Ava walks to the blasted remains of the generator, then looks through the gate at Linda. “Silly Linda. We weren’t trying to blow up the monster.”
Linda’s laugh turns into a choke as she pushes up onto her elbows to see what they’ve done.
* * *
—
Mack bursts through the trees, covered in green slime and soaked through and the most beautiful thing Ava has ever seen.
Mack stops, chest heaving, and takes in the destruction. The gate, wrought with ancient symbols, kept closed against a monster for nearly a century, hangs by one hinge. It’s destroyed beyond repair. Only the word MAZE—carefully soldered to the top of the gate when they made the theme park—remains.
But the maze, too, has been defeated, the beast led out of the labyrinth designed to keep it far from the gate, far from the people beyond it.
LeGrand, Mack, and Ava almost don’t remember there’s an unknowable horror pursuing them, they’re so happy to be reunited, so in awe of the destruction. But a pounding of hooves felt more than heard spurs them on. They climb through the twisted remains of the gate, helping each other. Linda’s car waits for them, keys still in the ignition.
“Stop,” Linda gasps, waving red-soaked hands futilely in the air as though she could grab them, make them stay. “You can’t let it out! You have to go back in! If you feed it before it makes it to the gate, it’ll go back to the center! Please. You don’t know what will happen.”
Ava, Mack, and LeGrand share a look.
“Maybe it’ll eat its normal amount from the town, and then go back to sleep for seven years,” LeGrand says. “Or maybe it’ll disappear.”
“Or maybe, now that it’s not bound, it’ll eat them all,” Ava says. “Which means eventually it could come for you again.”
Mack looks back at the maze that housed a monster that fed on youth and hope and stalled dreams. That ground up vulnerable people so the ones in power could keep their power, could keep their safety, could keep everything.
The monster emerges from the trees, ravenous, unstoppable, unbound at last. It stretches its head, rising to its full, wondrous, height, the sun framed atop its crown of horns like a burning golden disc. It takes a step toward the gate, no longer snuffling, no longer searching. Its next meal is not hard to smell.
Mack tosses Linda’s abandoned rifle to Ava, then gestures for LeGrand and Ava to get in the car. She crouches next to Linda, the fresh blood painting Linda’s abdomen a siren song leading the monster the last few steps to the ruined gate.
To freedom.
To who knows what end of destruction.
“Please,” Linda whispers, blood painting her pale lips. “You’re a Nicely. You understand. Help me, or it will destroy us.”
Mack pulls out the shoe and the delicately embroidered handkerchief from her pocket. She sets the shoe on Linda’s chest, then drapes the handkerchief on Linda’s stomach wound. The cotton soaks up the blood first, a crimson background with the word Nicely in stark white before that, too, is claimed.
With a shrug, Mack stands and turns to the car. “Who fucking cares.”
To the youngest generations we’ve tasked with saving us all:
You shouldn’t have to. I’m so sorry.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When my oldest child was in eighth grade, the yearbook did a feature on her special faux–stained glass classroom window art. The purpose? To prevent active shooters from being able to see inside. From age five, American children have to practice hiding from bullets, and to protect themselves we let them have art. In a game of Gun, Paper, Scissors, which wins?
So: All I have is art, too, and I wrote Hide as a scream of rage, but I had help.
This book benefited from two soundtracks: Joywave’s album Content while I was letting the ideas simmer for a couple of years, and The Smashing Pumpkins’ “Eye” on repeat while I was writing and needed to tell my brain where to be. Though not music, Maksim Gorky’s “Coney Island” rivals any song for sheer lyricism and also has the only detailed description of the infamous Hell Gate ride that tragically burned down Coney Island’s Dreamland. I was also inspired by the myth of the Minotaur and the ways we keep living the exact same cycles.
There really is an international hide-and-seek competition, the Nascondino World Championship, and it really did take place in an abandoned resort town one year, a fact that lit my brain on fire when I read about it. But it has too many rules and too few monsters, so I made my own.
The editor I most hoped would want to shepherd Hide into the world was Tricia Narwani, and I feel so lucky she felt the same way. I’m immensely grateful to her, Sam Bradbury with Del Rey UK, Alex Larned, Bree Gary, David Stevenson, Michelle Daniel, Angela McNally, Simon Sullivan, Ella Laytham, Pam Alders, Craig Adams, and Del Rey as a whole. As a child obsessed with fantasy, I looked for Del Rey on the spines at the bookstore, and it’s a tremendous honor to join those ranks. Most of my books live in the Penguin Random House now, and it’s a very very very fine house.
My agent, Michelle Wolfson, has seen me through so many stories she never expected when we started working together thirteen years ago, and I’m forever grateful to have her as friend, advocate, and business partner. And not at all sorry I keep writing things she has to read with all the lights on.
Special thanks to my earliest readers for their invaluable encouragement and feedback: JS Kelley, Lindsay Eagar, and Stephanie Perkins. Stephanie and Natalie Whipple provide constant friendship and sounding boards, and I’m glad every day to have them. Thanks as well to Eliza Jane Brazier, for being an example of fearlessly forging ahead in new directions. And Ian Carlos Crawford, someday I’ll put your name in a book and not kill that character. Maybe. Probably not.
My spouse and three children are the foundation of my entire world, and everything I write is possible because my days are filled with love and support. It’s a tremendous honor and constant delight to navigate life alongside you all.
Finally, to everyone who still insists they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps: For fuck’s sake, look up the origin of the saying.