Chapter 2

Declan's minivan smelled like french fries and something botanical that turned out to be the air freshener Birdie had duct-taped to the rearview mirror. It was shaped like a pine tree. The irony of that, given where we were going, seemed lost on everyone but me.

"Shotgun means aux," Hector announced, climbing into the passenger seat with his phone already connected to the stereo before Declan had the engine running.

"Shotgun means you navigate," Declan said.

"I can do both."

"You took us to Tacoma last time."

"We got there eventually."

Maren slid into the middle row beside me, her thigh warm against mine in the tight space. Soo-jin and Sarah took the back, already wrapped in a sleeping bag they were sharing like a cocoon. Birdie wedged herself on Maren's other side with a tote bag full of snacks balanced on her knees.

Six of us, technically seven if you counted whatever was growing in the cup holder behind Declan's seat. Someone had drawn a jack-o'-lantern face on a tangerine and left it there to age.

"I can't believe we're actually doing this," Birdie said.

"Hiking," Declan said. "People do it."

"Hiking on Halloween . In the actual Olympic rainforest. That's not hiking. That's the first twenty minutes of a movie where everyone dies."

"Not everyone." Hector scrolled through his phone. "The virgin survives."

Silence. Then Sarah, from the back: "We're fucked."

The laughter filled the van like something warm and pressurized. I smiled. Maren caught it, bumped my shoulder with hers, and I let the contact stay for a second before I shifted to pull my jacket zipper up.

It was the twenty-ninth. Friday. The actual holiday was Sunday, but Declan had argued for the full weekend, two nights at a campsite he'd reserved near Port Angeles. He'd pitched it at the Fremont house the week before, standing on the kitchen table in a pair of hiking boots he'd clearly just bought, soles still bright white. An anti-Halloween , he called it. No costumes, no parties, no twelve-dollar drinks at some bar playing the Monster Mash. Just the woods. I said yes before he'd finished the sentence.

The van merged onto the interstate, and the city began its slow dissolve. First the hospitals, then the industrial flats south of the canal, then water. Hector put on something with a lot of bass and no discernible lyrics, and Birdie made him change it, and then they argued about that for the fifteen minutes it took to reach the ferry terminal at Colman Dock.

I'd memorized this route on my phone. The schedule, the fare, the crossing time. Thirty-five minutes, Seattle to Bainbridge. I'd looked it up dozens of times from my window on 18th Avenue. I knew the distance. What I hadn't accounted for was the weight of it.

We drove onto the ferry in a line of cars, and Declan killed the engine. Everyone piled out to find the bathroom or the vending machines or the upper deck, where you could stand outside and watch Seattle shrink. I followed them up the stairs. Then I peeled off.

The observation deck on the port side was almost empty. Wind came off the Sound in sheets, cold and tasting of salt and diesel. I gripped the railing. The metal bit into my palms.

Behind me, through the glass doors, I could hear Hector and Birdie still going at it about music. Maren's laugh cut through, clean and bright. Someone, probably Sarah, was taking a photo.

Ahead of me, the Olympics filled the horizon.

They looked different from the water. From my apartment window they'd been a suggestion. A line. A thing to focus on when the walls pressed close. Here they were actual. Massive. Snow on the high ridges caught the late-afternoon light so the peaks burned copper against the sky. The range didn't sit on the horizon from here. It reared up out of it. Forest black at the base, ice white at the crown, and the dark band between where the old growth was, where we were going, where the roads narrowed and the cell service failed, and the trees had been alive longer than any country on any map.

My hands tightened on the railing. The callus on my middle finger pressed into cold steel.

The ferry horn sounded, low enough to feel in my chest.

"Ky." Maren, at the door behind me. "Birdie bought Cheetos from the vending machine, and they're the puffed kind. She needs emotional support."

I let go of the railing. Turned. The mountains stayed where they were, getting closer, and I walked back inside, where it was warm, and Birdie was holding a bag of Cheetos like a personal betrayal.

The campsite was three miles west of town, up a gravel road that made the van sound like it was digesting something. Declan backed into the spot with the confidence of someone who'd watched one YouTube video on campsite parking, and we spent the next forty minutes putting up tents in the last of the daylight. Hector bent a pole. Birdie read the instructions aloud in a voice she said was David Attenborough. Maren and I shared a two-person tent that went up fast because neither of us talked while we worked, just handed stakes back and forth until it was done.

By the time the tents were up, it was dark and nobody wanted to cook.

"Town?" Declan said. He jingled the van keys. Nobody argued.

Port Angeles on the Friday before Halloween looked like a town wearing a costume of itself. Fake cobwebs on the storefronts. Plastic skeletons zip-tied to parking meters. A banner over the main street read HAPPY HALLOWEEN in letters that had survived several seasons of rain. We passed a bar with a line out front, all twenty-somethings in costumes, a cluster of sexy cats, and one guy in a banana suit.

"There," Sarah said, pointing.

The diner sat between a hardware store and a place that sold fishing bait. Hand-painted sign. Fluorescent glow through windows fogged with kitchen steam. Inside: vinyl booths, a counter with stools, and enough Halloween decorations to suggest someone had gone to a dollar store with a purpose. Paper bats hung from the ceiling on fishing line. A plastic cauldron by the register held candy corn nobody was eating.

The place was close to full. Families. A couple of guys in Carhartt jackets. Three women in matching witch hats sharing a plate of nachos.

We found a booth near the counter. Six of us in a four-person booth, which meant Hector sat on a pulled-up chair, and I ended up on the outside edge, half in the booth and half not. The menu was laminated and sticky. Birdie ordered for the table— burgers, fries, onion rings, and a milkshake she planned to share with no one.

I went to the counter to get drinks.

There was a man two stools down. Mid-fifties, maybe. Flannel shirt washed enough times that the plaid had gone soft and vague. He had the posture of someone who'd been there a while, elbows planted, shoulders rounded forward over a glass of something brown. Not wrecked. Just settled into that groove where the alcohol had loosened everything a quarter turn.

He was talking to the bartender, who was drying a glass in the way bartenders dry glasses when they're listening with one ear.

"…won't go near it. Elk, deer, none of them. My buddy Ray runs trail cameras up above the Elwha, and he's got this dead zone. Hundred-something acres where nothing trips the sensor. Not a coyote. Not a rabbit. Nothing."

The bartender set the glass down. Picked up another.

"His grandfather, Ray's grandfather, had some name for it. Quileute or Klallam, I forget which. Ray never could say it right either." The man took a drink. "Something like… the thing that wants. That hungry thing… I don't know. Doesn't go into English clean."

I was waiting for our sodas. The bartender hadn't looked at me yet.

"Ray's uncle used to tell this one about a woman." The man turned his glass in a slow circle on the counter. "Way back. Backcountry, deep interior, the part where the logging roads quit. She went in alone. People said don't, and she went anyway." He laughed, short and dry. "Came back out a few days later. But she was off. Not sick. Hungry. Hungry like…" He paused. Rubbed his jaw. "That's how my uncle told it anyway. Hungry in a way that wasn't about food."

Behind me, Birdie said something that made Hector cackle. The paper bats swayed in the ceiling vent's breath.

"But the thing people remembered, the detail that stuck," the man said, and his voice dropped the half-joking register it had been riding. Just for a second. "Her eyes. Not the color. Just something behind them. Like whatever was looking out of her face had rearranged..."

He finished his drink. Set the glass down with a small, decisive click.

"Anyway." He signaled for another. "You see the Mariners traded Castillo?"

The bartender poured. His hands were steady, but he poured a little fast, moved the bottle back to the shelf, and wiped the counter that didn't need wiping.

"Didn't catch that," he said, and his voice had that bright flat quality of someone changing a channel.

I stood at the counter with four waters on a tray and my hands around the edges, and I didn't move. The floor was gritty under my boots.

"Ky, you need help?"

Maren. Behind me.

"No." I picked up the tray. "They're out of Sprite. Hector gets root beer."

I carried the sodas back to the booth. Slid in and handed them out. Birdie was explaining to Declan why ranch dressing was a scam. Hector was filming her. Sarah was reading the dessert menu with scholarly focus.

Nobody asked me anything. Nobody noticed that I'd come back with sodas, that my hands when I set the glasses down left no print of condensation because my fingers had gone warm against the cold.

The man at the counter was talking about baseball.

I opened my menu. The words sat on the laminate, patient and meaningless, and I read them twice without reading them at all.

The trail started from the Storm King ranger station, where a wooden sign listed the distance as 1.8 miles round trip and rated it easy. Declan photographed the sign.

"For posterity," he said, already walking.

Birdie fell in beside him. Maren pulled out her phone. Hector had his camera around his neck, the actual one, the Canon he'd apparently been carrying since high school, and he was already crouching to shoot a root system that had crawled across the trail like a fist opening.

The forest closed over us within the first hundred yards.

I'd read about old-growth. I'd looked at photographs. I'd written a paper on canopy structure for my ecology seminar that earned me an A-minus and a note from Professor Chen saying you write about forests like you've met one. I hadn't.

The Douglas firs went up two hundred feet, and the hemlocks filled the spaces between them, and the moss hung from everything in curtains so thick and so green it stopped being a color and became a temperature. The air was ten degrees cooler under the canopy. It tasted like water and rot and something metallic underneath, like the forest was running a low current through everything it touched.

Barnes Creek kept pace with us on the left, shallow and fast, the color of tea.

"Oh my God." Maren had stopped walking. "Oh my God ."

"I know," Birdie said.

"No, like. Look at it."

"I'm looking."

"Are you though?"

Soo-jin took a photograph. Then another. Then turned her phone vertical and took a third. Declan stood with his hands on his hips, and his head tilted back, mouth open, performing awe in the specific way Declan performed everything, generous and sincere and somehow still a little like he was narrating his own documentary.

I didn't take photographs. My hands hung at my sides, and the cold crept into my fingers. The notebook stayed in my jacket.

They moved ahead. The trail bent and their voices softened with distance, Hector saying something about f-stops, Birdie laughing.

I was looking at the ground.

The track was in a patch of bare mud where the trail dipped near the creek bank. Not boot-shaped. Not paw-shaped. Wider than my hand with my fingers spread, and deep, the mud pushed down and slightly outward as though the weight behind it had been enormous and brief. No claw marks. No pad. Just the displacement of something heavy passing through.

I crouched. Touched the edge of it with two fingers. The mud was cold, and the print was fresh, water still seeping into its lowest point.

The forest went quiet.

Not peaceful. Not the absence of sound. The birds stopped like a switch had been thrown, and the creek kept running, but even that seemed to pull back, thin out, as though the water didn't want to be heard. The moss on the nearest hemlock didn't move. Nothing moved.

I couldn't find it.

My eyes went to the spaces between the trunks, the deep green gaps where the light broke down into nothing, and there was no shape, no movement, no reflection of eyes. But my skin knew. The back of my neck, the insides of my wrists, the strip of skin above my waistband where my jacket had ridden up. Every surface of me that was thin enough to feel through.

I stayed crouched. My fingers in the mud.

My pulse should have been climbing. It wasn't. It was slow, slow, slow, heavy in my throat like something settling.

"Kyla! You gotta see this root ball, it's like a cathedral…"

Maren's voice, from around the bend.

I stood. Wiped my fingers on my jeans and walked toward them.

The birds came back before I reached the group. By the time Maren grabbed my sleeve to show me the upturned root system of a fallen spruce, the forest sounded like a forest again.

I looked back once. The trail behind me was empty, and green, and still.

"Cool," I said to Maren, and meant the root ball, and didn't mention the rest.

The visitor center appeared on the right, brown wood and green signage, and Declan was already pulling in before anyone asked.

"Bathroom," Birdie said, unbuckled and out the sliding door before the van fully stopped.

"I need coffee that wasn't brewed during the Clinton administration." Soo-jin stretched both arms overhead until her shoulders cracked.

"There's a gas station two blocks back that might have those jalapeño chips," Declan said to no one, squinting in the rearview. "The kettle-cooked ones. In the black bag."

"We're not going back for chips."

"Soo-jin. The black bag ."

Hector was already walking toward the building, camera swinging. Maren linked her arm through mine as we crossed the lot, then dropped it to check her phone and drifted toward a rack of postcards near the entrance. The group broke apart the way water breaks on rocks, each piece finding its own channel.

The backcountry section ran along the far wall,

Three display cases of trail maps, topographic surveys, and fire maps. A corkboard pinned with notices about closures and bear activity. I pulled a map of the upper Elwha drainage from the rack and unfolded it against the counter, pressing the creases flat with both palms.

The river system fanned south from the mountains in blue threads. Trails followed it partway, marked in red dashes, and then the dashes stopped. Above the old dam site, the map went white. Not blank the way unmapped places are blank on older charts, with crosshatching or the word unsurveyed . Just white. The contour lines thinned and quit, as though the cartographer's hand had lifted and never come back down.

"Heading up the Elwha?"

The ranger behind the information desk had seen me staring. Sixties, deeply tanned forearms, reading glasses on a cord.

"Thinking about it."

"You'll want to get up there before mid-November. Snow shuts the upper access road, and we pull the backcountry permits after that." He tapped his pen against the counter. "You solo?"

"Maybe."

He looked at me the way people in uniforms look at young women who say maybe about going alone into the wilderness. I held still and let him finish having the thought.

"Maren."

She'd appeared beside me, smelling like the hand lotion she kept in her coat pocket, something with grapefruit in it. Her chin rested neatly on my shoulder.

"Find anything good?"

I refolded the map along the wrong lines, let my thumb land on the lower section where a dotted trail led to Marymere Falls, a short, popular loop I'd seen on three different Instagram accounts this semester.

"Waterfall’s only a mile from the road."

"Oh, cute." She leaned in. "We should do that next time."

"Yeah."

I slid the map into my back pocket. Maren was already turning, fishing her keys from her jacket, moving toward the bright rectangle of the door where Declan stood jingling the van keys and holding a bag of chips he'd apparently found after all.

"Ready?"

"Yeah," I said. And followed her out into the parking lot where the light was ordinary, and the mountains held still against a flat gray sky, keeping whatever they kept.