We could hear the motorbikes now, the whine of their engines above the wind. The trees by the sides of the road looked like men. Then the trees gave way to fields, which should have been corn or wheat, but the crops had never grown, had never even been planted. In the darkness, the flat bumpy fields seemed like the surface of the moon—that inhospitable, that rough and alien. Nothing could live here.

Dance cut the wheel hard—and then we were traveling over the fields, jerking through them with a recklessness and speed that made my teeth clatter in my head. Starla woke up and began to cry, her face screwing in a red crease. “Don’t like,” she wailed. “Don’t like.”

It was the most I had ever heard her say.

“What are you doing?” Grayson said to Dance.

But Dance kept driving fast, his shoulders hunched. The house banged and fishtailed behind us, weighing us down, rocking the truck.

“We’re going to roll!”

A tire sank into a groundhog hole. The truck dipped forward and we all slid, Jamey and Starla pushing up against me. Then Dance steered us out of it. Starla slid up on Jamey’s lap and popped her thumb into her mouth, silently weeping. Jamey held her tightly.

“We just have to find another road,” Dance said.

But there was no another road. We rocketed over the fields. Plain and jagged and endless. I was afraid to look back, to see if the house was safe, if the motorbikes were there. I couldn’t hear their engines anymore. Then Dance slammed to a stop.

The truck was blocked by a line of trees, packed so tightly together I had almost missed them. They looked like extensions of the darkness. Starla wailed. I stared at the trees, exposed by our headlights.

The trees made a wall. They had been forced into a dense line. I saw swatches of knotted fabric, the kind of cheap blue cloth used for cleaning. The trees had been wrapped in the cloth, and lashed together with rope and bungees, the narrow gaps between them stuffed with branches, dead moss, rags. Several stumps, uprooted, had been wedged there, making a barrier like a beaver dam, sealed with mud and hard-packed snow.

Someone had done this, done this purposefully. Someone had seen how closely together the trees grew and had used it to their advantage. People had been here, and made some kind of fence, using junk and bits of the forest. What were they trying to keep out? Or in?

Dance looked over his shoulder, planning to try to back out over the rough fields again, but I stopped him. “Maybe we should hide here,” I said.

“Hide?”

“Get on the other side of that tree fence, get behind something.”

“Where are we gonna hide the truck? The house?”

“If we cut the lights, maybe they can’t see.”