She stumbles to Ted’s backpack, through wisps of white cloud. She finds a yellow pouch. The snake on the label rears out at her and she flinches, gasping. The instructions swim before her eyes. She puts the tourniquet on and places the suction cup on the mouth of the wound. The flesh there is pudgy and dark. It hurts. She pumps and blood fills the chamber. Perhaps it is wishful thinking, but she feels better already, steadier, more alert. She pumps a couple more times, then gets up. That will have to do.

She sees the surgical glue tucked into a pocket of the backpack. She throws it into the fast-running stream. “Just in case,” she whispers. After all, dead rattlesnakes still bite.

She thinks of her hand over Ted’s nose and mouth as he fought for breath. It’s fine, because he deserved it. Everything will work out. As for the moment when the man spoke with a little girl’s voice, that was just confusion caused by the poison. Her vision blurs, but she quests patiently, until she sees her yellow blaze on a distant tree trunk, marking the path out of the valley. She stumbles toward it. Dee will find Lulu and give her a place to live, and they will be so happy, and hunt for pebbles together. But not at a lake. Never there.

“Lulu,” Dee whispers. “I’m coming.” She staggers through the forest, through pillars of dark and light. Behind her she hears a dog baying. She hurries on.

OLIVIA

It’s not your body, Lauren. I am crying now. It’s his. We live in Ted.

“Yes,” she says with a sigh. “But not for much longer. Thank God.”

Why, why? I am rowing like a kit. You made me kill us. All of us.

“I needed your help to end it. I couldn’t do it on my own.”

I thought I was so smart—but Lauren led me so easily down this path, to this moment, to our death.

You lied, I say. All that stuff you said, about the vinegar and the freezer …

“That was all true,” she says. “Though it happened to him and me both. You don’t know what we have been through. Life is a long tunnel, Olivia. The light only comes at the end.”

I can see her in my mind, now. Lauren is slight with big brown eyes. Everything she said about her body is true. Murderer, I say to her.

Somewhere, Ted is panting. There is a really bad sound in it, a wet red whistle. He raises our hand, where it has been clutched against the wound in his abdomen. We all watch as our blood runs down our palm, hot and stinking slick. It drips to the ground and the earth drinks it. Ted’s body, our body, is failing.