It's easy to see that Travis still doesn't understand what is going on. Beth, hearing her name, wakes up. Noticing that we are all staring at her, she sits up quickly, the shawl slipping from her shoulder and exposing the festering wound underneath.

Harry shrieks like an injured animal and falls to his knees, crawling to his sister. Travis just stands and stares at me as I feel my body flare with heat. Already I despise myself, shame flooding through me, drowning me. I turn and run back down the path.

But at least I know that Travis now hurts as much as I do.

I wander along the various paths, leaving piles of rocks or twigs each time I come to a branch in the path so that I can retrace my steps back. I wish I could find something helpful—

something to bring back as an offering to make amends and prove that we are going in the right direction. That we won't wander the Forest until we die of starvation or dehydration.

But I find nothing—just the endless path filled with brambles and overgrown grass. Dead brown vines trail through the links in the fences with buds that may have once held flowers but now hang limp and desiccated.

Eventually, I find myself back at the first break in the path, and I sit and stare into the woods.

It's quiet here, the Unconsecrated not having risen at the sound of my steps.

“Gabrielle?” I ask the silence. At first my voice is tentative but then I grow bolder. “Gabrielle!” I shout. Soon enough I hear the sound of an animal charging through the underbrush, and then her bright red vest breaks from the trees and she throws herself against the fence. It's not her name she responds to, but my existence. She does not come because I call her, but because she craves me. Because she is mindless and hungry and knows nothing else but desire for human flesh.

She seems a little slower, as though her body is tearing itself apart in the effort to sustain so much energy. Still, she thrusts her fingers at me through the links in the fence, her mouth grinding against the metal in case I step too close.

I think about slipping a finger through the fence and into her mouth. Letting her consume me and infect me. Being done with the path and the longing that's too painful to bear.

I think about my mother out there in the Forest somewhere and how maybe I could find her if I was Unconsecrated. I have always wondered if there is any spark of recognition between the Unconsecrated—if it is like a feral animal that understands something so deep and true as love.

I reach out and press my finger against the nail of her pinky, the only finger that is not bent and broken from trying to rip through the fence.