The New Wilderness

by Diane Cook

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction; Alternative History sci-fi; Dystopian

Synopsis

A Washington Post, NPR, and Buzzfeed Best Book of the Year • Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

“More than timely, the novel feels timeless, solid, like a forgotten classic recently resurfaced — a brutal, beguiling fairy tale about humanity. But at its core, The New Wilderness is really about motherhood, and about the world we make (or unmake) for our children.” — Washington Post

"5 of 5 stars. Gripping, fierce, terrifying examination of what people are capable of when they want to survive in both the best and worst ways. Loved this."— Roxane Gay via Twitter

Margaret Atwood meets Miranda July in this wildly imaginative debut novel of a mother's battle to save her daughter in a world ravaged by climate change; A prescient and suspenseful book from the author of the acclaimed story collection, Man V. Nature. 

Bea’s five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away, consumed by the smog and pollution of the overdeveloped metropolis that most of the population now calls home. If they stay in the city, Agnes will die. There is only one alternative: the Wilderness State, the last swath of untouched, protected land, where people have always been forbidden. Until now. 

Bea, Agnes, and eighteen others volunteer to live in the Wilderness State, guinea pigs in an experiment to see if humans can exist in nature without destroying it. Living as nomadic hunter-gatherers, they slowly and painfully learn to survive in an unpredictable, dangerous land, bickering and battling for power and control as they betray and save one another. But as Agnes embraces the wild freedom of this new existence, Bea realizes that saving her daughter’s life means losing her in a different way. The farther they get from civilization, the more their bond is tested in astonishing and heartbreaking ways. 

At once a blazing lament of our contempt for nature and a deeply humane portrayal of motherhood and what it means to be human, The New Wilderness is an extraordinary novel from a one-of-a-kind literary force.

Release date: June 22, 2021

Publisher: Harper

Print pages: 416

Sample

Part I

The Ballad of Beatrice

The baby emerged from Bea the color of a bruise. Bea burned the cord somewhere between them and uncoiled it from the girl’s slight neck and, though she knew it was useless, swept her daughter up into her hands, tapped on her soft chest, and blew a few shallow breaths into her slimy mouth.

Around her, the singular song of crickets expanded. Bea’s skin prickled from heat. Sweat dried on her back and face. The sun had crested and would, more quickly than seemed right, fall again. From where Bea knelt, she saw their Valley, its secret grasses and sage. In the distance were lonely buttes and, closer, mud mounds that looked like cairns marking the way somewhere.The Caldera stood sharp and white on the horizon.

Bea dug into the hard earth with a stick, then a stone, then hollowed and smoothed it with her hands. She scooped the placenta into it. Then the girl. The hole was shallow and her baby’s belly jutted from it. Wet from birth, the little body held on to coarse sand and tiny golden buds brittled from their stems by the heat of the sun. She sprinkled more dust onto the baby’s forehead, pulled from her deer-hide bag several wilted green leaves, and laid them over the girl. She broke off craggy branches from the surrounding sage, laid them over the distended belly, the absurdly small shoulders. The baby was a misshapen mound of plant green, rust-red blood, a dull violet map of veins under wet tissue skin.

Now, the animals, who had sensed it, were converging. In the sky, a cyclone of buzzards lowered as if to check on the progress, then uplifted on a thermal. She heard the soft tread of coyotes. They wove through the bloomy sage. A mother and three skinny kits appeared under jaggedly thrown shade. Bea heard whines ease from their impassive yawns. They would wait.

A wind stirred and she breathed in the dusty heat. She missed the stagnant scent of the hospital room where she’d given birth to Agnes what must have been eight years ago now. The way the scratchy gown had stretched across her chest and gotten tangled up when she tried to roll to either side. How the cool air blew around her hips, between her legs, where her doctor and nurses stared, prodded, and pulled Agnes from her. She’d hated the feeling. So exposed, used, animal-like. But here, it was all dust and hot air. Here, she had needed to guide the small body—had she been five months pregnant? Six? Seven?—out with one hand while with the other she’d had to block a diving magpie. She had wanted to be alone for this. But what she wouldn’t have given for a probing gloved hand, stale recirculated air, humming machines, fresh sheets under her rather than desert dust. Some sterile comfort.

What she wouldn’t have given for her mother.

Bea hissed at the coyotes. “Scram,” she said, pitching the dirt and pebbles she’d just dug at them. But they only slid their ears back, the mother sinking to her haunches and the kits nipping at her snout, irritating her. She probably snuck off from the rest of the pack to get her young something extra, or to let them practice scavenging, to practice surviving. It’s what mothers did.

Bea shooed a fly from near the baby’s eyes, which at first had looked startled over having not made it, but now seemed accusatory. The truth was Bea hadn’t wanted the baby. Not here. It would have been wrong to bring her into this world. That’s what she’d felt all along. But what if the girl had sensed Bea’s dread and died from not being wanted?

Bea choked. “This is for the best,” she told her. The girl’s eyes clouded over with the clouds that rolled overhead.

During one nightwalk, back when she’d had a flashlight and still carried batteries to make it glow, she’d caught two eyes gleaming in her beam. She clapped her hands to scare the eyes, but they just dipped down. The animal was tall but crouching, sitting perhaps, and Bea feared it was stalking her. Her heart sped up and she waited for the cold dread that she’d felt a couple of times by then. Her inner sense of being in danger. But the feeling never came. She walked closer. Again the eyes dipped down, supplicant, like a dog obeying, but it was not a dog. She had to get closer before she could see that it was a deer with its sloped back, the peaked ears, the resigned flick of the tail. Then Bea saw another eye in the light, small, not looking at her, but quivering, unsteady. The deer heaved up and then the quivering eye wobbled up too. It was a small glistening fawn, on shaky, toothpick legs. Bea had unknowingly witnessed a birth. Quiet in the dark. Bea had come stealthily upon the mother like a predator. And the mother could do nothing in that moment but lower her head as though asking to be spared.

There were few things Bea let herself regret these days, these unpredictable days full of survival so plain and brute. But she wished she had walked another way that night, not found their eyes in her light, so that the doe could have had her birth, nuzzled and licked her baby clean, could have had the chance to give her baby a first unblemished night before the work of survival began. Instead the doe lumbered away, exhausted, the fawn stumbling after her, disoriented, and that was the beginning of their life together. It’s why, days ago, when Bea no longer felt the kicks and hiccups and flutters and knew the baby had died, she knew she’d want to be alone for the birth. It was the only moment they would have together. She did not want to share that. She did not want someone watching her own complicated version of grief.

Bea peered at the coyote mother. “You understand, don’t you?”

The coyote pranced impatiently and licked her yellow teeth.

From a far low ridge, some foothills of foothills to come, she heard a joyless howl; some watching wolf had seen the carrion birds, was signaling prey.

She had to leave. The sun was going. And now the wolves knew. She’d tracked her shadow becoming long and thin, a sight that always made her sad, as though she were seeing her own death by starvation. She stood, stretched out her sand-pocked knees, wiped the desert off her skin and ragged tunic. She felt foolish that she’d tried to resuscitate what she knew to be dead. She thought the Wilderness had cast all sentimentality from her. She would not tell anyone about that moment. Not Glen, who she thought wanted a child of his own more than he would ever admit. She wouldn’t tell Agnes, even though she thought Agnes would want to know about this sister who never materialized, would want to understand the secret particulars of her mother. No, she would stick to the simple story. The baby did not survive. So many others hadn’t. So we move on.

She turned without another look at this girl she had wanted to name Madeline. She gave that mother coyote a sharp kick, landing it against her visible ribs. The dog yelped, slunk, then snarled, but she had more pressing concerns than engaging a human insult.

Bea heard the scuffle and yips behind her. And though the dogs’ rising excitement resembled a newborn’s cry, Bea knew it was just the sound of hunger.

*  *  *

An unmistakable shadow of a path led toward the camp. It was hard to know if it was from the Community’s own impact, animals making their own animal trails, or a remnant of all the things the land had been before it became the Wilderness State. Maybe it was Bea alone who had blazed the trail. She visited that place as often as she could, whenever they migrated through the Valley. It was the reason she’d chosen it for Madeline. There was something subtle in that view. It seemed like a hidden valley. The depression of verdant grasses and coarse bushes lay slightly lower than the land around it so that it had a secret view toward the horizon and the inky hump of mountains there. All the land in view formed a mosaic of blurred, muted colors. It was pretty and quiet and private, she thought. A place someone wouldn’t want to leave. Again, Bea felt a fleeting relief to have Madeline poised there, instead of facing an unknowable landscape with her, a mother who felt incapable of maneuvering it with grace.

Bea could hear the voices of the others in camp. They carried across the even, empty land and dropped at her feet. But she did not want to return to them and their questions or, possibly worse, their silence. She shifted away and scrambled up boulders toward the shallow cave where her family liked to spend time. Their secret perch. She saw her husband, Glen, and daughter, Agnes, above her, kneeling in the dirt, waiting for her.

Bea saw Glen’s brow furrowing in concentration as he spun a leaf by its stem, peering at it from every vantage, pointing to something on its green spine so Agnes could see, asking her to notice some remarkable detail in its common shape. They both leaned closer to the leaf, as though it were telling them its secret, their faces breaking into delight.

When Glen saw her approaching, he waved her toward them. Agnes did the same, a generous and awkward sweep of her arm, smiling with her newly jagged tooth, chipped against a boulder. Why couldn’t it have been a baby tooth? Bea had thought, her daughter’s head in her hands, inspecting the damage under her bright, bloody lip. Agnes had held still and quiet, one tear squeezing from her eye and trailing through the dirt on her face. It was the only way Bea knew the accident had fazed her. Like an animal, Agnes froze when fearful and bolted when endangered. Bea imagined that as Agnes grew up this would change. She might feel less like prey and more like a predator. It was something in her daughter’s smile, some unnameable knowledge. It was the smile of a girl biding her time.

“This one is alder,” Glen was saying when Bea reached them. He took her hand, kissed it gently, lingering until she pulled it back to her side. She saw him glance at her stomach and wince.

He had prepared hot water in the brutish wood bowl, but now it was the temperature of the air. She squatted next to them, lifted her tunic, spread her knees. She scooped water under her skirt and gently washed between her legs, her stretched, worn folds, her splattered thighs. She felt raw, but she could tell she had not torn.

Agnes assumed the same position, her slight and toady legs splayed, splashing imaginary water on herself, eyeing Bea carefully. She seemed intent on not looking at where the baby had been.

Agnes was in some kind of mimicry stage. Bea saw it in animals. She’d seen it in other children. But in Agnes something about it disarmed her. She’d understood Agnes up until recently. Around the time the leaves last turned color, Agnes had become strange to her. She didn’t know if this fissure was just something parents went through with their children, or mothers went through with daughters, or if it was just some special hardship she and Agnes would have to endure. Out here, it was hard for Bea to dismiss things as simply normal because every aspect of their lives here was anything but normal. Was Agnes behaving normally for her age, or was it possible she believed she was a wolf?

Agnes had just turned eight but didn’t know it. They no longer marked birthdays because they no longer marked days. But Bea had taken notice of certain blooms when they’d first arrived. Then, Agnes had just turned five years old. It was April on the calendar. Bea had noted a field of violets during their first several days of walking. When she saw violets again, it seemed likely a year had passed—they’d felt the heat of summer, they’d seen leaves turn color, and they’d shivered in the snowy mountains. The snow had gone. She’d seen violets four times. Four birthdays. She knew Agnes’s eighth birthday had happened sometime since the last full moon, when she had seen violets in a patch of grass near their last camp. When they’d first arrived, Agnes had been so gravely ill, Bea hadn’t been sure she would see violets again with her daughter. But there they were, Agnes bounding through them.

Bea crept toward the back of the shallow cave. From behind a boulder, in a divot she’d hollowed out on their first time making camp here, she pulled a throw pillow and a design and architecture magazine that had featured one of her decorating remodels. It was a national magazine and the spread had been a turning point in her career, though not long after it published, she left for the Wilderness. These were her secret treasures she’d smuggled in from the City, and rather than carry them place to place, facing scorn from the others and damage from the elements, she hid them, blatantly disregarding the rules laid out in the Manual. When they passed through the Valley, which they had a few times each year, she dug out her treasures so she could feel a little more like herself.

She sat next to Glen and hugged her pillow. Then she thumbed through the pages of her spread, remembering the choices she’d made and why. Remembering what it felt like to have a home.

“If the Rangers find those, we’ll get in trouble,” Glen said, as he always said when she dug out her treasures, always so concerned with the rules.

She scowled. “What are they going to do? Kick us out for a pillow?”

“Maybe.” Glen shrugged.

“Relax,” she said. “They’ll never find them. And I need them. I need to remember what pillows are like.”

“Aren’t I a good enough pillow?” He said this so sweetly.

Bea looked at him. He was all bones. They both were. Even her belly, which had barely jutted with the baby, seemed to have immediately sunken. When she looked up at him, he was offering a small broken smile. She nodded. He nodded back. Then he staged a long, loud, languid yawn, eyeing Agnes. Agnes’s yawn followed with a big, fisted stretch.

“Big day tomorrow,” he said. “We start our trip to Middle Post. And we get to cross your favorite river on the way.”

“Can we swim?” Agnes asked.

“We’ve got to get in it to cross it, so you bet.”

“When?”

“Probably be there in a few days.”

“How much is a few?”

Glen shrugged. “Five? Ten? Several?”

Agnes huffed. “That’s not an answer!”

Glen poked her and laughed. “We’ll get there when we get there.” Agnes’s scowl was just like Bea’s scowl.

“Is everything packed?” Bea asked.

“Mostly. You don’t have to worry.”

Bea gave the pillow in her lap a tight squeeze. It was moist and smelled bitter, but she didn’t care. She buried her face in it, imagining she could transfer love to her small baby. She sighed and looked up.

Agnes was watching her, hugging the air, pretending to have her own pillow, or perhaps her own baby, and smiling the same sad smile Bea had no doubt just displayed.

The bustling and hoot-filled evening quieted as they passed through it.

At camp, a few of the other Community members were still at the fire, but most were breathing lightly in the circle where everyone slept. Bea and Glen eased down under the elk pelt they used as bedding. Agnes arranged herself, as she always did, at their feet. Her hand curled around Bea’s ankle like a vine.

“Maybe there will be some good packages at Post,” Glen murmured. “Maybe some good chocolate or something like that.”

Bea hmmed, but really she couldn’t eat things like that anymore without becoming ill, her body overwhelmed by what it used to crave in their old life.

Instead of chocolate, she wished instead Glen would mention the child she’d just buried. Or she thought she wished for that. What would she say? What could she say that he didn’t already know? And did she really want to talk about it? No, she didn’t. And he knew that too.

She looked at Glen, and in the firelight saw a look of hope play on his face. He knew chocolate couldn’t soothe such bewilderment, but maybe the suggestion could do what the chocolate was supposed to. She fit herself into his arms. “Yes, some chocolate would be nice,” she lied.

All around them, Bea heard the sounds of the wild world bedding down. Ground owls cooed, and something else screeched; shadows of night fliers skimmed between the sky and the stars. As the campfire hissed itself to sleep, she heard the last of the Community walking cautious and blind from the fire to the beds and nestling down. Someone said, “Good night, everyone.”

Against her ankle, Bea could feel Agnes’s blood pulsing through her hot clutching hand. She breathed in and out to its rhythm, and it focused her. I have a daughter, she thought, and no time for brooding. She was needed here, and now, by someone. She vowed to move on quickly. She wanted to. She had to. It was how they lived now.

•  •  •

River 9 moved fast and swelled against its banks, and to the Community it looked like a wholly different river from the one they were familiar with. So different that they had consulted the map again, trying to match the symbols with what was now there and what their memory insisted ought to be there. They had crossed the river many times since they first arrived in the Wilderness State. From their encounters with it elsewhere, they had even considered it a lazy river, the way it turned tightly back and forth through rocks and dirt from the foothills down across the sagebrush plain. They had a usual crossing spot that they considered safe, or as safe as a river crossing could be. But it looked as though a storm had altered the bank and submerged the patch of island where they used to regroup before attempting the far bank. It was a very helpful little island. But it was gone now and they could no longer be sure where that fording spot was. Perhaps the same storm that had kept them on the other side of the mountains since last summer had also remade this river.

They lowered themselves and then the children down a small ledge to the almost nonexistent bank where greens grew, a color found almost exclusively next to rivers. The grasses, mosses, the striving trees, so thin they could be snapped between two fingers, their new spring leaves quivers of creamy green. They handed down their bedding rolls, the pouches of smoked meat, jerky, pemmican, the harvested pine nuts, precious acorns, wild rice, einkorn, a handful of wild onions, the disassembled smoking tent, their personal satchels, the hunting bows and arrows, the bag of hollowed wooden meal bowls and the chips of wood and stone they used as utensils, the precious box of precious knives, the Book Bag, the Cast Iron, the Manual, and the bags of their garbage they carried with them to be weighed and disposed of by the Rangers at Post.

In the water, a loose log, stripped naked of its bark and limbs, bobbed and rolled past even though the nearby landscape was treeless. The log must have traveled from the foothills, the unusual torrent of water ushering it through. On a lazier river, or even a lazier part of this river, a log might have gathered farther upstream in an eddy or been nudged onto a bank. Here, it rolled in the rapids. Rapids they’d never even noticed in previous crossings, when the water was low and any whitewater was just a skimming thin hat the river rocks wore. They watched another log vault head over tail, after which Caroline took her first tentative step out into the water.

Caroline was their river-crossing scout. She was the most sure-footed. Had the lowest center of gravity. Her toes could grip like fingers. Beautiful toes wasted for years crammed into shoes in the City. She had learned the most about how water behaved. She was good at making sense of things that seemed erratic.

“Okay,” Caroline yelled over the rumble, her feet firm in the first foot of water, testing its pull, deciding whether to continue. “Rope.”

Carl and Juan handed her one end of the rope, which she secured around herself and they looped once around each of their waists, Carl behind Juan, and then held the rope in front of them. The children and the other adults stood as far back as they could.

They had already tried to ford two other spots, but Caroline, either feet out from the bank or waist deep in water, returned to the shore each time. “It’s too deep,” or “It’s too fast,” or “See that lip? There’s a pock somewhere under the water that will take us down.”

On this, the third spot, Caroline waded out halfway. From the bank, things looked promising. She paused, her head cocked slightly, like a coyote listening for the calls of the Wilderness—friend or foe, friend or foe. Her hands hovered over the whitewater, and it broke around her body and came together again behind her. Caroline turned her head toward them, her shoulders following, a hand turned palm up, about to signal something. She opened her mouth to speak just as the tip of a log surfaced where she stood, and with a terrible thwack and splash, Caroline was gone.

Then the river, like an awakened bear, yanked the rope and Juan went down too. He tried to dig his heels in. He bellowed as the rope wrung his waist. Carl tried to pull on his rope section, not to help Juan but to slacken the rope to avoid the excruciating thing that was happening to Juan.

Bea stood back with the others, her hands crimped on Agnes’s shoulders. She thought about how, long ago, they always had someone stand by the rope holders with a knife to cut the rope in case something like this happened. But nothing like this ever happened, and Carl and Juan decided they were strong enough for a catastrophe like this. Besides, no one really wanted to be the one to cut the rope anyway. Still, at each river, they would have a lengthy discussion about whether to require a rope cutter or not. When they inevitably decided they needed one, no one would volunteer, so they would have to draw for it and the person who lost would shit themselves the whole time. And when nothing ever went wrong, they begrudged all that worry and work for nothing. So finally, they had decided, not that long ago, in fact, to stop mandating there be a rope cutter.

Clearly that had been the wrong decision.

In a move, Bea grabbed Carl’s personal knife from his belt, lunged, and cut the rope in front of Juan, releasing him to the bank, where he crumpled and howled in relief. Carl, cursing, catapulted back into the others, and then everyone was tumbled over and tangled in weeds. Caroline, presumably still on the rope and most certainly dead, rushed downriver.

Carl clambered to his feet. “Why did you do that?” he screamed.

“I had to,” Bea said, replacing his knife in the holder tied to his belt.

“But I had it. I fucking had it.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Yes, I did.”

“No, you didn’t.”

Carl sputtered, “But it was our best rope.”

“We have others.”

“Not like that one. It was our river rope!”

“We can get another one.”

“Where?” Carl cried. He grabbed his hair in theatrical frustration, looking around at the empty Wilderness. But the feeling was real. He seethed.

Bea didn’t answer. Maybe she could talk a Ranger into giving them something as good, as long and thick. But she wasn’t going to promise that. She noted that while no one had sided with Carl, no one had defended her either. Everyone had busied themselves with some small task—inspecting their pouches, picking something out of another’s hair, eating an ant—until the moment passed. Except Agnes, who watched with unnerving neutrality.

Bea helped Juan to his feet, and Dr. Harold hurried forward to put a salve on the rope cuts around Juan’s waist and hands. It wouldn’t do much. None of Dr. Harold’s salves did much.

Debra and Val ran along the bank to see if Caroline resurfaced. She had, a few hundred feet downriver, her hair tangled in the branches of another log, her face submerged, her body limp. Her body and the log were snagged on something for a moment, and then were freed, speeding again down the river. There was no way to retrieve the rope. And not much to do for Caroline.

They took a moment to regroup, drink water, pass a pouch of jerky. Debra said a nice thing about Caroline and how being their river scout had been essential to their survival here and that she would be missed. “She taught me so much about water,” Debra said, looking quite shook. She and Caroline had been close. Bea looked around at the faces of the group, working their feelings out. Personally, Bea thought Caroline had been aloof, though she kept that feeling to herself. She chewed on a knuckle impatiently while she waited for the ritualized silent moment to end.

After all that, they argued about Caroline’s last intention. She’d turned and opened her mouth to tell them something about the crossing. But tell them what? Had her hand begun to signal a thumbs-up or thumbs-down before the log smacked her? What had her facial expression been before she’d grimaced in painful surprise? In the end they decided the spot was still the most promising place to cross, despite Caroline’s demise. Juan took over as the river scout and ventured in without a rope. Close to the middle, he turned and gave a thumbs-up. Single file they carefully shuffled out, children clinging to the backs of adults. It turned out to be quite a good spot to cross, and if it hadn’t been for that log, they all would have gotten to the opposite bank easily. Poor Caroline. She had bad luck, Bea decided.

With the children across, the adults formed a chain over the river and passed the heavy and cumbersome items across, the Manual, the Cast Iron, the Book Bag, the garbage, the bedding, the disassembled smoker, the food pouches, the wooden bowls and slabs of utensils, then all the individual packs, one item after the other, bank to bank. And once they’d hoisted and tied and strapped back on all their gear, they started walking again. The sun dried them instantly. They spit out the silty earth kicked up by their feet. Their skin became dusted and slippery with it. Covering one nostril, they rocketed snot out their noses into the dust and trudged through the sagebrush plain that unfurled around them like a sea.

*  *  *

When their way became lit by moonlight they stopped for the night. A small fire was built, and they lay on the ground around it. No skins were unrolled, no pelts unbundled. The sleep wouldn’t be worth the effort. They would be moving with the dawn. When they wanted to move fast, this is how they went.

On the horizon Bea saw the pinprick glow from an outdoor light that burned at Middle Post. They were close.

Juan said, “Just a quick story or two,” and, yawning, began one of his favorites from the Book of Fables, which they used to carry in the Book Bag but which had been lost to a flash flood some time ago. All stories had been told so often now, they came from memory.

The children were asleep in little mounds at the foot of the fire. Except for Agnes, who insisted that as the eldest child of the Community she ought to stay up with the adults and report on decisions made that might affect the youngest ones. There were never any such decisions made at night around the fire. She just liked staying up. Bea didn’t argue. She reveled in Agnes’s restlessness. She couldn’t forget when Agnes had been a frail, failing little girl too sick to hold her eyes open.

Bea squatted next to Glen, who grunted up from his task.

“How are those arrows coming along?” she asked, jostling his shoulder.

“Arrowheads,” he mumbled. “Good.” He was distracted, trying so hard to make a good point. She peered over his shoulder. They would be useless. He’d overflaked them. Bea smiled encouragingly. Glen was a terrible hunter. He knew it. She knew it disappointed him. Carl was the true hunter of the Community and provided much of their meat. So Glen was trying to master making tools, wanting to be of use in a way he had always dreamed of being. Of course, Carl was also a master arrow flaker and they were rich in perfect arrowheads already. But she wasn’t going to point that out to him.

Bea watched Glen’s brow furrowing in desperate concentration. Despite his shortcomings, he was having the time of his life here. All he read, as a boy, were tales of primitive life. The caveman stories of his youth were all he’d ever really been interested in. Now he was a professor, expert in how people evolved from the first upright steps to the first wheel. He knew the most basic nature of humanity, and he knew the how and why behind the onslaught of civilization. But when it came to living primitively, he was surprisingly hapless.

They had met in the City. Bea had been hired to decorate the University apartment Glen moved into after his first marriage ended. It was shockingly large as apartments went, and she understood that he must be an important person there. As she showed him samples and talked about the placement of pieces, he told her the origin of every object she’d chosen for his home. It made her work feel important, like she was a steward of history, of usefulness. They married. He was fatherly toward Agnes, whose real father had been a worker on a weekend furlough from the vast Manufacturing Zone outside the City. Bea had liked the men on leave because they had good hands and they didn’t stick around, and she liked her life and her job as they were. And she loved Agnes fiercely, though motherhood felt like a heavy coat she was compelled to put on each day no matter the weather.

Glen had been a nice change. She was ready for him at the time he came along. She had hoped he would change her life in surprising ways, but she never could have imagined just how much of it he could change.

Glen was the one who knew about the study, putting people in the Wilderness State. When things worsened in the City and Agnes’s health cratered, like so many children’s had, Glen was the one who offered his help to the researchers in exchange for three spots—for him, Bea, and Agnes. Bea’s hunch had been right—Glen was important at the University, and the researchers agreed without hesitation.

It still took almost a year of working and waiting to get the permission to place humans into what was essentially a refuge for wildlife, the last wilderness area left, to gather the funding needed, and to find other participants. They had wanted twenty skilled volunteers with knowledge of flora and fauna and biology and meteorology. A real doctor or nurse, not just an amateur herbalist. Even a chef would have been nice, but they eventually had to pad out the group with people who were simply willing to go. It sounded risky, people said. It was risky. It was uncomfortably unknown. It was an extreme idea and an even more extreme reality. More extreme than suicide, Bea remembered a mother from her building arguing. It had been a hard sell. Meanwhile, Agnes got sicker.

During that time, when Bea cradled her sleeping daughter, she’d sometimes wonder what she would do if Glen’s plan didn’t work, or worked too late. She could think of no other options for how to save Agnes. The medicines weren’t strong enough anymore. Each cough was pink with blood. “What this child needs,” the doctor had said ruefully, “is different air.” Since there was no other air, she recommended palliative care, and Bea found herself wholly dependent on Glen and his stupid idea. Toward the end of the wait, right before they got permission—she hadn’t and wouldn’t ever tell anyone this—she had started to think ahead, to a life after Agnes. She’d begun to say goodbye. There was a terrible comfort in reaching that point. And then, with very little time to prepare, the study and the group of twenty were approved, and trying on army-issue gear, seeing doctors, providing urine samples, doing intake interviews, packing up their belongings, tying up loose ends, and then, without fanfare, leaving. Bea was stunned by the turnaround and the change, unsure whether this all was real, even as the first cold nights in the Wilderness descended on them and she found herself scrambling to protect Agnes in a new way.

It had seemed like such a game, even on that first evening when the sun set on them before they had a fire. Even as their stomachs knotted from coarse food or, soon, not enough food. Even when their camp was first ransacked by a hungry bear. Then the first person perished, from hypothermia. Another after misidentifying a mushroom. And another from wounds sustained from a cougar. And then a climbing accident. It felt as though they’d escaped one monster by hiding in a closet, only to find another there among the hangers, claws unsheathed. They couldn’t possibly stay here, could they? It felt unreal. Some kind of terrible trick.

At any moment she imagined Glen taking her by the wrist, turning her around, and marching her and Agnes back to the border fence, back to civilization. But that never happened. Eventually it dawned on Bea that the ground they trudged wearily upon day after day would be endless. And if they found an end, a border, a fence, a granite wall, she realized, they would just turn around. How could they ever return to the City? Agnes was like a colt, bounding, curious. And healthy for the first time in her short life. For the first time, Bea let herself believe Agnes would be long for this earth. And Bea was surviving when others had perished, others stronger than herself. It soothed her anxiety, stroked her ego. She might actually be good at this survival thing. Maybe this was the right decision. Maybe this will all be fine. Maybe we aren’t insane. It was her mantra. She thought it almost daily. She thought it now.

Bea looked around the circle at the faces deranged by the dancing firelight. She thought there was a heaviness to the group since River 9. Since the rope. Since Caroline. No one would look at her. The jerky bag had been passed to her without comment, and taken from her too quickly. The heaviness seemed directed at her. Which she thought was absurd. People had certainly lost important things before and they weren’t shunned for it.

There was the teacup they’d used during ceremonial moments for rituals they had made up early on for the different milestones of their new life.

The teacup had belonged to Caroline, passed to her through a line of family members who were early settlers in the New World. ...