“Hey!” I call into the dark.
The two men stop—a quick shuddering halt—and both their heads swivel around, looking back up the road at Calla and me. They had probably thought they were far enough past the perimeter that they wouldn’t be seen—they must have crept through the trees on the far side of the boundary, the storm clouds blotting out the bright moonlight, then looped back to the road so they could follow it out of the mountains.
Maybe if I hadn’t heard them talking, whispering, I wouldn’t have noticed them. But now they stand like two cornstalks, afraid to move.
“Theo?” One of them calls back, voice deep, and I recognize it.
It’s Ash—Colette’s husband, and the father of the baby who clings to life in the birthing hut.
“Where you headed?” I ask, as if I didn’t already know. As if they weren’t dangerously far beyond the safety of our borders—although not nearly as far as I’ve walked. Not by a mile.
The leaves on the trees along the road seem to shiver in reply, bending this way and that in a sudden wind that dies just as quickly.
“We’re going to get help for my wife,” Ash answers. “For my child.”
At the gathering, Ash had spoken up, suggested that perhaps the road was safe and that someone might be able to make it to town. Levi had denied this request, but it seems Ash has no intention of sitting around and waiting for his child to drift away. He plans to do something about it.
“Who’s with you?” I ask.
I feel Calla tense her shoulders beside me—she doesn’t like this. Doesn’t like staring down the road at two people from our community who have broken the one unbreakable rule, the one I myself broke only days earlier. Her eyes dart to the trees, as if she could see the illness moving among the pines and settling like yellow, sticky pollen on the men’s skin.
“Turk is with me,” Ash answers back. “But he’s hurt. Fell over a log up in the trees. Twisted his ankle pretty good, could be broken.”
“You won’t make it down the road with a broken ankle,” I call back to the two men.
They are quiet, faces tilted to one another, speaking in low tones I can’t make out. “We can’t turn back now,” Ash answers finally. “Everyone will think we’re sick.”
Ash is a large man, broad shouldered and tall—he is the foreman for all construction projects within the community—but even at his size, he can’t drag another man through the woods in search of the nearest town. I’m not certain of the distance they’ll need to travel, but anything past the abandoned truck will be too far with an injured man. They’ll never make it.
“The others will think you’re sick even if you come back with medicine or a doctor,” I argue. “And they’d be right to think it.”
Turk adjusts his balance against Ash, trying to shift his feet but wincing at the movement. “But at least we’ll have brought back help for Colette,” Turk says, speaking for the first time.
I shake my head. “There might be nothing out there,” I say, remembering what Levi told me: that the world beyond our small forest might only be a husk of what it once was. No doctors, no medicine, no help to be found. The illness might have spread until it decimated everything—we might be all that’s left. “And even if there is,” I say. “You might die before you reach anything.”
Calla touches my hand and I think she’s going to say that we need to go tell Levi that two men are trying to leave, or that she thinks they might already have the rot inside them. But instead she whispers, “We have to help them.”
My gaze cuts down at her, surprised.
“Colette’s baby will die if we don’t,” she adds.
My wife has always feared the woods, her eyes turning quick and white whenever she’s too near the tall slanted boundary trees. But something has changed in her—maybe it’s the discovery of the books in the garden, the disappearance of Travis and Maggie, or maybe it’s that Bee too has gone over the boundary—and now she wants to help Ash and Turk.
I look back to the men, their faces hard to distinguish in the soft light. “Bring Turk back to the border and we’ll help him.” I swallow, looking to my wife then back to the men. “You can keep going,” I say to Ash. “But you’ll never make it with Turk and that injury.”
My wife draws in her bottom lip, nervous, anxious. She knows it’s the right thing to do, but she also knows we’re putting ourselves at risk.
The two men speak again in a hush, then I see Turk nod up at Ash. In slow, labored movements, they begin walking back toward us. Their faces come into view the closer they get, and I see dirt and a few drops of blood mar the right side of Turk’s face, likely from when he fell. He looks worse off than I was expecting.
They’re only a yard away when they lurch to a stop.
Turk almost buckles forward, but Ash keeps him from dropping to his knees. Both their gazes are lifted, looking beyond Calla and me, to something behind us—my heart seizes, unsure what has stopped them dead.
I swivel around, and three men approach from up the road, from the direction of Pastoral.
Levi and Parker appear through the dark first, followed by Henry—one of the original founders, a quiet, soft-spoken man who I’ve always liked, always admired, and who I asked to forge the ring I used to propose to Calla.
“Evening,” Levi says, nodding at me and then Calla. A calm, unrushed gesture.