Hannah was standing across from me on the trail. Her skin glowed a ghostly silver in the moonlight. When we got to her camp, she passed the tent and went out to the edge of the mountain. The borders of the QZ were never so obvious as they were late at night. Since it was long past the time the state turned off the electricity, inside the fence was nothing but inky blackness. Outside was a map of light and movement. The highway that ran along the western edge was like a glowing artery, red blood cells streaming one way, white the other. The neon billboards for gas stations and fast-food chains were so bright you could almost read them from where we stood. Beyond, a constellation of small towns stretched into the darkness.
“Weird, huh?” I said. “There’s a whole other world out there.”
Hannah’s hair whipped in the breeze. She tucked it behind her ears. “What’s it like?”
I came up beside her, watching the lights move out into the dark. “A mess mostly.”
“So we’re not missing anything.”
“Maybe not.”
She was quiet a moment, watching the lights. “Greer thinks your friend Gonzalez can find out who I am.”
“Is that what you want?”
Hannah turned her back on the valley and settled onto the rocks. “He said sometimes, even when he’s happy, it’s like there’s this hole that runs right through him. All because he doesn’t know.”
“Greer said that?”
She stared down at her hands, almost as if she hadn’t heard me. “When I found out that I did it, that I came here to—it was kind of a relief. You know? Like something must have happened that made me want to, made me need to do it. But then I thought, I had to have a family, right? And friends? What could have happened that was so awful I’d just leave?”
“The note you wrote didn’t . . .”
Hannah shook her head. “It said I should decide who I am instead of worrying about who I was.”
“That’s not bad advice.”
“Maybe. But the whole time I was reading it, even though I knew it was my handwriting, I kept thinking, I don’t know this person. Why should I trust her?”
Hannah took hold of the key and drew it back and forth across the leather band.
“I don’t know. Maybe nothing happened to me at all.”
I found a place a little farther down the ledge and sat. “What do you mean?”
“I mean sometimes when I think about, you know, before, I get this feeling like maybe I was the one who did something. Something awful.”
“No,” I said. “No way.”
“You don’t even know me, Card.”
I wanted to tell her she was wrong, that I did, but I knew it wasn’t true. She was as much a stranger to me as she was to herself. I sat there staring at the ground, feeling stupid, wondering what to do or say. If things were normal, I could have put my arm around her, hugged her, told her it was going to be all right, but of course I couldn’t do any of those things. Not then. Part of me wondered if I ever could have.
“What was her promise anyway?” she asked.
“What?”
Hannah was looking out to where the trees rose over the mountain’s highest peak.
“Lucy must have promised somebody something pretty big for them to name a whole mountain after it. What was it?”
How strange was it that in all that time, I’d never asked the same question? There must?ve been a town legend about it, something they would have taught us in school, but as hard as I tried, I couldn’t remember what it was.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Hannah thought for a moment, and then she turned to face me. “So I guess it can be anything we want.”
We were sitting so close, closer than we should have been. Her eyes were dark and huge, twin universes. For what felt like a very long time, neither of us moved or said anything or looked away. The cabins in the camp below felt very distant. Black River was another world.
Hannah laid her hand on the rock between us. In the moonlight it was this pale, beautifully curving thing, like a dove. I moved closer. My hand shook as I reached out and placed it on top of hers, covering it. I thought I could feel a little bit of her warmth through my glove, and the gentle tapping of the pulse in her wrist. My breath grew hot under my mask as something rushed into the space between us. I didn’t know what it was or where it came from, but it was there, warm and alive, connecting us both.
And then, just like that, it was gone. She drew her hand back, and time spun forward again. The air was just the air.
“I should probably get some sleep.”
“Yeah,” I said, my voice as thin as a slip of paper. “Me too.”
I started to go but stopped at the trail and turned back. Hannah was standing at her tent, holding the flap open.
“My dad used to read me and Tennant all these Greek myths,” I said. “Gods and heroes and monsters and all that stuff. Penthesilea was the queen of the Amazons. She was a great warrior and one of the most beautiful women in the world.”
The treetops whispered in the high wind. Hannah smiled.