But it’s not safety anymore, it’s not hope. It’s exactly the opposite direction she was trying to go. She’s deeper in the labyrinth now, heading the wrong direction. She knows how to get to the pavilion from here, but it requires doubling back. Going toward the relentless, patient hoofbeats heading her way.
Mack runs forward, trying to correct, trying to get back on the right path. She’s heedless of direction now, turned and twisted. Her heart races and her breath is ragged and she’s going to die and then LeGrand is going to die and then Ava is going to die, and once again it will be her fault. It was her choice to come back into the park. Her selfishness.
Mack stumbles and careens off a lone roller-coaster cart waiting in the middle of the path.
She needs time. She has to buy herself time to figure out where the hell she is.
The roller-coaster cart eyes her wearily, the painted face of a long-suffering cow begging her to look at what it sees.
She turns her head. The tracks are right next to her, a wooden path leading off her traitorous trail and up, up, up into the trees. She can’t see where it ends through the tunnel of branches and ivy. It’s obviously not a path that will lead her to the gate. But maybe, just maybe, it will save her.
Mack jumps onto the track and runs straight up.
* * *
—
When it was built, the Cattle Run was a wonder of engineering. Most roller coasters were designed to be contained, portable, easy to dismantle and transport and reassemble, depending on where cash was flowing and where it wasn’t.
As a demonstration of how flush with cash, how confidently permanent the Amazement Park was, Lillian Nicely Smith commissioned a wooden and metal marvel, the longest ever made. This was a roller coaster that would never be taken apart and moved elsewhere, a soaring, dipping, twisting testament to the fact that things built in Asterion are meant to last forever.
It was the most popular ride in the park, so fast and winding that there were dedicated vomit bins at the end for the unfortunate riders stumbling off to lose their overpriced lunches. Ian’s favorite ennui-plagued Russian revolutionary would have written about it as a perfect example of both American ingenuity and excess.
Indeed, until the unfortunate incident with the little girl lost, the Cattle Run was the most notorious and famous aspect of the whole park.
But all things end. The park closed. Even if the roller coaster had been portable, no one would have taken it, because no one needed anything from the park except the thing that never left it, that slept in the center, that woke only every seven years to consume and bless and sleep once more.
And it turned out this roller coaster was not, in fact, built to last forever. Halfway up the first great climb, Mack’s foot goes right through a rotted board.
“Shit,” she gasps, falling hard on one knee as her calf is gouged by the wooden shards around the hole she’s made. Without concern for doing more damage to her skin beneath her pants, she yanks her leg free. She runs up the steep incline with all the speed and lightness she has, with an empty focus honed by years of doing and being nothing. She is as light as the memory of her mother’s laughter, as soft as the touch of Ava’s buzzed hair, as weightless as a child’s duck made of grubby yellow yarn.
Mack crests the top of the roller-coaster track, and her stomach drops as the park falls away around her, the trees at last defeated.
There, the gate! And there, a path through the labyrinth, a winding return to hope.
Mack can feel the hot, wet breath of death on the back of her neck. She doesn’t turn. She throws herself down the track, her feet barely keeping up with her momentum, and leaps over a gaping hole where the track has completely fallen away. She lands hard, rolling and coming up decorated with splinters. There’s a terrible crash behind her and she doesn’t look back, but she waits for something—a low animal moan of pain or panic, some indication the monster has fallen, has slowed—but it doesn’t come.
Still, she’s bought herself a few precious seconds. She keeps running, eyes tracing the track, searching for where she needs to exit to meet up with her escape plan.
Everywhere paths in the park wind around and away, intended to corral the monster’s prey, to make it easier. Easier on the monster, easier on the prey, easier than fighting and running and hoping.
Hope is exhausting, and Mack is nearly spent.
A dip, a turn, a stumble, and Mack’s stomach drops with fear that she’s lost where her path is. That she’ll be running this track forever until she is caught. An infinite, futile loop, the same she has always been stuck in.
Ava’s smile, she thinks and puts on a burst of speed, leaping another gap and barely noticing when she trips and her palms are speared by rusted nails. She tears them free and continues.
LeGrand’s sister, she thinks, climbing one last rise, the rise she needs most, and looking down at the pool of water beneath her, a layer of green sludge on the top making it impossible to gauge the depth. Across it, access to her path out.
She doesn’t have time to climb down, and she doesn’t know how deep the water is. If she jumps and it’s only inches, she’ll break something and be devoured.
If she climbs, she’ll take too long and be devoured.
She thinks of the bird, living forever hidden and alone in the dark of the rafters. Safe. But never free.
Myself, she thinks, and Maddie. Mack leaps into the air, floating impossibly long, suspended by hope and fear and desperation and something, at last, like peace.
* * *
—
“Come on, come on, come on,” Ava whispers, crouched next to the generator. They can’t do it too soon, or everything will be lost. She has to time it exactly right. LeGrand has moved to a tree, watching. Waiting.
Linda is on the other side of the fence, letting out small whimpers of suffering. Her breaths are panicked and shallow and sound wet. Ava knows from experience that’s not a good sound. Feels good to hear today, though.
At last, LeGrand shouts. Ava lights the end of the T-shirt, now thoroughly soaked in gasoline where it’s been twisted and worked through the open gas cap down to whatever is left in the tank.
“Go!” Ava shouts, waving at LeGrand. He jumps down and ducks behind the stone wall. Christian’s shirt is well and truly on fire now, and if all goes to plan, there will be shrapnel.
So much shrapnel.
LeGrand pops back up to help drag Ava over the wall and they crouch together next to a spot where a little girl once sat, kicking her heels against it, patent leather shoes still new and shiny.
“Come on, come on, come on,” Ava prays again.
The explosion is deafening, a tremendous boom punctuated with the terrible scream of metal. Ava and LeGrand are thrown back, stunned, as shards of iron and clods of dirt and a few pieces of stalwart concrete rain around them.
They stand hesitantly, checking for injuries as they brush themselves off. A gasping laugh greets them. Linda, still lying flat on her back, gurgles and laughs again. “You did it too soon. The beast wasn’t even there yet.”