Olivia hears it first. She vanishes under the couch. It takes me a moment longer to understand. The sound is not coming from the TV—it fills the air. Big engines are coming. Diggers, maybe, or tractors? Too loud, too close. What are they doing here? At this end of the street there are only two houses and then the forest. But they come on, closer and closer. I go to a peephole to watch them roaring by, yellow as death, great jaws crusted with earth. They don’t stop. They go past the house, toward the woods. A man hops down out of the cab and takes the chains off the gates. There is something bad, something official about that action. He swings the gates open for the machines to pass through. Then the digger and the bulldozer roar and wheeze their way up the forest path.

I run out of the front door, and I am so upset I almost forget to triple-lock it behind me (but I do remember). The neighbor lady and some other neighbors are standing on the sidewalk, watching the two diggers fade into the trees with their terrible sound.

“What’s going on?” I ask her. I am so worried I forget for a moment about how rude she is. “They can’t go up there. It’s a wildlife reserve. It’s protected.”

“They’re making new rest stops off the trail,” she says. “A picnic area. You know, so more hikers, more tourists will come. Hey, I got some more of your mail by mistake this morning. You want me to bring it round later?”

I ignore her. I run into the woods, following the grind of the engines. When I glimpse them, I follow at a distance. After a mile or so they turn off the path and start smashing into the undergrowth. Saplings crack and give. It’s like listening to children screaming. They are tearing up the earth less than three hundred feet from the clearing. They won’t reach it today, but tomorrow they might. A man in a bright orange jacket turns and looks at me. I lift a friendly hand, then turn and walk away, trying to look like a normal person. The sound follows me down the path long after I am out of sight. Jaws, eating the forest.

I could kick myself. I knew it—I left the gods buried in the glade for too long. People sense them there, whether they know it or not. They are drawn to them as if on a string. I can’t tell if my arm is all better yet. Some, I think. The bruising has gone down. Anyway there’s no more time. I’ve got to move them tonight.

The afternoon is so long, it feels like years before the sun goes down. But at last it does, leaving crimson cuts across the sky.