We traveled up the driveway through the gate. We saw the usual collection of outbuildings, trailers, and sheds, each more collapsing than the next, planted haphazardly on the hills like tumors growing out of the ground. I was used to seeing cars on blocks, buildings left to rot, even old farmhouses with trees sprouting through their roofs. But some of the cars parked here beyond the gate were burned, bombed out, and vandalized like the cars on the highway. Some of them looked as though they hadn’t been running for years, snow mixing with rust. This place was a junkyard.

Or a graveyard.

The truck bounced over the ruts of the road, knolls of ice along the driveway’s eroding edges. They had not dug ditches here. I looked back at my tiny house, still chained to us. Still intact. The driveway grew more difficult, and the house jostled. I heard the brakes of the truck grind. I straightened around to see where we were going.

Something had been built into the hill ahead of us, the ground hollowed out for what appeared to be a giant, curving swimming pool. But it was drained and empty, the curves swept clean of snow despite the white ruin all around us.

This was where the skaters had slipped off the edge of the world, flying into the sky. The big, band shell–looking thing I had seen from the gate was perched at the top—it was not a band shell at all but a dome, resting above a concrete bowl, deep and wide.

“I think that’s a skate park,” Dance said.

“It’s a theme park in hell,” Grayson said.

“If you own land, you can act like a king. You can build what you want.” I was glued to the window.

We came over the crest of the hill and saw the main house, as the men at the gate said we would: two stories, shingled with rot-black wood. A farmhouse turned flophouse. A sagging front porch hid any people who might be standing there, watching us from the shadows. The roof, sloppy with snow, threatened to collapse onto their heads. An addition onto the house had never been finished, and tar paper flapped, loose in the wind. The pink insulation made that side of the house look naked. It would never be finished now.

Junk was everywhere, tires and beer cans. Fires burned in the barrels scattered around the hills, and in pitted, ashy craters in the ground.