TWENTY

BOBBY’S GONE, DISAPPEARED in the swarm of shepherds and Icelings, but Stan’s still right here, with Emily beside him. The captain, obviously furious and shouting left and right, pulls us in as close as he can and lowers the gangplank, setting it heavily down on the dock, where it scrapes and rattles and bangs because of the trembling.

“EVERYONE OFF!” he shouts, and we file out as quickly as we can, doubling up on parkas and hats and gloves, because this is the coldest any of us has ever been.

The Icelings are long gone, and some of us are rushing after them, while some are lingering, moving real slow, as though they don’t want to stray too far from the vessel that might be the only thing that can take us back to anything resembling what we used to think of so fondly as “home.” Stan and Emily and I shove our way through, leaving the stragglers behind without a second look. Not because we pity or disdain them, but because we’re afraid that if we pay them too much attention we might start to understand why they’re doing what they’re doing and start to do it too. At least that’s what I’m worried about, so I keep my head down and push forward.

Cursing myself for all the times I felt scared on this trip, because apparently I had no idea what “scared” meant back then, I look back at the boat so I can memorize exactly where it is, exactly where it’ll be waiting for us. I see the captain walking around the second level, scanning the craft for stragglers. He wanders the deck, checking behind benches, and then he ducks down into the stairwell and repeats the process on the first level before heading back toward the gangplank. And then he raises the gangplank and then the anchor. The Icelings are running around and pairing up. They’re moving their arms and then standing very still.

“Oh my god, Stan!” I shout, pointing to the ferry, my head swimming with lightning and feeling like I might throw up.

“Hey!” shouts Stan. “What the hell are you doing? You can’t leave!”

We’re screaming at him, pleading until our throats are raw, but the captain only works to abandon us faster. Some Icelings run through and around us, and we jump back and stumble, startled. The anchor is up, and the captain begins to pull away as the Icelings assemble up ahead, and they stand still, and they sway. People are calling out to their siblings, and some are trying to grab hold of them, but nobody can keep any hands on them; they’re in the wind. They’re up ahead.

And I’m just staring at the ferry, only registering this in the back of my mind, because what used to be in the back of my mind has now crawled its way to the front. It’s the only thought I can hold right now. In that it’s gripped me, completely.

“Stan,” I say. “They probably knew about the boat. Or even arranged it.”

“Who knew about it?” Emily says. “Who arranged it?”

“The government,” Stan says, his voice flat and dead.

“What? What are you talking about? What do you mean? What the hell do you mean?” Emily’s eyes go wild.

“What I mean is that if we made it this far, it’s probably because the government—whoever in the government believes our brothers and sisters are monsters—wants us to have made it this far. If we weren’t supposed to be on that boat, we wouldn’t have been on it. If that guy hadn’t been instructed otherwise, he’d be waiting right there for us, to take us safely back to shore, just like we paid him to. And if for some reason we had decided not to get on that boat, I’m pretty sure something really terrible, maybe involving bullets, would have happened to us.”

Meanwhile, everyone else has just noticed that the ferry’s gone.

“Hey!” they shout.

“Hey, come back!” they shout.

“Are you SERIOUS, man? You can’t do that! COME BACK!” they shout, they plead.

“We’ll die here! You can’t leave us here! It’s freezing!” they scream.

“Oh God oh God oh God oh God oh God, we’re gonna die,” they cry. They fall down around each other. Four people have fallen into the sea and are trying to get out. I can’t imagine they won’t freeze. Did they think they could swim to the freighter that ferried us over as it sails itself away?

“Jesus, people,” says a voice of reason. “Get it together. What’d you think would happen? We came out here for them. We came to help them.”

“What about us?” comes another voice, and I know I need to calm and quiet that voice right away or else everything will fall apart in a way that’s worse than I’ve yet to imagine.

“Hey!” I shout. “HEY. Look at them. They’ve spent their whole lives quiet, locked up inside themselves, away from home! We get to live in the world. We know our parents are our parents and our friends are our friends.”

Emily, standing next to me, takes a step forward. “We get to make out and drive cars, and when people say things to us, we know what they’re talking about!” she shouts. “The least we can do is finish what we started.”

We’re answered with nothing but grumblings and panicked whines.

“THE WAY I see it,” shouts Bobby to anyone who’s calm enough to listen, “all we need to do is get enough people to start moving after the Icelings, and everyone else will follow. The longer we stand around, the more time people will have to freak out and worry and come up with reasons to just stand around here and freeze to death.”

He’s right, I think. I make to turn to the Icelings, to spot them so we can follow them, but they’re all gone. While we were all yelling, they lit out for parts unknown that were calling to them like home.

“Damn it,” says Stan, seeing what I’m seeing, which is everything but our siblings. “Let’s do it. Now. They can follow us, or they can stay here and freeze, but we need to go now.”

WE TURN AROUND and follow the path that’s been cleared and trampled down by the Icelings, which thankfully leads us right to them—or the smallish speck of them, at least, because they’re so far ahead of us. From what we can see, they’re running up to this stacked-high pile of what looks like driftwood. But then the closer we get, the more shape and structure the wood pile takes on, and now I see that it’s probably not a pile at all but more like a shed. Except the shed looks like it’s . . . growing up and out of the ground. There’s no snow on it. The snow won’t even touch it. The wood looks old, but not at all rotted from the snow and wind like you’d expect. There are no windows. Just two broad gray boards for a roof and four gray walls made of smaller boards and then a small and asymmetrical opening that looks like it could pass for a doorway.

To say this structure gives me the creeps is a real and serious understatement. It’s straight out of a horror movie. All it lacks is a creaking door and a pile of fresh bones out back, and I actually can’t rule out that second detail just yet. I’m shivering, and it’s not from the cold.

I’m expecting this to be the Icelings’ first stop, but they breeze right past it—and I am in no way sad about this. I am in no way excited about coming back this way and seeing this place again either. Some of us linger here and check out the shed, but me, I’m going to keep going.

“What the hell was that?” says Stan, who’s a couple of footsteps behind me now, the shed having tripped him up a bit.

“Creepy as heck,” says Emily, and I just nod, because for some reason even I don’t know, I need to get that thing out of my mind. Pretend it doesn’t exist, not give language to it at all.

Finally, we’re past it; it’s nothing but a sinister dot behind my shoulder. We’re in the trees now, those tall, tropical-looking trees with the low-hanging branches forming canopies weighed down with ice and snow. Up close, they’re not exactly like palm trees, but I’ve also never seen real palm trees in person before, so the truth is I don’t know. They’ve got these long, broad, flat leaves, and they bend so low with the weight of the snow. I’m looking up at those leaves and the patterns they make in the sky, and my steps slow down, and all of a sudden I’m no longer moving. I can’t stop staring at the leaves, because whereas at first glance it seemed that the snow was weighing them down, I see that it’s not that at all. They’re sloping and drooping at this willful kind of angle, like if you brushed the snow off, they wouldn’t spring up. In other words, it looks like these trees are bending their branches and leaves low on purpose, for the purpose of holding the snow. It looks like they’re built for this strange job, all the way out here. Stan turns around for me and follows my gaze upward. I know he sees what I see, but he doesn’t say a word, just nudges my shoulder and guides me back on the path.

We keep walking under this weird canopy for at least half an hour, just following the trampled-down snow to see where our Icelings are going.

“Look!” someone shouts, the need to believe choking his voice. “A squirrel!”

We look, see nothing.

“Oh,” says the same voice, this time tinged with sadness. “It was just a gust of wind.”

My heart sinks, and I realize how desperate I am—how desperate we all are—to see something familiar. Because not only are there no squirrels around here, there isn’t anything. No birds, no animals, no lizards, no frigid-water fish. We can hear the water and the wind and the trees as they sigh and bend low under the weight of the snow, but no living things with eyes or minds or hearts. No life, aside from ours, have we yet seen here.

We follow the trampled path until we’re finally out from under the trees, and it turns out we were just tracing the coastline, but vaguely inland, and we’re approaching another dock. Two docks, actually, both of them newer-looking than the one we used to get on the island—either that or nobody bothered to make them look as weathered as the first one.

STRUCTURES THAT LOOK like storage sheds sit on top of each of these twin docks, and there are these tires that hang off their sides like bumpers. Affixed to one of the docks is an old-fashioned gas pump, painted a bright cherry red, with like what look like functional gauges.

“Huh,” says Stan. “This one looks like it might be a refueling dock. And look at all these slips on the other one. For smaller boats to, uh, park.”

“How do you know all that?” I ask.

“According to my dad, fishing and camping trips are great ways to bond with your sons,” he says, and in what is no longer anywhere close to the darkest part of my mind, I feel relieved at least one of us might know some survival skills. “And these,” he says, gesturing at the docks, “are way better maintained than the one we anchored by.”

“So the only things missing from this equation are the people maintaining them,” says Emily, and we look at her but don’t respond, because we don’t want to think about what that means.

The docks are in this little rocky cove, hidden and jutting inward in such a way that it was impossible for us to have seen them when we were first circling the island to pull up to the other dock. Hiding them even more is another dense copse of those heavy, weird trees, their stubbornly drooping leaves making a canopy over part of them. The wind blows the snow around, like a smoke screen protecting a fort.

Stan taps me on the shoulder and points to a spot in the distance.

“See that spot of color?” he says. Emily and I shake our heads no, so we get out our phones and try the zoom function, but all I can see is a blur.

“You mean that red thing?” Emily says.

“No,” Stan says. “It’s yellow. Are you sure you don’t see it?”

“All I see are blurs. What do you think it is?” I say.

“I thought it might be a boat,” Stan says. “Forget it, though. It’s probably nothing. We need to keep going, or we’ll lose our way.”

“If it’s a boat, we need to find it! Otherwise . . .” And I just let the thought drift, because it’s terrifying.

“If it’s a boat, we will find it,” Stan says. “Right now we need to keep going. They’re somewhere up ahead, and we need to find them.”

I take some pictures and a few videos before we go, hoping that I captured enough of the peculiarities of this place so we can find our way back here later. “Hey, Bobby?” I call, wanting to ask him if I’ve captured enough angles for us to be able to use my footage as a map, but he doesn’t answer, and when I look for him, he’s not around.

“Hey, Stan,” I say. “Have you seen Bobby?”

“Nope,” says Stan. “Probably he’s up ahead? If anyone knows where they’re going, it’s Bobby.”

Someone calls out, “Yo! Is anyone maybe Hansel-and-Gretel-ing this place?”

Stan gives the guy a thumbs-up, and I hold out my phone and shout, “I’ve got your bread crumbs right here, champ.”

We keep walking the path until it opens up and the trees disappear, and all around us are these low hills. The tracks start to peter out here, though there’s still something of a path headed onward. An argument breaks out—some of the kids have had enough and don’t want to continue.

Some guy sits down and says, so loud and pouty it makes my frozen skin crawl, “It’s goddamn cold! I don’t even like my sister! I wanna go home.” A few other guys and girls who share this sentiment join the chorus and plant their asses down on the hostile ground, the definitive sign that this is indeed a collective temper tantrum.

But if it were that easy to just dismiss these kids as selfish whiners, then this would be a different story. People are tired. They’re cold. They’re hungry. Someone here has driven from Los Angeles, which seems insane to me. To imagine what I went through—what we went through—in a single day and just a bit of change, and stretch that out over days or maybe even a week or however long it takes to drive from L.A. . . . I don’t know.

“What if they are weapons?” someone—whether in the sitting group or the standing group, I don’t know—asks.

“They just ran. They left us. Alone. I never left Jennie alone. Not once in her life,” someone else sobs.

“So what?” asks someone, and when I see that it’s Jayson, a little happy chime rings in my head. Jayson’s here! “What, are you gonna swim home? Do you even know which way’s land? We’re stuck here,” he says.

“Just because those . . . things got me stuck here against my will,” says the boy who started all this, “doesn’t mean I have to participate in whatever’s going to happen. Because something’s going to happen, and you’re an idiot if you don’t know that too. It’s not like nobody knows we’re coming. It’s not like they would understand the idea of someone setting a trap for them to run into. It’s not like they’re gonna realize it and then stop themselves from doing whatever it is that’s so important they do. It’s not like they’d even understand what a trap is if we explained it.”

“We have to keep going,” says Stan. “We have to leave them and keep going.” He’s looking out at the Iceling tracks.

“What?” says Emily.

“He’s right,” I say. “We don’t know what’s out there or what’s waiting for them. And maybe we can’t do anything about it, but . . .”

“Yeah,” she says. “Right. Okay.” It’s not the resounding yes I was hoping for, but I know she understands that this is the only option. She puts one foot in front of the other, same as me, and I guide her onward as Stan turns to the seated shepherds.

“We’re going,” he says. “We’ve got to. I get why you maybe think you can’t, but you can. We can all do this. You’re welcome to come with us. Just follow our tracks and you’ll find us.”

He turns and catches up with us. We trudge on after the speck in the distance we know, in our hearts, to be our siblings. We trudge on and on and on.

I KNOW THAT I shouldn’t be running like this, toward whatever’s to come, happy or horrible. But I can’t help it. And it looks like neither can anyone else. At least, anyone else who’s with us. Stan, Emily, Jayson, me, and about thirty others are running along this path up one of the low-slung hills, and when we get to the top, we stop and stare.

Because below us is the trembling field of ice. A field about the size of a middle school auditorium, sheeted completely in ice, and it’s trembling. There’s snow all around the ridge of hills bordering the whole island, not so much piled up as somehow shaken off. The ice is starting to look weird. The snow is scattered and heaped in such a way that it’s as if the ground is shaking itself loose of things before something shakes itself loose from the ground. I mean that it looks like something’s under the surface, and it wants to come out. After several seconds of silent staring, we trudge on again, and as we get down to the bottom of the hill, we see them.

Our Icelings.

And I see her.

Callie.

Callie and Tara and Ted and Greta and all the rest, holding hands. They stand in a circle along the perimeter of the trembling field of ice, and all I can say about it is that they look like they belong there. I zero in on Callie. She knows exactly where she is, exactly whom she’s with, exactly what she’s supposed to be doing. In other words, she looks a way I’ve never seen her look before. Like she belongs. Like what I feel like when I walk through Mom and Dad’s front door and think—not actively, not even with my brain, because when you belong, you don’t really need to think—This is home. And I feel safe. They all look like that, like they just got back from a long, long trip, which was exhilarating and rewarding but ultimately really difficult, but they’re home now, and they remembered to clean up before they left so that their homecoming could be that much warmer.

Their eyes are closed, and they’re holding hands, and they’re smiling.

And we stand above them, shivering and numb with awe and terror, and we look at them like we have no idea who they are, and we realize we are strangers here. To each other, to our brothers, to our sisters, to this frigid mystery of a place.