“Such a nasty girl,” Linda mutters, taking the rifle. “What will they think if they examine the gun?”
“That Ray didn’t know how to handle one. Don’t know, don’t care. Good luck with the body, he’s a big dude.” Ava grits her teeth. She’s in hyper-focus mode, one task at a time, not letting herself think about tomorrow, what will happen, what she’ll do. She’s so mad, she wants to strangle them all. All she knows is she has to stay with Mack and LeGrand. She’s their only hope. So she climbs, up into the tower and then back over and down into the fucking murder monster park.
“Your grandparents understood covenants,” LeGrand says, his deep voice firm. “You’ll keep yours.” It’s not a question, it’s a statement, as forceful as he’s ever been in his life. Except when he hit Linda in the head. That still feels like someone else did it, like the hands weren’t his.
“Of course.” Linda’s head hurts, and she neither forgets nor forgives as she watches him climb. Since they already passed through Tommy’s gate once, this shouldn’t be a problem. All it takes is one cross of that threshold.
Mack is last. Linda goes stiff with shock as Mack embraces her in a hug. “Thank you,” Mack says.
Linda hesitantly pats Mack’s back, then something inside her loosens and she really returns the embrace. Linda’s so relieved that Mack understands. At last, finally, someone understands the weight of this responsibility, this duty. Linda’s surprised to find herself suffused with pride for this unnerving, strange girl. A girl who understands that sometimes, sacrifices have to made. Of course she’s a Nicely. They always have been the best family.
This is all going to be fine. Linda’s got it back under control, somehow, against all odds. She’ll even keep her word to LeGrand and move his sister to a care house, since that means knowing where a spare is at all times. She most certainly will not keep her word about Ava, though. Ava will die.
“Goodbye.” Mack pulls away and climbs up the tower.
By the time she gets to the other side, Ava and LeGrand are both on the ground, waiting. Ava’s shoulders, so strong, are slumped. Being here, again, has broken her. She doesn’t know what to do now. She has no idea what to fight, or how to fight it, or even if she has the strength left for any fight at all.
LeGrand sits on the ground. He might as well wait right here. Doesn’t seem much point to doing anything else.
“Why?” Ava whispers, not reaching out for Mack, not wanting to touch her skin while it’s still warm, while it’s still here. She had felt safe with Mack, had felt a future in her touch. “Why did you do this?”
Mack took Maddie’s hiding spot. But she hadn’t known what the result would be. She hadn’t killed Maddie. She can see that now, thanks to Linda. Mack crouches and pulls out the handgun she tucked into her sock instead of putting it back in Linda’s purse with the fallen lipstick tubes.
“I said we’d choose what was sacrificed. I never said it was gonna be us.”
DAY SIX
The sun breaks the horizon, cracking the darkness and flooding an abandoned amusement park—a labyrinth—a cemetery—a place haunted by the living and the dead alike—with light.
Three people are inside.
The sun hits the top of the Ferris wheel first, so brilliantly backlit it could almost look whole, like at any moment it will spin to life, rotating riders up and around, an orbit of wonder as they look down at the quickly receding and then breathlessly approaching ground, the stomach-dropping giddiness leading to a stolen kiss. A peal of gleeful laughter. A few minutes of freedom from gravity.
But no more. This particular orbit has been forever arrested, rusted into place. The view will never change.
A set of roller-coaster tracks, ancient and rotting, carpeted with so much ivy that it might be the body of some great sleeping beast long since forgotten, is illuminated next. But it’s just wood and metal. The only beast within this park is neither forgotten nor sleeping for much longer.
Daylight pierces the trees, the ivy, the feral topiary. It can’t break through to the center of the carousel, where both Rosiee and Rebecca ended, surrounded by the grimaces of flaking animal faces. It shines sideways into the base camp, where Ian’s and Christian’s blood has become a sticky black stain, an accusation with no one willing to answer for it. It winks along the chains of the swing, where Jaden thought he was safe and Brandon chose not to be. It lingers on Brandon’s gaze, filmed over, no clean devouring disposal for his body. Who will be the kindest gas station attendant in Pocatello, Idaho, now?
The sun races along the ground, over countless winding maze walls, devouring shadow and piercing mist, throwing everything into sharpest relief. The bushes where Sydney crouched and closed her eyes so she wouldn’t see what was chasing her. The leering clown mouth where Logan—out so quickly, forgotten now by even our three hiders, who will not be able to remember his name—fell asleep and never left. The clotted pool, a twin to the one in the base camp, a testament that beautiful Ava existed, that she was real, that she tried. She tried so hard.
And here, following arrow to arrow, the path Atrius left behind. His mark on the competition. Mack pauses at the discarded sensible pumps, tries to remember the woman they belonged to, can conjure only an image of a pantsuit and an aura of stress.
Isabella, lost first, lost forever.
Mack doesn’t fail to notice the child’s shoe, cracked and peeling leather, hooked onto a branch now grown to the level of her face. Mack nods, as though making a secret agreement with the shoe, and takes it off, tucking it into her pocket.
She pushes on, knowing this is far enough, but needing to see for herself the center of it all. What a generation long before her summoned and paid for, and what subsequent generations decided to make others pay for. Trickle-down economics. They got the economy, and the blood trickled down the decades.
Mack comes around a bend, almost trips on an old iron loop fixed into the cement decades ago. She stops, awed in the oldest sense of the word, where awe is soul-quaking fear and mind-bending wonder wrapped into one.
Here is the temple.
And here is the beast.
* * *
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