Siena

SIENA

Four or five days after Emmett died, she found a meadow.

The ground squelched beneath her feet. She rested her bag on a rotten stump to relieve the burning ache in her shoulders.

The sun was out. She tilted her chin until warmth baked her face. When was the last time she'd seen the sun? She'd grown careless with tracking days. Everything between leaving the mountain and now was a blur of color and trees accompanied by stabs of grief.

After he'd died—after she'd finally pulled herself together—she'd dragged some branches and lichen over his body and left him on the ground. She didn't know if what had killed him was contagious, but if it was, she was likely infected. Time would tell, and she felt powerless against the possibility of dying like him. She'd traded out her bag for his because it fit better, and would have taken his digital watch if it weren't strapped to the rotten hunk of flesh that was once his hand.

Then she'd left and followed her compass south, her nubuck gloves permanently fixed to her hands. Emmett's death played on a loop in her head until the recollection devolved into a surreal memory with little emotion attached. She wasn't sure if this stage of grief was supposed to be denial, or acceptance .

She dropped her chin to gaze across a sea of high grass and mustard-yellow flowers, her breath hitching at a small deer with dark spots and hook-shaped tusks. The deer blinked at her and ducked its head beneath the grass, foraging for something. Insects, maybe.

A compulsion crawled over to unstrap Isaac's bow from her bag and shoot the deer. Her subconsciousness had known to not part with the weapon in hopes of a fresh kill.

Her mouth flooded at the thought of meat until a flash of fungus growing from Emmett's hand made her dry heave.

Enough .

She gained some semblance of control, and felt guilty for wanting to shoot the poor thing, which was just minding its business. After sitting on a stump, she drew her field journal from her pack, and poorly sketched the deer. She'd compare the drawing to Feyrer's research the next time her phone worked. For now, it lay dead alongside Emmett's at the bottom of her bag.

She also carried with her the remainder of their food, a tightly rationed month of dehydrated dinners, energy bars, and MREs. If that wasn't enough to get her home, she had bigger problems.

Her eyes scanned beyond the meadow to the next woodland edge. She blinked a few times against the sun. A lump formed in her throat, and she pulled her map from her rain shell and unfolded it, even though she was certain she'd copied no landmarks other than the trail and the outposts for the rest of the journey.

Less than a quarter of a mile away, ancient growth cut the land from east to west, more absolute than the wall of a military base. The trees grew upward of ninety meters—impossibly tall—and from where she stood she could make out an impenetrable canopy and the beginnings of fatally thick growth.

She'd stolen Emmett's batteries—seven triple As in various used states—and had a sense her headlamp would remain on at all times through the next leg of the hike. Hopefully a short leg. The damp darkness she'd traversed since Outpost 2 continued to eat away at her nerves. Not only that, but a scratch from a wayward branch could be the end of her, for all she knew.

The sun dipped behind the clouds, and she zipped her rain shell to her neck and tied a bandanna over the lower half of her face. After throwing on her pack, she crossed the meadow and found a trail, following it until the forest swallowed her.

took a breath of drenched air. Her headlamp beam swept over the bracken hugging the narrow trail. Moss and maidenhair painted giant slick trunks while fungus ate away at crumbling deadwood. Water splattered over her hood, falling as thick as rain, though it hadn't been raining when she entered.

It was beautiful. And then, less than half a mile in, the forest fell darker than fucking midnight.

If it weren't for all the growth—and the rain—she'd think she was in a cavern. The perpetual nighttime biome echoed, cacophonous hoots, caws, and chitters casting back and forth beneath lichen-drenched boughs. Every so often, her headlamp caught the tail of a mouse or the flutter of a bat.

Before her stretched only the promise of black forest. followed the thinning trail deeper, kicking through ferns and lunging over tree corpses. She strained her ears for the sound of lurking predators, or the hungry rumble that signaled The Shadow.

A few miles later, she glanced up at the sweet relief of stars.

No .

Horror pulsed through her as thousands of eyes reflected the light of her headlamp. Bats, owls, rodents. Pale mammals with big ears, for which she didn't have names. Lizards. Snakes. Spiders hanging from their webs, eyes quadrupled. An infestation.

A fight broke out somewhere between her and the canopy, a creature shrieking in death. Sets of eyes zipped away, scrambling from the noise. gripped the straps of her bag so tightly, she felt her panicked pulse beating in her palms.

To hell with making camp here. She'd keep walking until she died .

She lunged forward when branches snagged her bag, scanning ahead for any sign of light. Her attention caught on trash scattered between the ferns—a cluster of plastic bags, an old tire.

How did a tire get here?

When she slowed to investigate, something from beyond the darkness rattled. She picked up her pace again, leaving the tire alone. Better to not piss anything off.

But hours later, both her determination and caution waned, and exhaustion slammed into her full force. If she kept walking like this, she'd run her body down until she was stuck here forever.

So much for walking until she died.

She shook her ground tarp out on the driest patch of moss she could find in the dark, then struggled with her bivy, fingers fumbling to connect the poles. Water pooled in her hanging tarp mere seconds after she strung it up, but she was too tired to care. At least she could filter it for her bottle in the morning. She wriggled inside her bivy, laid flat her damp clothes, and spent as much light as she could waste tearing up her field journal with notes.

How does life evolve to survive without the sun?

Chemosynthesis

Bacterial or fungal symbiosis

Soil nutrients—leaves and rot

Gets warm enough to sweat here, between 15–20°C.

I understand the plants more than the animals. Their noises never wane or change, like nothing in this biome sleeps.

Light had yet to break through the forest by her third camp.

The rain wavered between mist and downpour but never stopped. She gave up on the pipe dream of drying out in her bivy. No amount of shaking out or blowing on her hands could unprune them. Her feet were in a worse state, both macerated and inflamed, her heels as tender as raw chicken. She'd used all her aspirin on her knee sprain, a laughable injury compared to this. The soles of her boots drooped from the toe like flapping mouths. She duct-taped them shut and set them aside, then swept her headlamp over the troughs and ridges of her waterlogged skin to check for infection. Nothing yet, though her luck had to run out eventually, like the fuel of the camp stove she'd abandoned this morning. There would be no more instant coffee. She could still taste it from when she and Emmett made cups back in Outpost 2.

When she turned off her light, it was too dark to see her hand waving in front of her face. Her rib cage tightened around her lungs, and she couldn't expand her chest enough to breathe. She reached out and touched nothing other than her cold sleeping bag.

After her diagnosis, when Emmett still slept by her side, she'd wake up in a panic and reach out to touch him. He'd wake up every time, roll over, and hold her. He'd done the same at the research cabin when they were trapped there. A reflex.

Over the sour and putrid stench of her own body, she could smell him, here in the dark. Their bed, his sweat and deodorant. She could smell him even though there was no one around her for miles, no one to reach out and touch, not even if she needed touch to keep living.

She wrapped her arms around her body and pretended they belonged to someone else, and in the morning, she ate half a package of glutinous rehydrated Alfredo, packed up, and kept moving.

She fantasized about the sun the way she used to fantasize about good sex, almost too distracted to notice that her ribbon of trail had finally thinned to nothing. Her light flashed over beads of water dripping from thorny briars. She took out her compass and shook it a bit until the trembling red-capped needle pointed to her right.

Assuming her compass even worked in the Briardark, the trail had been leading her west, not south .

Her feet snagged on roots, and saplings clawed her pants, the light from her headlamp unhelpfully trembling like it was afraid of the dark. She sank to her calves in a sea of soaking detritus, backtracking when fallen trees blocked her way.

Any sign of a trail or a break in the suffocating canopy eluded her. She stomped down enough growth just to make camp, and did this over and over again, and again, and again, taking her meds diligently each time she thought twenty-four hours had passed, until the last twelve pills rattled around in her bottle.

Then her feet started to bleed, and she lost track of time.

When was a kid, she watched a cartoon movie about a boy who drove monsters and goblins away by singing. So she tried it now, oscillating between Spice Girls and John Denver.

Her mother had owned a cassette of Back Home Again that never left the deck in her car. It had played on repeat, flipping to side B and back to side A again as they drove to Lodgepole in Sequoia National Park. Mariposa Grove near Wawona. The idyllic little village of Mammoth Lakes. They'd drive up those slow, winding roads that glittered with mica as her mother sang "Annie's Song," heading toward tourist-trodden visitor centers that smelled like pine needles and ice cream.

had played that album on her mother's last day in the hospital, right before she went to get lunch.

She shoved herself southward long after "Sweet Surrender" died on her lips, fighting off spiky new growth until the nocturnal foliage parted for the vaguest sliver of a path. Hope pulsed inside her, and she followed the path eastward and around a bend until the dulling beam of her headlamp caught the remains of a structure. She ventured through the thicket and wet pulp to a sign hanging crookedly from one of the remaining beams.

Outpost 4

Outpost 3 was somewhere behind her, probably passed by the first time she lost the trail. The dank atmosphere had eaten this outpost whole, gutting her chances of drying out and healing her skin for one goddamn night.

Her singing had warmed her voice up for a shriek of anguish.

Farther down the trail, she threw down camp and crammed the last of her remaining batteries into her headlamp. She unfolded her damp map and located Outpost 4, then brushed her rippled and peeling finger back and forth across the paper valley before clenching her fist.

Halfway. Halfway to the last outpost and the ring with two slashes through it. Halfway between Mount Agnes and home, if she could even get out of this place.

Halfway.

She was half-fucking-way.

Did this midnight biome stretch all the way to the last outpost? Was the pitch-black canopy merely The Shadow, ingraining into her the lesson that what he giveth, he taketh away? The light, the sun, a clear path forward. All of it, merely a privilege.

She finished her MRE. Two more, along with ten mangled and squashed energy bars, remained at the bottom of her pack.

Not enough.

She woke screaming, despair thundering through whatever emotional valve had finally broken inside her.

She gasped and sobbed, frantically feeling around until her sticky fingers found the strap of her headlamp. She clicked it on, the light shining on her nails caked in blood.

She stared at the red crescents in a daze, snot dripping from her nose, until a tender spot on her back itched. Flipping over, she lifted the blood-smeared hem of her shirt. Broken pustules clustered along her flank. They hadn't been there the last time she camped. She'd scratched them open in her sleep.

Numbly, she dug through her pack for her deflated first aid kit, and cleaned the area and her fingers with her last alcohol wipe before bandaging her side with tape and gauze.

How long had Emmett lived after the splinter? One day? Two? This rash wasn't the same infection, but she couldn't trust it would be any kinder.

She took a small bite of the energy bar in her pocket and folded the wrapper over the rest. One and a half bars. Four pills after rationing. No more antiseptic.

She licked the open cracks of her lips and fell back into her sleeping bag. This was better than dying in a hospital like her mother.

A branch snapped outside, close to her tent. Something from the woods had heard her scream and had arrived to scavenge her corpse.

She unzipped her bivy and shone her light into the forest and a gnarled claw of thorns. A small lizard skittered away.

Nothing.

She sang out the first line of "Annie's Song." The darkness ate the melody whole.

Six or seven or eight camps later, she was still alive.

Her antipsychotics were gone. The rash had spread across her greasy flank. Her headlight had petered out, and now she dragged the bloody stumps of her feet through the darkness by only the soft beam of her pocket flashlight.

She passed garbage every once in a while. Tangled chain link fencing, a soggy fast food bag. What the trash signaled, she couldn't know for sure, but clung to a fragment of hope.

Hypothesis: I'm reaching the end .

Pale rodents the size of enormous rats hopped and skittered through the bracken and leaf rot, weaving courageously between her feet. She caught only flashes of them with her weak light. Their behavior differed from when she entered the pitch-black forest, when thousands of creatures watched from the safety of the tree branches. She committed their features to memory, their large ears and puckered eye sockets, the purple fungus that grew on their backs. Parasitic? Commensalistic?

One latched on to her pant leg, and she shook it off with an angry yowl.

This happened two, three more times until she duct-taped her pants to her shoes for fear they'd get beneath her clothes and bite her.

The rodents weren't the only creatures getting braver. She dodged a snake and a spider the size of her hand, both so bullish in their approach, like hallucinations. Maybe they were hallucinations—products of her paranoia.

When was still getting her PhD, she'd dreamt of traveling to the arctic and studying subglacial lakes, overwintering with her team at a station. She'd even written a draft of the proposal, and had researched how to prepare herself physically and mentally for the months of unending darkness, when the sun never breaches the horizon. Cabin fever. Isolation. Hijacked hormones and circadian rhythms. Disorientation and delusions. She read about the researcher who'd plunged a kitchen knife into a data manager for eating the last of the station's chocolate stash. Early explorers stripping naked and sprinting across the ice until they froze to death. Wooden barracks full of sleeping technicians and engineers, lit on fire by a deranged supervisor.

's dream had fizzled out when she was diagnosed and could no longer pass a psychological screening. But she still often thought of those scientists and explorers who caught winter-over syndrome like one would catch a cold. A spark of madness was all it took, a fire poker to the brain, sending thought patterns and emotional intelligence aflutter, like ash.

The same thing would inevitably happen to her. Better Emmett died before she could brain him with the rod of her bivy, strip naked, and walk through the fetid abyss until the rats ate her. There was still time for the latter to happen. She couldn't think of a better way to kill herself. Maybe pills, but she'd eaten all of hers.

A clearing interrupted her path, the fire pit in the center covered in moss and slime. A skull sat on one stone, fungus eating away at the eye sockets.

She sat near the ring, resting. The tremors in her muscles wouldn't stop, not even when she slept.

"I can't decide if I'm jealous of you," she told the skull. She swept her light from its eaten eye sockets to an equally eaten canvas bag to her right. Pushing the fabric away, her hands closed around a metal cylinder. At first she couldn't believe it. She dragged the can toward her face, her dull light falling on the label.

Pennyman's Pork and Beans - Campfire Style

She laughed, and then she laughed harder.

She checked the can for bloat, then pried open the lid with her knife. Raising it to her lips, she shut her eyes as the sludge slid into her mouth and down her throat. Brown sugar and slime with chunks of ham. It was gone before she could even enjoy it, and she cried as she licked the inside of the can clean.

tossed the can aside and wiped her nose with the back of her wrist. She found one more can in the rags of the canvas bag, which she took, but nothing else to identify the poor soul who'd lost their head by the fire ring.

At a snap, glanced up and lifted her light. In the dull yellow orb, a deer picked at the leaves of a spiky bush on the other side of the clearing, its milky eyes bulbous, hairless flank threaded with inky veins. Its little knees bulged with white cartilage. Pustules like the ones on her back covered half its body.

Was this what she would turn into? A walking scab?

She could shoot this deer. It suffered from the same thing that infected her, so why the hell not? Put it out of its misery and eat the meat. All tinder and wood near the clearing was too wet to start a fire, but at this point she'd eat the meat raw.

She'd also never dressed a deer before. Cam had. They'd taken a duo trip around the Tahoe Rim a few years ago, and somewhere between their shared joint being a quarter smoked and two-thirds smoked (she'd noted this intently), they'd begun co-creating a survival scenario where they were stuck in the woods, Bear Grylls style, with nothing but a hunting knife and a fire source. Foraging and creating small traps for prey was priority one, of course, but what if they saw a deer?

" Clearly at this point in my life, I'd have taken knife-throwing lessons, " Cam had said.

But it wasn't just the knife throwing they needed to ponder. There were a hundred and ten ways to fuck up dressing a deer.

The two most important ones remembered: don't puncture the intestines. And don't puncture the bladder.

"You have to cut out its asshole."

"Christ, Cam."

"What? All the meat you eat once had an asshole."

"Yeah, why do you think I don't eat a lot of meat?"

"Because you think about asshole too much?"

There'd been a lot of incessant giggling. She missed the joy of deranged conversation. A dry sleeping bag. The soft orange of sunrise. The voice of another.

She licked away a tear that rolled past her mouth, then the surrounding foliage shook, and something struck out from the darkness. The deer screamed as it fell forward, feeble hooves digging into the mud as it scrambled to find purchase.

jumped up as the deer was dragged through the thorns, fumbling with the straps holding Isaac's bow to her bag. She finally freed it, sliding an arrow from the elastic side pocket and nocking it for her own defense. She wouldn't get far through the thicket if she tried to run.

She pulled back on the string, and it snapped apart, the arrow tumbling into the mud .

" Fuck! " She held her breath in the stifling dark, straining to listen beyond the pattering rain.

In the distance—she didn't know how far—the deer released a death shriek.

A predator.

She waited for primal fear to surge through her body, glancing at the dim flashlight in the mud near her feet. She wanted to know— needed to know—about the creature in these woods strong enough to snatch a deer from right in front of her.

She picked up her light and hobbled toward where the deer had stood, then peered into the woods. The flashlight beam shook along the ground. No drag marks, no animal tracks. No tang of iron in the air.

The scream of the deer echoed in her skull.

She returned to her bag, lugged it onto her weak shoulders, and pressed her fingers to the belt pocket containing her empty pill bottle. She fished it out and held it before her, shining her light on the bottom of the empty bottle until it glowed like the sun.

"Wake up."

opened her eyes to darkness and the patter of rain, her face slick. She blinked, sniffed, then slumped once more against the half-rotten tree she leaned against.

She'd stopped to rest when the muscles in her calves wouldn't stop clenching and trembling, and must have fallen asleep. Her head drooped, and she let it hang there, contemplating every shallow breath.

Did she have enough energy to set up camp for the last time? Her belongings had finally surrendered to the rain, her bivy and sleeping bag soggy and moldering. Slipping into them would be worse than just sitting here. She couldn't feel much anyway, her legs pleasantly warm and numb.

"I expected more from you."

Her head bobbed as she tried to lift it. The voice was her own, yet her lips hung limply open and wordless.

"Drink."

Her teeth clattered against something plastic. lifted her head and gulped cool water. Fingers plucked a leech from her neck, and another from her forehead. She'd lost the energy to keep fighting them off hours ago.

"Nothing waits for you back home," her voice said.

swallowed for the last time, her head falling back against the tree. Her father , she wanted to say. Her father was still alive. As far as she knew. In his cabin up in the Yukon. No phone. No internet.

When would he learn of her death?

A bright orb burned up the darkness.

Tears streamed from her sensitive eyes. She blinked until her vision adjusted and settled on a silhouette holding a lantern. Light flickered over blurry plastic lenses, a long, hazy tube snaking from their mouth. She processed just enough of the figure to recognize the man in the gas mask. The man from the other cabin on Agnes. A severed mule head, a message in blood.

The Mother Reigns.

Terror seized her, her body trembling uncontrollably as his familiar deep voice rumbled.

" Don't be afraid. "