With a cry, I push up against the trapdoor with all my strength, and the ancient rotting wood groans and gives way, most of it coming unstuck and swinging up, while other pieces, so decayed from water and age, simply crumble and fall around me.

I do not know what lies above, but I push Julian up and through and lay him on the ground beside the opening, then begin to slowly, agonizingly pull myself up after him. By now I can hear Donovan reaching the door below me, and I have just enough time to look up into the beaming moon on snow and ice-crusted trees before a hand grabs my foot from below.

Wildly, I kick back, kick again, and finally my foot connects with something and the hand lets go. Free, I pull myself up the rest of the way and roll onto my back in the snow, then slam the crumbling wooden door back into place.

I can see now that the reason it was so hard to push up the door is because there was several inches of snow lying on top of it, which was dislodged when I managed, through sheer brute force, to pry up the wood. The snow here is not as deep as the drifts around the house, perhaps because the trees have blocked it or the wind blew it away from here and out toward open lands. I breathe the cold, fresh air, unsure when my toes went painfully numb, having escaped, gratefully, from the dank earth.

But I know immediately, by the dark smell and the creeping whisper of stalwart trees, that we are in the swamp.

As soon as I hear Donovan pushing up on the trapdoor from underneath, I take off along the frozen bank of the creek, clutching Julian as he whines in the cold and feeling my way around the trees that loom up seemingly out of nowhere. My feet slip on the layer of icy snow, my toes numb all through and that numbness creeping across the soles of my feet like an infection. Twice I pause to wrap the towel more tightly around Julian, fearful for his delicate newborn skin and the heart-chilling temperature that blows wicked, stinging wind right through the fabric of my own clothing.

Somewhere behind me, I hear Donovan call my name, his voice repeated in the trees as the swamp gives up a faint echo. Sam! His voice runs ragged over the vowel, and he slurs on the s as if his lips are already numb from cold, or aching from the blows he has taken tonight.

“Don’t worry, Julian,” I murmur. “I’ll get us home.”

Perhaps it is cruel to lie to a child, even one who cannot understand you, but if I did not lie, then I would have to admit to myself the truth—that we are lost, and that we might likely freeze to death out here in this vast deadened wild before we ever find our way back.