The Edge of Everything (Untitled #1)(85)

Zoe thought of how much she’d once loved the woods. She remembered running through them in summer, patches of sunlight bright on her skin. She remembered snowshoeing through them on days so crazily cold that it hurt to breathe. She remembered Jonah’s laughter lighting them up, no matter the season. But too much had happened. She feared forests would always feel hostile now—claustrophobic somehow, as if the trees were waiting for her to look away so they could rush at her from all sides.

X’s fever was spiking. When they came to a larch that had fallen across the path, Zoe cleared some snow from the trunk and snapped off a half dozen spindly branches. She helped him sit.

“How much farther?” she said.

She was desperate to get there. And desperate not to.

“Perhaps a half mile,” said X, each word draining him even more. He pointed at the path ahead of them, which was tamped down and streaked with mud. “These tracks,” he said, “are your father’s.”

Zoe’s stomach did its tightening thing, where it felt like someone was turning a wheel. This time, it felt as if her skin was caught in the gears.

“My throat is in flames,” he said. “I feel as if glowing coals were being shoveled down it. Still, there is counsel I would give you, if you will hear it?”

“Of course,” she said.

She sat down next to him on the trunk.

“It is not that your father is an evil man,” said X, his voice a husk. “It is that he is a weak one. You will know it the moment your eyes encounter him.” He paused, collecting his energy. “You will also know that he loves you,” he said. “We are not slaying a dragon today, Zoe—just putting a wounded animal to rest. You will find it harder than you imagine. I have never known my parents—and it seems that I never will—so perhaps I have no right to advise you. However, if you find that you pity your father, you need only look at me and I will know—and I will not take him.”

“Stop it,” said Zoe. “Just stop it. He doesn’t love anybody but himself. I understand that now. You are going to be free. Do I seem like somebody who changes her mind?”



They walked for what felt like much more than half a mile. Maybe it was because the woods were strange. Maybe it was because Zoe was going to see her father. She was so tense now, so alert, that time seemed to crack open and expand just to maximize her anguish.

She was going to see her father—it seemed like such an innocent statement. Except that he was supposed to be dead. Hadn’t she prayed for his soul at the cave? Yet, somehow, her father was still alive. He was up ahead through the trees. Doing god only knew what. Pretending to have no wife, no children, no Zoe, no Jonah, no past. Did they mean so little to him?

Rage seeped through her. She knew one thing she’d tell her father for sure: it was a good thing he’d gotten rid of his name because where he was going they wouldn’t let him keep it anyway.

A squirrel jumped into a tree as they passed, sending snow down the back of Zoe’s neck. She shivered as it melted on her skin. They couldn’t be more than a quarter mile away now—but a quarter mile from what? Knowing her father, he could be living in a house, a cave, an igloo, anything. She peered through the trees. There was no plume of smoke, no sign of life at all.

Suddenly, her phone trilled again.

ME!!!! it said.

“Bug, I can’t talk,” she said, hoping to preempt another tirade.

“Why are you looking at an ocean?” said Jonah, his voice more desperate than before. “You don’t even like oceans! You have to come home, Zoe! Right now, right now, right now! I am still alone and now it’s—it’s either raining or snowing, I can’t tell which. But it’s creepy and loud, and even Spock and Uhura are mad at you because I told them where you were.”

Zoe only half-listened.

The forest thinned out up ahead. The light grew stronger.

X leaned close and whispered, “We will soon be within sight of your father.”

Zoe nodded, and squeezed his hand.

“I gotta go, bug,” she said into the phone. “I’m sorry. I love you.”

“No, Zoe, no!” he said. “If you hang up, I will call back! I will call back thirty-two times!”

“Bug, stop!” she said. “I promise to call you back and make you giggle, okay? I will do whatever it takes. I will tickle you over the phone, if I have to.”

“That’s not even possible, obviously,” he said. “Unless I, like, put the phone in my armpit, and probably not even then.”

She felt guilty for hanging up. Jonah had suffered even more than she had. If she’d cried over her father a hundred times, he had cried a thousand. His eyes had gotten so puffy with tears that he could hardly see, and he’d let out wails that she would never forget.

There were only a hundred yards of forest left.

They could see something through the trees—a field of snow, maybe. A gray sky hung above it.

Zoe took X’s arm, and they followed the path as it snaked through the firs. Anger and fear fought for her attention. The woods were so quiet it was as if the silence, rather than being passive and still, were a living thing that devoured all sounds. It was like the snow. It buried everything.

Just ahead, two snow ghosts leaned toward each other, weary under their heavy white coats. They formed a narrow archway—an exit out of the woods, an entrance to whatever it was that awaited them. Zoe peered between the trees. In the distance, she could see a dark smudge on the snow—a cabin, maybe. A hundred feet and they’d be out of the forest.