“But shouldn’t we check? See if anyone’s inside?” Calliope resisted the urge to cover Eunjoo’s ears with her palms. She’d already heard their conversation, witnessed the drowned car. The damage already done, Calliope couldn’t keep shielding the girl from this nightmare. Eunjoo was as entangled as the rest of them.

Chance motioned Calliope and Eunjoo out of his way. He would wade into the oily mudpond. He took off his boots, then stripped down to his boxers.

Around Chance’s neck, a turquoise stone on a silver chain. He must’ve worn it under his flannel; she hadn’t noticed it before.

He slogged into the water, and Calliope debated telling him to forget it, the water was so disgustingly black. Nor was she prepared to see the camper family’s corpses—she’d envisioned them off hiking, although she and Eunjoo were wearing their clothes.

But they needed to know. Had the campers driven into the pond trying to escape something? Like Suuke? It had rained, but enough to cover the car? There were no tracks in the dirt around the water. As usual, Calliope was at a loss for explanations, which would have exasperated her at the best of times. She had built her whole life around a need for answers.

Chance jimmied open the driver’s-side door, took a deep breath, and ducked his head into the murkiness.

Calliope waited on edge for Chance to resurface with a corpse, but he arose alone, spitting and wiping his eyes. “Empty.”

She sighed, unsure if she was relieved or frustrated. Either way, they were stranded.

Still, Chance kept his promise. He reclothed, drying off in the campers’ tent and filling backpacks with food and liquids, and they left midmorning. There was no way to tell time but by the sun. Amy had flown away at daybreak. Eunjoo, Chance, and Calliope walked in the opposite direction, following the map Calliope had taken from the plane the night before, thankful for one small fortune amidst the crisis Amy had left them in. A map was a light in darkness.

Calliope expected to find cars beyond the curve of highway stretching away from the City of Rocks. She didn’t expect to find the highway like this—

As she, Chance, and Eunjoo finally emerged from the scrub oak and brush and stepped onto the tarmac, the road unraveled onward, miles ahead, rutted with gnarled roots shooting through the broken slabs of asphalt and branching into the sky, pushing through cars, twisting through the metal. A forest had sprung up—when? Arizona ash, quaking aspen, bur oak piercing into the air, full-grown, covered in leaves. A highway sign slanted diagonally, away from a tree trunk growing from the place the sign had melded into black tar.

“What the hell?” Chance wrenched open a car door partway unhinged to begin with. A stout gray-brown trunk and broad crown of serpentine branches mangled through the floorboard.