She wants to see Ava again.
Mack rubs her eyes, gritty with either exhaustion or tree shrapnel, she can’t be sure and she doesn’t really care. “So we make sure LeGrand wins, and in the meantime, we try to find a way out.”
“No, first things first,” Brandon says, distracted as he looks around them, as though seeing everything for the first time. Wide-eyed with wonder or horror as he takes in the towering trees, the creeping vines, the rusted remains of a kiddie roller-coaster car sitting alone and abandoned in the middle of the path ahead of them. “We find Jaden.”
“I know where he is.” LeGrand turns and heads down a new path.
“Tell us about your sister,” Brandon says. He’s distant and unfocused, but keeping pace.
“She’s—she—” LeGrand struggles for the words. Almera didn’t get enough oxygen at birth, and because his mother couldn’t go to a hospital and was helped only by the other wives, Almera nearly died. He once heard an aunt whispering that Almera should be totally healthy, and it makes him sad to think about. Sad because of who Almera could have been if his father allowed real medical treatment. And then sad to wonder about it, as though he’s betraying who Almera is, what a wonderful sunshine piece of happiness she is, by wishing she could have been someone else.
Everyone always told his mother, told him, that Almera was lucky. Incapable of sin. Heading straight for the highest degree of glory. They dismissed who she was on earth, focusing on who she’d be after.
But who she is on earth is a girl who is suffering and can’t help herself. Who she is on earth is a girl who is suffering and can’t help herself and is locked in a compound where no one will help her, either, because she’s already saved, so what’s a little suffering in the meantime?
If Almera’s saved either way, why does she need to suffer to follow the rules of their father, the prophet?
“She likes the color yellow, and bubbles,” LeGrand repeats. “She’s thirteen. She can’t walk or talk.” How else can he sum up the only person he was ever sure loved him? “She’s not too heavy. You’ll be able to carry her. Break in at night. My mother’s house is in a corner of the compound, southeast. Go over the wall there. You’ll know it’s the right house because there’s a wheelbarrow in the vegetable garden with pads in it for moving Almera around. The gun shed is close by, so you can get some of those before going to the house.”
Brandon misses a step, but Mack nods. Then she adds, “You’re going to get her, though.” She wants LeGrand to know she’s listening, but she has no intention of doing any of this. LeGrand will. She’ll make sure.
“I’m going to get her,” LeGrand repeats softly. He takes another branching path, seemingly at random.
“How do you know where Jaden is?” Mack asks.
“Direction the other Ava came from.”
Mack experiences a pang of guilt and sorrow. She hasn’t mourned beautiful Ava at all, because LeGrand is right: She was the other Ava. Not the one who mattered.
All these people, locked in here together, and none of them mattered to Mack. She had tried not to learn their names. She treated some of them like enemies, when really, they were all just trying to win. Now they’re dead. Soon she will be, too, and no one will remember her name. And that’s okay. It’s what she deserves, and more or less what she’s expected and wanted out of life. To disappear. She hoped to disappear while alive, but something about all of this feels inevitable. The end of a game that started so many years ago when she took Maddie’s hiding spot.
She was always going to be found by something terrible.
LeGrand puts a hand on her elbow to guide her to a tiny sliver of path shooting off from the one they were following. He’ll remember her. He’ll remember Ava, too. He’ll remember them all, she’s sure of it. Brandon would, too.
“The direction she ran from?” Brandon asks, staring up at where the sun stretches toward them between branches. An enormous clown head, once brightly painted but now chipped and muddied and missing its nose, leers at them with a mouth gaping open, an unnerving invitation.
“A ride,” LeGrand answers. “I saw Jaden hide there on the first day. It’s a good spot.”
“What kind of ride?” Mack asks.
LeGrand shrugs. “Dunno. I’ve never been to a place like this.”
“No one’s ever been to a place like this.” Brandon laughs. It’s a broken sound, gaping open, an invitation, like the clown behind them, to explore the darkness inside. “I always wanted to go to Disneyland. Or Lagoon, in Utah. Have you guys ever been? But my dad would never take me on his visits. It was only ever fishing, once a year. Sometimes not even that. I wonder if he’s related to Ray?”
“Who?” Mack asks. She isn’t following Brandon’s train of thought. Maybe there’s nothing to follow; it’s jumped the rails, like her own mind.
“Ray, in the diner. His last name is Callas. Same as my dad’s. I thought that was a funny coincidence, but he didn’t want to talk about it.” Brandon’s steps slow as he pauses in front of the tracks of a miniature roller coaster. Several cars shaped like bugs are lined up, waiting to go. Each car is filled with decades of seasons, layers of leaves from green to brown to a fine leaf powder at the bottom, black water sludging where tiny feet would dangle.
Brandon sticks his hands in his pockets and keeps walking, catching up to LeGrand. The train of his thoughts continues, crashing down a hill, engine on fire. “Jaden got her killed. Ava. Both of them, really. Sydney, too.”
“He didn’t know.” Mack wishes she could blame Jaden, but he thought it was a game. He was playing.
Then again, she knew. Just like she knew the game of hide-and-seek with their father had higher stakes than simply winning or losing when she stole Maddie’s spot. It was in his voice. She might have forgotten her mother’s laugh, but she hasn’t forgotten his voice that night.
People pretend things aren’t wrong, even when they can feel the truth, because they’re too afraid of what it means to look right at the horror, right at the wrongness, to face the truth in all its terrible glory. Like little kids, playing hide-and-seek. If they can’t see the monster, it can’t get them. But it can. It always can. And while you aren’t looking, it’s eating everyone around you.
So. Mack knew then, just like she knows now. And if Mack’s guilty in her sister’s death, then Jaden’s guilty in at least three women’s deaths here.
And Mack is guilty, isn’t she?