night by the time they reach the camp. Jackie’s leg jitters, pounding the floor as they coast through the dark. She’s dozed on and off in between harassing Shauna for details on the world (celebrity breakups, the movies she just has to see when this is all fixed, Shauna’s still-crap taste in music). The tug behind her ribs has been easing a little more with each mile put behind them. They’re going in the right direction.

But every time she’s fallen asleep, that horrible electric sensation has coursed through her bones again. She sees them all when she shuts her eyes: two pairs of freckled hands, linked; two pairs of brown fingers, curled around one another; a hand bedecked with gold rings joined with a hand whose fingernails are chipped; two pale hands, trembling. A circle. A perfect circle of eight.

Eight’s a good number, she feels. Eight is an important number, she feels. Nice and round, nice and endless. Turn an eight on its side, and it’s infinite. So much potential. So much—

“Fuck,” she mumbles, rubbing her eyes. “This is too much.”

“Dreams?” Shauna’s voice is strung tight. She’s squinting through the dark, searching for the elusive turn ahead. Jackie nods tersely.

“They’re so fucking weird. I feel like it’s trying to tell me something.”

“It?” Shauna repeats, a blade tucked into the word. Jackie shrugs.

“Whatever subconscious freakazoid runs the brain train when I close my eyes. And whatever’s giving me these goddamn hot flashes when I wake up. Is this what menopause is like?”

Shauna snorts. When Jackie continues to watch her, waiting, her expression turns to horror. “I don’t know! You think I’ve hit menopause?”

“It can happen in your forties,” Jackie says, straining for credulity. “Coach said so in that horrible health class he so should not have been teaching.”

“I haven’t—I’m not—”

“There!” Jackie cries suddenly, craning forward in her seat and pointing through the windshield. “That’s it, that’s the sign!”

Shauna whips them off the road, their headlights casting over six figures huddled on the other side of a gate. A wave of apprehension hits Jackie square in the chest. They should have talked less about the downfall of MTV and more about this. More about how to float this, specifically.

Oh well. Too late now.

“Wait!” Shauna calls, launching herself out of the minivan. Jackie hurries to catch up. “Wait for us!”

“Shauna?” a woman yells back. “Are you fuckin’ kidding me? What are you doing here?”

“No,” a voice she recognizes as Taissa’s whispers. “No way.”

“Can’t be,” Van adds, sounding lightly nauseous. “Am I—am I seeing this?”

That’s when it really hits her. When it really lands. Not with the shock of Shauna telling her, but with the grim resignation that follows a moment you know you’ll remember the rest of your life. Shauna’s her best friend. Shauna, even in telling her the worst news possible, sugarcoats. She can’t help it, and Jackie knows if their positions were reversed, she’d be likely to do the same.

These guys won’t. Her teammates, staring at her with open horror, make it all real.

“Everyone,” Shauna pants, bowed over her knees. “Hello. Thanks for having us. What the fuck is going on?”

Jackie’s whole body is blistering. The cool night air skimming across her skin aches. She considers backpedaling toward the car, leaping into the driver’s seat, starting over somewhere no one knows Jackie Taylor is supposed to be dead.

Instead, she pastes on a smile. The same one she threw on before a pep talk or a halftime pump-up. The same one she threw on so many times in the woods to no avail. She tries to sound like she’s kidding when she says, “You were right, Shipman. They don’t look like they’re handling this well at all.”

“Jesus,” teenage Van hisses. “Jesus, I’m gonna be sick.”

That seems a little much. Okay, sure, yeah, seeing someone who is supposed to be six feet under has its terrifying elements, but it’s not as though Jackie is rotting. Why they’re all gawping at her like this, she can’t imagine. Is it really any weirder than double-vision?

“It’s okay!” Jackie insists. “I’m not a zombie. Or a ghost. Just a dead girl walking.” She tries to inject as much laughter into the words as she can, as if every step isn’t unbinding something in her.

Six pairs of eyes shift to Shauna, accusatory.

“You told her?” the grown redhead with Van’s scars blurts. “Seriously, dude? Have you watched a single movie in your whole life?”

“This isn’t The Butterfly Effect!” Shauna protests. Van groans.

“It might be! Hi, by the way.”

“Can we get inside?” the woman at her side—Taissa, clearly—asks. “We can deconstruct Shauna’s terrible choices in private.”

“Terrible?” Shauna blusters. “This is hardly the worst thing I’ve done in the last month!”

“Debatable,” adult Taissa mutters, setting off toward the lights of the compound.

Lottie—the grown-up version, almost too beautiful to look upon—leads them into a building with a wide-open floor speckled with mats and pillows. There, huddled together under warm low light, sit two familiar girls. They’re both rubbing their eyes, yawning, looking as though they’ve just woken up.

“I thought we’d have to wake you,” adult Lottie tells her younger self. The teenage version shrugs. She looks exactly as she had in Jackie’s dream: busted. Miserable. Her hand firm on Natalie’s shoulder.

That part is new, and so is the unease in her voice when she says, “Had a dream. It didn’t make sense.”

“When do your dreams ever?” asks the younger Taissa sardonically. Van elbows her in the side.

“This was worse,” teenage Natalie says, her voice raspy with sleep. “She said she saw—no fucking way.”

Her eyes have slid over the adults, snagging briefly on Shauna with interest, and landed on Jackie. She raises a hand, wiggling the fingers one by one.

“Look, like I told them, I’m not—”

Whatever she’d been about to say rocks out of her in an oof as Natalie scrambles to her feet and launches across the room. She yanks Jackie into a violent hug. Lottie follows more slowly, a hunted expression on her damaged face. Then Van, pulling Tai along in her cautious wake.

All of them wrap around her, one enormous tangle of arms and hair and breath. All of them, with Jackie in the middle, exactly where she’s supposed to be. They don’t speak. They don’t seem to know how. They cling to her, and for the first time in months, Jackie remembers these people are supposed to be—are, at least some of the time—her friends.

Tears prick her eyes as they let go. Van’s smile is weak, and Taissa’s is guilty, and Lottie keeps reaching to brush her fingers against the ends of Jackie’s hair. Natalie, most of all, holds to her. She opens her mouth like she wants to speak, and suddenly, Jackie doesn’t want to hear it. Any of it. Jackie thinks that moment was too beautiful to spoil with something awful.

“It’s okay,” she tells them, not even wanting to know what she’s absolving them of. “I’m okay.”

One by one, they peel away and drop to the floor, forming a scattered circle. Jackie joins them, huddling into herself. With the warmth of their embrace fading, that horrible unreal heat has been building again, faster and more complete than before. Sweat trickles in rivulets down her back. She feels like she’s spent hours in a sauna.

“How the fuck did you find us, anyway?” adult Natalie asks Shauna.

Jackie raises a hand again, clearing her throat. All eyes turn to her.

“Jesus,” teenage Tai mutters. “This just keeps getting more insane.”

“More insane than your dark passenger leading the way?” adult Van asks.

“Or Lottie knowing you’d be at the gate?” teen Nat adds.

“All of it!” Tai throws up her hands. Van slides her fingers up the back of Tai’s neck, stroking gently.

“Easy. It’s okay.”

“We’re connected,” Lottie murmurs. Her eyes are so much older than Jackie remembers. How could this be the same girl who sang the opening bars to a Seal song just hours ago? “All of us. To the earth. To each other.”

“Why us?” the older Taissa demands. “Why not Misty, or any of the others? I mean, if we can be plucked out of time and space, what the hell kind of rules could there possibly be?”

She scratches at her leg, looking rattled. There’s a wedding ring on her left hand, Jackie notes. She looks reflexively to Van. It’s so strange seeing them so comfortably together. She’d only just watched them kiss for the very first time, and now the teenage versions are bundled close as a two-for-one sale. And the adults…

The adults aren’t looking at each other, but they can’t seem to control the angle of their bodies. Van’s, tilted toward Taissa’s. Taissa’s boot-clad foot bumping Van’s. There’s something there, something Jackie has neither the time nor focus to parse.

“There are always rules,” says teenage Van patiently. “Right?” She looks to her older self for confirmation, visibly buoyed when the woman nods. “We figure out the rules, we figure out how to fix this.”

“Put us back?” asks teen Nat, straightening. Van gives a reluctant little shrug.

“I mean, yeah. Guess so. We have to, right?” She doesn’t look happy about it. None of them do. “Most of the stories are pretty clear. A single timeline can’t hold the weight of two identical lives. And if Tai, and Lottie, and now Jackie were all led to this exact spot…”

“Then it’s for a reason,” teenage Lottie finishes. “We just need to work out what that is.”

They stew over it for a while, Jackie looking at each in turn. They look rough. The younger versions are worse than she remembers by far: paler, with gaunt faces and stark crawlspaces beneath their eyes. Their clothes are clean, their hair recently washed, but they still look broken, somehow. Too thin, too angular, too washed-out.

The older versions are rough in a different way. They won’t look one another in the eye. They fidget. Lottie twisting her rings. Natalie scuffing her shoes against the floor. Shauna keeps glancing toward the door like she wants to make a break for it. The older Taissa keeps glancing at Van like she doesn’t know she’s doing it.

They don’t look like girls who just surrounded her with a too-ferocious hug. They don’t look like people who know how to navigate one another at all.

What happened to us? Jackie wants to ask, but she’s terrified someone will tell her. The whole truth. The whole story. She’s terrified someone will open their mouth and speak it into permanence. This is how they grow up. This is how they turn out.

Everyone, except:

“I’m the outlier,” she says, realizing. “I’m the only one who didn’t make it out.”

“No,” Shauna begins, “not by a long shot—”

“Here.” Jackie hops up, striding to the middle of the haphazard circle. Her dream burns in her memory. Eight hands, joined together. Eight people, forming an unbroken seal. Bound.

“It’s me,” she says. “I’m the only one who didn’t grow up.”

The look on Shauna’s face almost breaks her. She looks sharply away, focusing her eyes on the rest of them. They look tired and sad, guilty and ashamed, but even reflected back eight times over, it’s easier than the way Shauna is watching her right now.

“Tai,” she says, pausing in front of the teenage Taissa. “You led them here?”

Tai looks uncomfortable. “I guess. I was—” She hesitates, sets her jaw. “Sleepwalking. I’ve been sleepwalking.”

“And Lottie,” Jackie goes on, hustling to the girl with bruises on her skin. “You have that weird thing. With the dead French guy and the blood. You dreamt me.”

She hadn’t believed in any of that for a second until tonight, until the way Lottie had looked at her for the first time. Now there’s something else in that look, a grim certainty. Lottie nods.

“We’re connected,” she says again. She looks to Tai. To Nat. To Van.  “The four of us. We’re the most connected.”

“What are you talking about?” Shauna asks. Lottie leaps up, excitement beginning to seep into the swing of her arms, the lift of her chin.

“No, listen. I hear the Wilderness—”

“And the Wilderness hears me,” her adult counterpart finishes, realization dawning.

“And Nat understands the wild like nobody else. She has to, she’s the one who finds all our game. She makes the maps.”

“And Taissa,” teen Van says, “sees it in the dark. The trees. The symbols. She knows how to find them.”

“And you,” Lottie adds, reaching to grasp Van’s elbow. “You saw it clearer than any of us. It. When you died—”

“She didn’t die,” both Taissas snap. Adult Van raises a hand to shush them.

“But I wasn’t alive, either. I was somewhere in-between.”

“And Jackie.” Lottie is swinging around, looking at her with sad eyes, a miserable smile. “Jackie was the first to be taken. Really taken. Jackie was the first of us to die because the Wilderness chose.”

She doesn’t like the sound of that. She doesn’t like that at all. She wants to point out that she wasn’t the first to die, that she remembers the slapdash funeral services for Rachel and Coach Martinez and the pilots and Laura Lee. She wants to protest that she doesn’t see anything, she doesn’t belong here.

But maybe, she thinks with mounting solidity, that’s the point. She doesn’t have an adult version. She only has Shauna. And Shauna’s teenage self is nowhere to be seen.

“We’re connected,” adult Lottie says. “I keep thinking it, it keeps…coming to me, over and over. It wants us together. It always liked us together. And of everyone, we are the voice, the ears, the eyes, the heart of that place.”

“We brought it back with us,” Natalie mutters. Her dark hair is mussed, her mouth tense. “And it, what? Gave back Jackie? That’s not how this shit works.”

“I think—” Adult Lottie stands, moves to Jackie faster than she can process. She touches a hand lightly to Jackie’s cheek. Her skin is cool against the fire of Jackie’s. “I think it’s for you. I think all of this is for you.”

Shauna sits up, guarded. “You think…you think it could change things? Save her?”

This is the moment, in a movie, where everyone would start crying and laughing and hugging one another. This is the moment where everything should feel bright and beautiful. Hope springing eternal or whatever.

Instead, teenage Natalie bites her lip. “Shauna,” she says slowly, her gaze flicking to Jackie. “You know how that went down. If it doesn’t…couldn’t it get a lot worse? I mean. A lot worse?”

Anger flares, then, brighter than hope. It snuffs the residual comfort of their embrace. It snuffs out everything else. Jackie grits her teeth.

“Are you saying you want me to die?”

“Of course I’m not saying that!” Nat’s back on her feet now, all elbows and big, sad eyes. “I’m just saying we don’t know.”

“We could starve faster,” Tai says. She looks, for some reason, utterly disgusted with herself. “We could kill everyone.”

“Or,” Shauna says, “Jackie could live. Jackie could live, and it could all change. All of it. Maybe we get out sooner. Maybe more of us make it!”

“Guys.”

They turn, quieting before a real argument can break out. Van is standing there, arms at her sides, looking tired. Looking straight at Jackie.

“The script’s written,” she says. “However the story goes now, it’s already in motion. Either it fixes things, or it doesn’t. It’s going to happen either way.”

“She’s right,” adult Van adds. She presses a thumb to her temple, dragging a punishing little circle as she winces. “God knows I wish things were different. Just about every last thing.” She’s looking at her Taissa. She’s almost smiling. “But we don’t have control of that. We already crushed the butterfly.”

“Now we see,” Taissa concludes, reaching for her hand, “what happens next.”

***

They form a circle. Shauna wants to put it off longer, stop them from acting for at least the rest of the night. Let Jackie sleep in a bed one last time, just in case. Tuck herself in right beside her so they can whisper all night, swapping secrets. Shauna can tell her everything. How it felt to be pregnant without her best friend holding her hand. How it felt to lose the baby. How it felt to raise Callie. How it felt to live the rest of her life feeling so impossibly removed from the world.

She hasn’t had enough time. If this is the last she gets with Jackie, she wants it to go on as long as possible.

Jackie herself is the one to convince her. Jackie, who keeps rattling her arms, bouncing on her heels, breathing hard. She’s too hot, she keeps saying. She’s too hot, and she can’t get enough air.

“I think it has to be now,” she wheezes. Teenage Lottie rests a hand on her shoulder.

“Tell us what to do.”

That doesn’t feel right to Shauna, who knows all too well who ran the show out in the woods. It was never Jackie, not from the first moment. Misty, sometimes. Shauna, sometimes. Occasionally Van, or Taissa, or even Mari. Lottie, often. Natalie, most of all. Everyone but Jackie made a choice with an axe, with a compass, with a deck of cards, with a crown of antlers. Everybody but Jackie got to speak.

But Lottie is looking at Jackie now, trusting her, and they could be back in high school. Back on the field. Jackie clapping her hands, leading a play, heading in that wonderful final goal of her life.

“You have to hold hands,” says Jackie. They move to obey—teenage Van grabbing teen Tai, adult Nat grabbing adult Lottie—and she shakes her head. “No, no. With yourselves.”

They cringe back.

“We can’t,” Nat says in a low voice. “I—we can’t do that.”

“We’re not supposed to,” says Van like the words aren’t entirely her own. Jackie tips a half smile in her direction.

“Yeah. You are.”

One by one, they obey, clustering around the bags of supplies collected from the compound’s stores. The Lotties go first, the serenity of their faces shuddering when palm crosses palm. Shauna sees them convulse from shoulder to fingertip, sees the bite of nails driving reflexively deep into skin. Adult Natalie touches the edge of the older Lottie’s robe, worried.

“How’s it feel?”

“Like power,” Lottie says, her voice throaty. Her head casts back, black hair sheeting over her shoulders. “Raw power.”

She reaches with her free hand, taking Natalie’s, and Natalie takes her own in turn. They’re grimacing, blonde and brunette, huntress and forever queen. Blood drips down from crescent grooves, mingling. The same blood. The same blood, when all else has changed.

Teenage Nat stretches, clasping teen Van. “C’mon. It’s not so bad.”

Van swallows, her younger hand hovering an inch from her adult one. For a moment, Shauna thinks she’ll pull back. And then their hands are one, the freckles identical, the only true difference a set of silver rings. The scars on their faces burn. Crimson trickles between their clasped palms.

They’re starting to hum. Not an electrical pulse, but a song like the wind rustling through the trees as a storm approaches. It fills the room, vibrating the fillings in Shauna’s back teeth, her feet in her shoes. She can feel her own blood in her ears, whooping to be set free.

“Tai,” says adult Van. “Please.”

Taissa moves to her, unequivocally awake. She slides a hand down Van’s arm, weaving their fingers. She squeezes hard. She extends her other hand to herself.

“This is nuts,” Tai says, and accepts. As one, they jerk, their eyes going blank. There are moon-shaped marks, visible from across the room, blunt nails biting nearly to the bone. Neither one so much as winces.

“Jackie,” says adult Lottie. “Come on. We need to do it now.”

She waits just long enough for Jackie to sprint into the circle. Her hand is outstretched for Tai’s, ready to close the loop.

“Wait!” Shauna cries. “Wait, you just—you can’t just go again! Like this? Really?”

Jackie gives her a smile. It’s genuine. It’s perfect. In it, Shauna sees none of the anger, none of the blame. None of the haughty arrogance she sometimes mistook for malice. Just Jackie at her absolute best: beautiful, eighteen, her best friend. The person she loves even when loving stopped making sense decades ago.

“I’m sorry,” Shauna says, and realizes she is sobbing. “I’m so sorry, Jackie.”

“I’m not,” says Jackie, and winks. “You’re not getting rid of me so easy, Shipman. Promise.”

Lottie’s hand catches Tai’s, and the hum rises to a crescendo. A hurricane of energy fills the room, sending tables clattering, chairs thrown by a giant’s hand. Shauna bows her head, squinting into the blue-white light. She wants to see. She needs to see.

She needs to watch Jackie go this time. She needs to be here for every single second.

It’s the thought she’s still clinging to when the room goes black.

***

There is sunlight pouring through the windows.

There are people murmuring.

Shauna Shipman is dreaming again. She must be. The bedroom doesn’t let in nearly this much light. Jeff doesn’t make nearly this much noise. Every friend Callie has wouldn’t make this much noise.

She cracks an eye to find a view of endless purple.

“What the—” She sits up too fast, her vision fizzling out. She rocks in place, surprised to find something sturdy at her back. A hand. Some strange man, holding her upright, offering a benevolent smile.

“Ugh,” Van Palmer groans from somewhere to her left. “Even the ‘shrooms weren’t this bad.”

“Charlotte!” an unfamiliar voice is saying. A young woman with brown hair and a lip ring, bending over Lottie’s prone frame. “Natalie! Can someone get some water?”

Lottie is sitting groggily up, looking exactly as Shauna remembers. “Lisa,” she says, sounding incredibly calm for a woman who has just been found passed out on a floor. “We’re all right.”

“Are—are you sure?” Lisa looks deeply unconvinced. “You were unconscious.”

“Completely fine. A misunderstanding. Leave us, please. Everyone.”

Leave us, thinks Shauna with an edge of amusement. What is she, Dracula?

“Do you always talk like that around your minions?” Taissa asks. Van gives a gruff little laugh, rubbing her head.

“They’re not minions,” Natalie grumbles. “They’re our community.”

“Our?” Shauna repeats. “Since when?”

“I—” Nat blinks several times. Probes her forehead with two fingers. Looks at her hand like she’s never seen it before, at a strange set of crescent-shaped scars. “Since it…started?”

“You started this place,” Tai deadpans. “The both of you. Together.” She pauses, blinking. “Yeah. Yeah, you did. You…told us you were going to break Lot out of her Swiss…prison…”

“No,” says Shauna. “No, that’s not how it happened.”

Except, she thinks, it is. It wasn’t. But it is now. She’s got both versions in her head, standing side by side, twin movies projected on a giant screen. A world where Nat knew nothing of Lottie Matthews for a quarter of a century. A world where Nat couldn’t be kept away from her by all the king’s horses and men. One world. The same world. Somehow.

“Taissa,” she says slowly. “What’s your wife’s name?”

“What?” Tai blinks at her. Her brown eyes are foggy, her hair a mess. She’s idly rubbing the nail-shaped scars on one hand. “Are you fucking with me?”

Shauna nods at her left hand. Gold ring on her finger. A wedding ring. “Humor me. What’s your wife’s name?”

“Van,” says Tai. “Van Palmer? Obviously?”

Van raises her hand in a wave. “You forget me so fast? I’m wounded, Shauna. I thought what we had was real.”

And no, Shauna knows, that isn’t the right answer. Van Palmer is the love of Tai’s life, sure; they all know it, even Tai herself. But her wife is Simone. Her wife, and the mother of her child, and—

“Do you have kids?” she blurts. They look at her like she’s lost it.

“Yeah, yeah,” Van drawls. Shauna can make out her scars with ease—the ones on her face, where they belong, and the new ones etched into her freckled hand. “You’re the only parent among us. Rub it the fuck in.”

Tai elbows her. “I thought you didn’t want kids! We agreed! Only dogs!”

“Sammy,” Shauna says. Tai’s brow furrows.

“Simone’s son? What’s he got to do with anything?”

“He’s…I mean—isn’t he your—”

“Favorite kid in the universe? Uh, duh.” Tai rolls her eyes. Van folds her hands beneath her chin, faux-angelic.

“He likes me better. For the record.”

“Simone,” Shauna says firmly. “You and Simone.” This isn’t coming out right. None of it. She can tell from the downward tug of Taissa’s mouth, the way she darts a glance at a confused Van.

“We…yeah, we tried it, for a minute. You know she and I barely put two years under our belt before I got my head on straight.”

“Gay,” Van corrects in a sing-song. Tai laughs.

“She wasn’t exactly asking my advice when she got pregnant. Thanks for reminding me, though, his birthday’s coming up. I promised I’d send him something really good this year.”

That can’t be right, either. Taissa, in contact with her not-ex-wife? Except…yeah, now that she thinks of it. Tai and Van did split up, for a while, in college. Tai had dated around. Nothing too serious. She’d met Simone once, thought maybe this was the woman who’d get Tai to settle, but—

“You guys ran into each other at my…graduation ceremony,” she says under her breath. “Hit it off again. You—cheated on your girlfriend—”

Tai grimaces. “And I’m luckier than most, ‘cause she forgave me. At least enough to saddle me with babysitting duty when she’s off traveling with her wife. What’s going on, Shauna?”

“It changed,” Shauna says. She’s staring at the ring on Van’s finger. She’s staring at the way Lottie is brushing the hair back from Natalie’s forehead, the scars standing out against her otherwise clean hand. There’s unmistakable love in that gesture, and just as much in the way Nat swats her hand away. “The story. The story changed.”

Their communal puzzlement stretches to fill the room. Shauna slaps her hands on the floor. She pushes a bag out of her space, watches food spill out with uncomprehending eyes.

“Who else? Who else made it out of the woods?”

Tai and Van exchange an uneasy glance.

“Shauna…,” says Tai, her tone careful, “do you really want to do this again? Rehash it all? Christ, look around. We spent the night toasting to too many memories.”

“And then drinking to forget them again,” Van says darkly.

“Who,” Shauna presses, “else? How did we survive the first winter? After the bear. After the bear, what happened?”

They look ill. They look like any one of them is ready to call 911, get Shauna some professional help.

“Coach,” Nat says, her forehead creased with the pain of the memory. “Got sick. Remember? He went out one night, refused to take Misty with him. When we found him, he’d been in the snow for hours.”

Coach. Coach Ben. Coach Ben, who didn’t set their cabin ablaze, because he’d never gotten the chance. Coach Ben, who died before the baby was even born, and whose body…on the pyre…with the snow…

It didn’t change. Not all of it. She remembers the way they’d staggered out into the night. The way they’d taken fistfuls of his flesh. The way they hadn’t looked at one another, unable to believe the last adult among them was…

The rest of it is so much like what she remembers. The cards. The Hunt. Javi. The pits. The baby. The sound of his cries. The way they’d all wept as she begged, as she begged for them to hear him—

The way Jackie had wept.

She fumbles to her knees, scrambling across the floor to her purse, kicking aside the bags of supplies—left behind, she finally registers, despite their best intentions. Her phone lights up, a string of texts clustered over a photo of Callie aged four or so.

Shipman, where r u? supposed to be movie nite.

c'mon, picked good ones. Bruce-a-thon.

Callie’s never seen Armageddon?? the fuk u doin w/ that kid

Shauna? not funny.

srsly. stg Shauna if ur out w/ TaiVan w/out me again

shauna?

text me back.

“She’s alive,” she breathes. “Jackie’s alive.”

Tai presses a hand against her forehead, brows raised. “The hell kind of hangover is this? Yeah, she’s alive. She better be, we just put her on your goddamn deed.”

The deed. To the house. To the house she bought with Jeff, trying to make it work despite everything. The house she bought with the man she’d been with long enough to have a child, a beautiful girl with more Jackie in her than Jeff, somehow. Jeff, whom she’d never married, but to whom she’d felt a certain debt after she’d lost their son.

Jackie told her it wasn’t her fault. Jackie told her over and over not to blame herself. His mother was starving. You couldn’t have done anything. But Shauna hadn’t been able to shake it. Hadn’t been able to convince herself it didn’t mean something.

You don’t even love him, Jackie’d said with fierce certainty. They hadn’t spoken for weeks afterward. Shauna remembers feeling ill. Shauna remembers feeling sick to her stomach.

Calling Jackie the night she’d finally taken a pregnancy test. Sure in her bones she’d fucked something that could never be un-fucked.

Remembers Jackie’s voice over the line, warm and amused and just a little bit damaged: Don’t you know, Shipman, that anything can be un-fucked if you’re willing to bleed for it?

Jackie hadn’t wanted her to do it again, hadn’t understood how she could, but then—they were all fucked up. Van and Tai, with their semi-regular breakups over those first ten years. Nat, in and out of rehab once she’d pulled Lottie from the institution. Lottie, juggling new meds and old visions and a love so powerful, it sometimes looked like blind rivalry.

Jackie, who led the feast that first night, looking at the slow-roasted remains of that last adult. Jackie, who knelt in the snow, touched his shoulder, and whispered, Oh god. I understand.

They’d all been fucked up, and Shauna as much as anyone, so she’d tried. She’d tried, with Jeff, and they’d had Callie. And then they’d moved on. She got the house.

The house where Jackie’s stayed ever since she got back from a six-year trip abroad. Doing all the things her mother wouldn’t approve of. Exploring the world until she could come back home.

To Shauna.

She’s lived it. She’s spent twenty-five years living every second of it. She remembers.

“Adam,” she says quickly. “Adam Martin. Does that name mean anything to you? The artist.”

Tai wrinkles her nose. “Ew, Shauna, no, not another of your pet projects. I love you, but they never get off the ground. You can’t save every rundown art major you stumble over.”

“I didn’t kill him,” Shauna mumbles. A giggle rises in her chest, pushing up against her bewilderment. “I didn’t sleep with him. I don’t even know him.”

“Great,” says Van, drawing out the word. “Do we need to get her to a hospital, or…?”

“She’s fine.” Lottie reaches down, pulling Shauna and her phone up. She smiles. Taps the side of her head very gently. “Aren’t you?”

“I’m not married,” Shauna says happily. She grabs Van’s hand, Tai’s in the other, holding them both up like trophy fish. “You are. And you two—” She runs to Nat, dragging her to Lottie’s side. “Run a fucking cult! And Misty fucking Quigley has never helped me hide a body!”

“Oh boy,” Van mutters. She makes the universal finger-twirl of crazy beside her head.

“I don’t live with Jeff!” Shauna cackles. “I don’t see ghosts! My best friend isn’t dead!”

“No,” Tai says reasonably, “but she might kill your ass if you don’t call her. You know what Jackie’s like.”

“Alive,” Shauna says. She wants to sprint in circles. She wants to lay on the floor and sob. “Alive, and—” She blinks. Another memory. A poppy. A ring. A smile.

My mother always did like you better. She’s gonna be thrilled.

“My…fiancé?” Shauna breathes. “She’s my fiancé?”

“Oh, please tell me we aren’t cycling back to the gay panic part of the show,” Van groans. “Tai, if she’s gay-panicking, it’s your turn. I used all my best moves last time.”

Shauna isn’t listening. She’s staring at her phone, at her left hand, at the diamond on her ring finger. She’s staring at Jackie’s name with a little heart next to it.

You’re not getting rid of me so easy, Shipman. Promise.

Are you willing to bleed for it?

Jackie Taylor is alive.

Shauna Shipman, for the first time in decades, is, too.