I DON’T KNOW how long I waited in that spot, holding my breath. The water was a mess of ice collapsing in on itself, mounding up in some areas, spreading out in others. It was like a flat field full of debris left behind after a village is leveled in war. I gasped for breath. I held the knapsack in one hand. I wanted to scream.
But the cold, the cold was breaking my bones. I turned and crawled, and my body creaked with the weariness of it. Once I was closer to what I thought was solid ground, I stood gingerly and walked toward where Adam still sat against a tree. They were haunting, those trees. Their roots, where they showed through the black ice, seemed to pulse like veins. I knew it was some trick of the light, perhaps the shimmering of the ice, but it still repulsed me.
I stopped beside Adam and sat down. The snow had been coming and going ever since Lucia and I had arrived in that place, but in that moment, it was so light that I thought it had stopped. Except every so often a lone flake would fall, lost. The sky was only low, gray clouds, like a hovering fog. I thought about the rim of the abyss beside the river Acheron and the immeasurable distance between us and that place. I wondered how far we had fallen.
Adam mumbled something that sounded like a question. I looked at him again, trying to find the brother I remembered hidden there among the gaunt flesh, the long hair, the broken skin. His knees bled from kneeling on the rock for who knows how long. He flinched every few seconds as if being prodded.
“What?” I asked him quietly. I wanted to hug him. I wanted to hold him. After so much time with Lucia and her silence, the sound of another human being’s voice, even indecipherable, was like balm. But there was something between us, something I couldn’t identify. There was a kind of strangeness there, and years, and misunderstandings that might be too far gone to clear up.
“The girl,” he muttered, his voice still hoarse. Saliva pooled in the corners of his mouth. He was crazed. Would the hike out help him heal, or had he left whatever shred of sanity that remained on that rock in the middle of the frozen river?
“Where is she?”
I took in the shifting ice. When I didn’t see her, a sob came out of me, a wave of grief, but I cleared my throat to hide it. I knew in that moment I could never tell him about her, or he wouldn’t leave. I was the only one who knew she was his daughter. Had been his daughter. There was no reason to tell him now.
“What girl?” I whispered.
“The girl,” he said, his voice stronger, his eyes searching mine. “The girl who came over to me.”
I shook my head slowly. “I don’t know, Adam.” I paused, swallowed. “I didn’t see anyone.”
He stared hard into the deep blackness of the ice beneath us. There was another blistering crack from the river, a moaning creak, and Adam shivered convulsively. The ice was on the move. I wondered what had set it off.
“I’ve seen a lot here,” he said. “I’ve imagined a lot.”
I nodded.
“Are you sure?”
“I didn’t see a girl,” I insisted. “I saw you look up at me across the ice, drag your way through the river. That’s all I saw.”
He clenched his jaw. Shook his head. “I could’ve sworn . . .”
“We should go.” I stood up, moving gingerly away from the tree on the ice, but my caution was unnecessary. The water there remained solidly frozen.
“No use,” he said.
What?
“No use,” he said again. “There’s no way out. The gate is locked.”
“Have you been to the gate?” I asked.
He nodded. “Once. Long after everyone left. Long after she left. I managed to crawl all the way there. When I found the locked gate, I gave up hope. So I crawled back out to the rock.”
“She?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You said, ‘Long after everyone left. Long after she left.’ Who’s ‘she’?”
He shuddered. “The one in charge. The one who ran this whole place, every circle of it, every tree, every corner.”
“It was a she?” A sense of dread slunk through me. “Did she have a name?” I asked in a hushed voice.
He nodded again.
I raised my eyebrows in a question. What was her name?
“Kathy,” he whispered.
Kathy. I had left everyone with her, and they didn’t even know who she was. A thought dropped into my mind—what if I was here because of her? I was, wasn’t I? Hadn’t she been the one to convince me to come back in, to get my brother? But he couldn’t have gotten out without me, could he?
What if she was now convincing the others to come in and retrieve me? What if she walked east and found others to convince?
She would fill this place again.
“We should go,” I said. I was filled with fresh urgency to get him out, get us out, and find the others.
“Who are you?” he asked with none of the urgency I was looking for.
“Me?” I asked. “I’m Dan.” I decided to leave it at that. For now.
“Dan,” he whispered, and he was lost again, searching through hidden realms in his mind, perhaps searching for me. He emerged moments later. “The gate.” He sighed.
I reached into the knapsack, searched the bottom corners of the cloth, and pulled out the key. I held it up in front of him, and he looked at it in awe, as if it was the strangest of all the strange things he had seen, the least believable.
He reached up, not to take it but to touch it. “Is it real?”
“Yes,” I said, again seeing the movement of Lucia’s arm as she threw the knapsack. I saw her clinging to the ice, sliding toward the edge. I saw her going under.
Adam tried to stand, and when he couldn’t do it on his own, I reached down and took hold of his arm. He felt like a bundle of twigs. We both continued to shiver, so I put my arm around him and we tried to live off each other’s warmth. I didn’t know how we would walk, how we would leave this place. I thought of the bog we had to get through, the ledge we’d have to maneuver. The river. Maybe Karon and Sarah could help us. If we made it that far.
The ledge. I had left Miho by the ledge, assuming she wasn’t a figment of my imagination. And now we had to get past her too, make sure she didn’t exact some sort of revenge on Adam. I had never heard her story, but I could guess. The crash had affected her in some way. She hated my brother. She was waiting for him like all the others.
“Do you see people a lot down here? Imaginary people?” I asked.
He nodded as we walked stiffly through the trees and over all those strange shadows. The ice felt solid under our feet, but I was still expecting it to break at any point. The water that was on me felt like it was freezing, turning me into a block.
“Do you think I’m real?” I asked.
“No,” he said, and as we shuffled along, this was the closest he’d come to giving me a smile.
“Fair enough.”
We found the entrance to the narrow canyon and left the trees and frozen river behind. And Lucia. We left Lucia behind. The guilt was crushing me, even though I knew there was nothing I could have done. I could not have walked across the ice. I could not have jumped in and pulled her out. I could not wait here long enough—she was gone. Not telling Adam about her felt like both a gift and a terrible betrayal. I told myself I would tell him someday. Far in the future. Far from here, when everything else was better.
The gate was still there, open, just as I had left it. Adam seemed so intrigued by it that I slowed and let him lead the way. He stopped directly in front of its opening, walked from side to side, and caressed its cold metal. He examined the lock, the doors.
“I stood at this gate, beating on it with my fists.” He rubbed his hands together. “I screamed until my throat bled. How did you get the key from her? How did you come here?” He seemed to finally be accepting the fact that I was real and that I was with him.
“Do you know who I am?”
He nodded, his face blank, his hand still on the gate.
“You do?”
He nodded again, but he still didn’t say anything.
“We have a lot to talk about once we get out of here,” I whispered. I glanced away from him, feeling my face form a kind of wince, before walking over and gently taking hold of his elbow to guide him farther along. He kept looking over his shoulder at the gate, as if it might transform into a monster and chase us down, devour us in that rocky canyon.
“You should lock it,” he said, his voice suddenly lifeless.
“What?”
“The gate. You should lock it. We can’t leave it open. What if she comes back down? What if she brings someone else here to keep them prisoner, like she did to me and all the others?”
“I don’t think we have to worry about that,” I said. I would have locked it had it not been for Lucia in the frozen river. Somewhere among the ice. Locking the gate suddenly felt crucial. Every evil I knew would come through if I didn’t.
“There are horrors there,” he said, stopping. “There are things in there, in the water, in the woods, you cannot even imagine. They will follow us. They will get out.”
His voice was quiet, but it was impossible for me to ignore the terror he clearly felt in that moment. Have you been with someone who is in the midst of a panic attack? There is no rationalizing, no explaining. Nothing I said would convince him that all the things he had seen had been illusions, the constructs of a broken mind. But I could not lock Lucia into that place. It was the very bottom. If she had somehow survived, the way needed to remain open for her.
To appease Adam, I walked over to the gate and pushed the doors against each other so that they appeared to be closed. I held up the key so he could see it, then inserted it into the gate. I turned it so that it locked, but I also turned it back so that it unlocked again. When I took out the key, the unlocked gate budged only a fraction.
When I turned to look at him, relief left him sagging, like someone who has finally relaxed. He had not seen the slight movement of the gate shifting open. In his mind it was locked and all the horrors of this place would be contained. Seeing the gate from that side, he raised his hands and covered his face, and the sound of his weeping echoed off the rock. I did not go over to him, not that time. I only watched and waited. His crying went on for a long time.
We finally continued through the canyon and had nearly reached the bog when I noticed that the cold was not so cold. My feet and fingertips were no longer numb. I put my hands up to my mouth and blew into them, and I could feel the warmth spreading. I looked over at Adam and could tell he was feeling it too. His joints didn’t seem so locked. His face had regained some color, although his black hair did still emphasize the paleness of his skin. He reached up with a swollen finger and pushed a thread of hair out of his face.
“I can’t believe this is all here,” he said. “A way out.”
We walked slowly, and the scuffing sound of our feet on the hard earth was lonely and peaceful. Every so often, one of us would need to stop to rest, and the other would stop as well, leaning against the canyon wall or sitting on the ground. We had reached the limits of our exhaustion. I could not let myself think about how far we still had to go.
I pulled out the water and we each took a sip. I put it back in the knapsack and thought about the price of it.
“How long?” he asked, staring at the ground between hisfeet.
“How long?” I repeated.
“How long was I in there?”
That was a good question. I had no idea. The passing of time in the small town on the edge of the plains had felt immeasurable. It could have been ten years. I thought of all the harvests we had seen, all the times we had pulled vegetables and fruits from the garden and the orchard. It must have been longer. Twenty years? Could it have been longer than that?
“I don’t know,” I said. “Time doesn’t pass the same way anymore.”
“Why’d you decide to come and find me? Why now?”
“Things were ending. Our village was destroyed. Kathy was there.”
“Kathy?” He didn’t actually say her whole name out loud. He said it the way a child might whisper a curse, knowing they’d be in trouble if anyone heard.
I nodded. “She burned down our village. At least I think it was her. She was trying to cause chaos, trying to break us up. I don’t know. I don’t understand completely. I think she wants everyone back in here again.”
“But you’re here because . . . of her?”
“No. I’m here because of you. I waited a long time, Adam. For you. I couldn’t come back here. I couldn’t. But then, when everything fell apart . . . I don’t know. I had to do something.”
We walked on, and I could tell he was thinking hard about something, thinking through all I had told him.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said. “Nothing she wants to happen is good.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.
He spoke again. “If she wanted you to be here, you shouldn’t be here.”