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The fire still burned in the fireplace. Its smoke trailed upward into the black sky, carried by the wind like a thousand thin fingers. Natalie sat apart from the others, though she could hear every sound—the chewing, the tearing, the occasional mutter of voices so low and careful they could almost be mistaken for prayers.
They were eating Javi.
The thought wouldn’t leave her. It pressed against her chest like a stone, heavy and permanent. They had done this before, she reminded herself. Shauna’s baby hadn’t lived, Jackie had frozen, and that night when hunger had gnawed too deep, they’d turned to something unspeakable. But Javi was different. Javi had been alive this morning. Javi had been running, hiding, silent in his strange little way. And now he was gone.
She could still see the way his hair floated in the water when they pulled him out. His body looked lighter in death than it ever had in life. And the team, the people she had once called her friends, had wasted no time in deciding what to do with him.
“Survival,” someone had said.
Nat had nodded along, though her throat closed up at the word. Survival. What clever way to dress up what they were doing. What a way of pretending the choice hadn’t already been made, long before he drowned.
Now, as the fire crackled, she sat cross-legged in the snow, the cold biting her thighs, and let herself drift.
Travis had once told her that his brother was the only person he trusted. Nat had laughed at the time because she knew the way siblings could tear each other apart, but Travis hadn’t smiled. He meant it. Javi had been more than a brother—he’d been the one good thing left after their father, after the fists, after the shouting that drove Travis into silence more often than words.
When she thought of Javi, she didn’t just see him in the wilderness. She saw him back in town, scrawny and restless, trailing after them like a shadow. She remembered how she and Travis used to lie on the roof of his house at night, sneaking cigarettes and whispering, as if the whole world was against them. Sometimes Javi would sneak up, too, curling against Travis’s side, pretending not to listen when the talk turned bitter.
Her own father never noticed when she disappeared. If he did, he didn’t care. Sometimes he barked about her smelling like smoke or accused her of wasting time, but mostly he ignored her, retreating behind his cans of beer and the muttering static of late-night TV. Travis’s father was different—he didn’t forget so much as erupt. Nat still remembered the bruises, the flinch in Travis’s shoulders when doors slammed too hard.
That’s why they smoked. Why did they creep out together, shivering under a pale moon, flicking ashes over cracked pavement? Smoking wasn’t rebellion; it was escape.
And now, here she was again, older by years that hadn’t really passed, tasting smoke from the fire where her friends were eating the boy who had once curled into his brother’s side.
“Nat.”
She blinked. Misty was standing over her, eyes too wide, too bright, as if she carried the fire inside her. She held something wrapped in leather—a strip of meat.
“You should eat,” Misty said softly, like an offering.
Nat’s stomach churned. She shook her head.
“You’ll get weak.”
Her voice cracked when she answered. “I’m already weak.”
Misty lingered a moment longer, as though deciding whether to insist. Still, finally, she drifted back toward the circle, slipping into it as naturally as if she had always belonged there.
And that was the thing. They all belonged to each other now, didn’t they? Bound by what they’d done, by what they were willing to do again.
Nat wasn’t sure she belonged to anyone anymore.
She thought about Travis again. About the way he had stood apart earlier, eating, but not speaking. His face had been carved from stone, his eyes hollow and lifeless. She wondered if he was thinking of Javi, or if thinking was too painful for him. Maybe he was empty. Perhaps that was easier.
She wanted to reach for him. She tried to tell him she remembered those nights before the crash, how he had passed her the lighter with shaking hands, how they had breathed out smoke like ghosts, how they had whispered about leaving it all behind.
But there was no leaving this behind. There was no trailer to sneak out of, no highway to drive down until the world disappeared. There was only the clearing, the fire, and the circle of girls gnawing at bones.
Nat pressed her hands against her face, cold against colder, and tried not to cry.
She could feel herself slipping in and out of memory, the way you drift half-asleep and dream of things that almost happened. She saw herself back on the roof, the shingles rough under her back, Travis beside her. His voice was low, telling her about his dad’s rage, about the way Javi sometimes tried to protect him, standing small and stubborn between them.
“I hate him,” Travis had whispered, as though the night itself might tattle if he spoke louder.
“I hate mine too,” Nat had said.
But it wasn’t the same. Her father’s cruelty was quieter, a knife that cut only when she got close. Travis’s father had fists that spoke for him.
They had lain there together, smoke curling upward, sharing silence until the stars blurred.
In the clearing now, Nat lifted her head, staring at the night sky through the smoke of Javi’s body. The stars were different here. Too sharp, too close. As if the universe itself wanted to watch.
Someone laughed by the fire. It was a soft, jagged laugh, and it made Nat’s skin crawl. She knew the sound of hysteria when she heard it. Hunger did that. Grief did that.
Maybe she was hysterical, too. Perhaps that’s why she couldn’t stop thinking of Javi as he had been before, chasing after his brother, grinning when they teased him, fumbling with his shoelaces because he never learned to double-knot.
He hadn’t deserved this. None of them had, but especially not him.
And yet, here they were.
Nat stood, legs numb, body trembling from the cold, not from anything else. No one stopped her as she walked toward the edge of the clearing. They didn’t even look up. Their world had collapsed inward, fire and flesh, and she had slipped out of orbit.
She walked until the fire was only a glow behind her, until the sounds of eating faded, until the forest was only trees and snow and silence.
Then she sank to her knees and let herself break.
That night would always live inside her—the crown, the fire, the body of a boy who had once been family. She would carry it the way she took everything else: the bruises, the shouting, the cigarettes on rooftops, the whispered promises that someday they’d be free.
The truth was, they had never been free. Not then, not now. Not ever.
But maybe, if she remembered, if she kept Javi alive in her mind, she could keep a piece of herself alive too.
The forest pressed in on her after she left the clearing. Every creak of branches, every shift of snow sounded too loud, like the woods themselves were whispering. She sat with her back against a tree, trying to breathe evenly, trying not to think about the smell of roasted flesh that still clung to her hair.
But memory had its own way of hunting her down. It didn’t ask permission. It simply arrived.
The trailer park reeked of cigarettes and damp, earthy soil. Rusted cars lined the street, and the windows glowed faintly with the dim buzz of television sets. Natalie slipped out her back door as quietly as she could. Her dad had passed out hours ago, mouth open on the couch, a beer balanced dangerously on the armrest.
She stuffed the half-empty pack of smokes into her pocket and crept across the lot. Travis was already waiting by the chain-link fence. He didn’t smile when he saw her, but he held the wall open just enough for her to slip through.
“Thought you ditched me,” she said.
He shook his head. “He’s still awake.”
She didn’t need to ask who he meant. She knew.
They walked fast, shoulders hunched against the night air. Travis didn’t speak again until they reached the roof of his house, the climb practiced and silent. They sprawled out on the shingles, the pack of cigarettes between them, the lighter passing back and forth like a fragile secret.
Travis lit the first one. His hands shook, just a little.
“Bad night?” she asked.
He exhaled smoke into the stars. “He broke the TV. Javi was watching cartoons, and he just—” He flicked ash off the roof. “He said he was wasting electricity. Said he was lazy. I tried to tell him it was my fault.”
“And?”
“He didn’t care. Just threw the remote at me.”
Natalie winced. She’d seen the bruises before, the way Travis’s sleeves never seemed to ride up too far in gym class.
“My dad just yells,” she offered. “Calls me a waste of space. Says I’ll end up like my mom.”
“You won’t,” Travis said flatly.
“How do you know?”
He turned to look at her then, eyes shadowed but steady. “Because you’re already tougher than anyone I know.”
The words landed heavier than he probably meant them to. Natalie sucked in smoke and let it out slowly, pretending her eyes didn’t sting.
They lay in silence a while, the pack dwindling, the stars wheeling overhead. She thought about how small the town looked from up here, how easy it would be to imagine they were somewhere else.
“Sometimes I think about just… running,” Travis admitted.
“Where?”
“Anywhere.”
“Would you take Javi?”
He nodded, no hesitation. “Yeah. I couldn’t leave him. He’s… he’s the only good thing.”
Natalie wanted to say she understood, but the words caught in her throat. Instead, she just passed him the last cigarette.
Back in the forest, present night, Natalie pressed her forehead against her knees. The memory burned sharper than the cold.
Javi. Always trailing behind, always quieter than the rest, but steady. She remembered how he used to sneak out to the roof too, padding barefoot, curling against Travis’s side while pretending to fall asleep. Travis never pushed him away. He’d just wrap an arm around him, jaw tight, eyes flicking toward the house as if afraid their father would notice.
And Natalie had been there, too. The three of them—broken in different ways, bound together by the kind of loyalty that only came from surviving a house that wanted to crush you.
Family.
That’s what they’d been, for a while.
She saw flashes now:
Travis asking her to teach him how to hold a cigarette without coughing, and she pretends to scold him while laughing anyway. Nat handing over half her sandwich at lunch when she noticed he hadn’t brought anything. The three of them sharing a blanket at a football game, the cold seeping in, but their shoulders pressing close.
Little things. Fragile things.
The kind of things that shattered too easily.
The fire’s glow flickered faintly in the distance. She couldn’t see the others anymore, but she knew what they were doing. Javi wasn’t just gone—he was disappearing piece by piece, swallowed by the very people who once claimed to love him.
Was this what survival meant? Becoming complicit in erasing the ones who mattered most?
Her chest tightened. She had nodded along earlier, but she had stayed silent. That silence felt heavier than any scream.
Complacency. That was the word that clawed at her now.
She hadn’t fought. She hadn’t tried to stop them. She had let it happen.
And maybe that was worse than eating.
She closed her eyes, and the forest shifted.
Now she was back in Travis’s room. The wallpaper peeled in the corners, and the door had a crack near the handle where a fist had once landed. Javi sat cross-legged on the floor, sketching something on lined notebook paper. Travis sat on the bed beside her, staring at his hands.
“Do you ever feel like…” He trailed off, then tried again. “Like we’re just waiting for something bad to happen?”
Natalie snorted. “Isn’t that just life?”
But she knew what he meant. The dread that lived in your stomach, the bracing for impact every time footsteps echoed too close.
“Sometimes I think Javi doesn’t even notice,” Travis said.
Javi looked up then, frowning. “I notice.”
Natalie reached down and ruffled his hair. “Of course you do. You just don’t let it show.”
For a moment, the heaviness lifted. The three of them laughed. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
The memory faded into the sound of her own breathing, harsh and uneven.
Javi had noticed. He had always noticed. And now he was gone, and she was left with the crown, the silence, the complicity.
Nat dug her nails into her palms until they stung.
Maybe she deserved the crown after all. Not as a leader, but as a reminder. A punishment.
The antlers weren’t heavy, but they might as well have been made of stone.
The snow had long since soaked through her shoes, leaving her toes numb, but Natalie didn’t move. The cold was easier to endure than the pull of the fire behind her. Easier than watching them eat Javi.
The forest wrapped itself around her like a cocoon, hushed and relentless. And inside that silence, memories bloomed, sharper than the night air.
It had been weeks after the crash when she first realized Javi really trusted her. He’d been quiet from the start, the kind of quiet that wasn’t just shyness but self-preservation. He’d followed Travis everywhere, sticking close, never straying too far from the safety of his brother’s shadow.
But one morning, while the others argued about food, Natalie found him sitting by the stream, fumbling with a fishing line. His hands were red with cold, his movements jerky with frustration.
“You’re doing it wrong,” she’d said.
Javi glared up at her, eyes blazing with the stubbornness only little brothers knew how to wield. “I know what I’m doing.”
She crouched beside him anyway. “No, you don’t.” She showed him how to tie the knot correctly, her fingers moving carefully, patient in a way she rarely was with anyone else. When she handed the line back, he stared at her like she’d given him a secret.
The next day, he followed her again. Not obviously—he never wanted to look like he needed help—but close enough that she noticed.
From then on, it became routine. Javi shadowed her when Travis wasn’t looking. She showed him how to set snares, how to scrape a spark into flame, how to keep his hands steady when the cold threatened to steal them away.
Sometimes Travis watched from a distance, jaw tight, torn between pride and worry. Natalie always made sure to meet his eyes, to let him see she wasn’t replacing him, just helping carry the weight.
And for a little while, it seemed to work.
They built something fragile, the three of them. A kind of family that wasn’t quite spoken but lived in the small moments.
Like the time Travis tore his palm open on a splintered branch, cursing under his breath. Natalie cleaned it while Javi hovered, wide-eyed.
“Stop squirming,” she muttered as Travis flinched.
“I’m not squirming.”
“You are.” She pressed a strip of cloth over the wound, tighter than necessary. “There. Now you can keep being a martyr.”
Travis shot her a look, half annoyance, half gratitude. Javi giggled, the sound brief and bright in the frozen air.
Or the night Javi got sick from eating something he shouldn’t have. Natalie stayed up with him, stroking his hair while he shivered, whispering that it would pass. Travis sat nearby, silent, his hands clenched into fists he couldn’t unclench. She caught his eye once, and he looked like he might break apart.
When Javi finally slept, Travis murmured, “Thanks.”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to.
Now, huddled in the snow away from the fire, Natalie could still feel Javi’s small weight leaning against her side on those nights, could still hear the way his breathing steadied when he finally drifted off.
And it gutted her.
Because she hadn’t saved him. Not this time.
Another memory rose, unbidden:
A night in the cabin, long after the fire burned low. Javi curled on one side of the bedroll, Travis on the other. Natalie lay between them, the cold seeping in, but their shared body heat holding it at bay.
Travis hadn’t been asleep; she knew by the way his breathing didn’t settle. Eventually, he whispered, “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
She turned her head toward him, the dark making his features unreadable. “None of us do.”
“I just—” His voice cracked. “He’s all I’ve got.”
“I know.”
For a long time, there was only the sound of Javi’s breathing. Then, softly, Natalie said, “You’ve got me too.”
The words had slipped out before she could stop them. But they had hung there, fragile and dangerous, until Travis let out a breath and whispered, “Yeah.”
She hadn’t known what that meant. She still didn’t.
Now, with Javi gone, she wondered if Travis remembered that night. Suppose he blamed her for not saving his brother. If he hated her.
She almost wished he did.
Hatred was easier than this hollow nothing.
The forest shifted again, and Natalie saw the roof. The cigarettes. The bruises. The whispered plans of running away.
She had believed, for a little while, that maybe they could. Maybe she, Travis, and Javi could escape everything—the fathers, the small town, the crash. That they could make their own family, one not defined by violence or silence or hunger.
But dreams were fragile, too. And fragile things always broke.
She pressed her palms against her eyes until stars burst behind her lids. She didn’t want these memories, not now, not when the fire behind her still devoured the boy she remembered teaching how to tie knots.
But grief didn’t care what she wanted.
It only cared about what it could take.
The snow crunched faintly under Natalie as she shifted against the tree. She had wandered far enough from the clearing that the firelight was only a dull shimmer behind her, but the sound of it still reached her—crackles, voices, the rhythm of knives against bone.
She tried to block it out. She tried to breathe only the clean, sharp air of the forest. But the crown pressed against her skull, the antlers snagging whenever she tilted her head, as though the woods themselves wanted to remind her: you can’t run.
Her thoughts, as always, bent toward Travis.
There had never been a moment when it began. No clean line between friend and something more. Just a slow gravity that pulled them closer, night by night, until his presence was as natural as her own shadow.
It had been in the cabin, on one of those nights when the hunger clawed so severely she couldn’t sleep. She’d gone outside, hoping the cold might distract her. Travis followed, his breath ghosting in the dark.
“What are you doing out here?” he asked.
“Same as you,” she muttered. “Not sleeping.”
He sat beside her on the step. They didn’t talk much—didn’t need to. The silence between them had always felt different from silence with anyone else. It wasn’t heavy. It was just… space.
She didn’t know who leaned in first. Maybe it was both of them. Their mouths brushed, clumsy and unsure, and for a heartbeat she forgot the crash, the hunger, the bruises of the world they’d left behind. There was only him, warm and real.
Afterward, they didn’t speak of it. But something had shifted.
In the present, Natalie curled her arms around her knees. The memory should have comforted her, but it only twisted like glass inside her.
Every tender moment was laced with guilt.
Another night, weeks later, Javi had been asleep only a few feet away. Natalie and Travis had lain side by side, whispering in the dark.
“Sometimes I think he’ll hate me,” Travis admitted. “For not being enough. For not protecting him.”
Natalie turned toward him. “He won’t. He looks up to you.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
He stared at her for a long time. Then he whispered, “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Do you… look up to me?”
It was such a stupid question. So raw. But she’d seen the truth of it—how badly he wanted to be something good, when all his life he’d been told he was nothing.
She could’ve lied, softened it. Instead, she whispered, “I don’t need to look up to you. I’m right here. With you.”
He had kissed her again then, harder this time, and she let herself believe, if only for a moment, that maybe they could build something whole out of all their broken pieces.
Now, with Javi gone, those memories felt tainted. The family they had built was fractured. And Natalie wondered if, when Travis looked at her, he saw the girl who had loved, or the girl who had failed to save his brother.
Maybe both. Maybe neither.
She didn’t know which hurt more.
The fire behind her flared, a gust of wind carrying the smell to where she sat. It hit her like a punch—sweet and sickening. She pressed her sleeve to her mouth, but the taste of it clung anyway.
She thought of Travis, sitting silent in the circle, his face carved into stillness. He hadn’t eaten. She was sure of it. But he hadn’t stopped them either.
Just like her.
Maybe they were more alike than she wanted to admit.
Another memory:
The day after their first kiss, Travis had avoided her. He’d kept his distance, busying himself with chores that didn’t need doing, his silence sharp as a blade. She’d felt the sting of it but said nothing. She understood fear.
That night, though, when Javi had finally fallen asleep, he found her by the fire.
“I don’t know how to do this,” he said abruptly.
“Do what?”
“Any of it. Be what you need me to be.”
Natalie had looked at him, at the boy with bruises mapped across his skin and guilt stitched into every breath.
“I don’t need you to be anything but here,” she said.
He’d nodded, as if trying to believe her. Then he’d taken her hand, awkward and tentative, and held it until dawn.
The memory gutted her now. Because being “here” wasn’t enough. Not anymore.
Javi was gone, and no matter how tightly they clung to each other, she and Travis couldn’t stitch the world back together.
This was what they thought she was now. A leader. A symbol. A queen.
But inside, she was still the girl sneaking cigarettes on a rooftop, trying to forget the sound of her father’s voice, the slam of Travis’s father’s fists. She was still the girl who had believed, for one fragile second, that love could keep them alive.
And what had that belief gotten her?
A crown. A dead boy. A fire full of bones.
She wrapped her arms around herself and stayed.
The woods were so quiet that Natalie could hear her own heartbeat. Too loud, too steady. She almost wished it would falter, would stutter, would stop. At least then she wouldn’t have to carry the weight pressing down on her chest.
Behind her, the fire popped. She imagined sparks jumping into the dark, feeding off the dry branches, refusing to die. Just like them. Just like her.
Survival. Always survival.
But what did survival mean when the cost was yourself?
She thought of the look on Travis’s face when they pulled Javi from the ice and brought him to the cabin. He hadn’t shouted. His expression had frozen, locked into something unreadable, like a mask he’d been forced to wear too many times before.
She knew that look. It was the same one he’d worn after his father’s rages, when he’d clenched his jaw and refused to give his old man the satisfaction of seeing him break.
But this wasn’t the same. This wasn’t a bruise that would fade, or a door that could be shut against the shouting. This was Javi. His brother. The only good thing.
And now, even that had been devoured.
Natalie dragged her fingers through the snow until her nails scraped bark. She thought of how the others had moved so quickly, how they hadn’t hesitated to turn a boy into meat.
It hadn’t been hunger alone. Hunger explained desperation, not eagerness.
She remembered the gleam in Misty’s eyes, the way Mari’s laugh had cracked into the cold air. She remembered Shauna’s silence, hard and unflinching.
They hadn’t just eaten. They had accepted.
And Natalie had sat there, watching.
“Nat.”
The voice wasn’t real, but it threaded through her memory. Javi, tugging on her sleeve, asking her to check his fishing line. Javi, smiling shyly when she handed him a rabbit she’d snared. Javi, leaning against her side when the nights grew too long.
She pressed her hands against her ears, but the echoes didn’t stop.
Another memory surfaced:
They had been sitting in the cabin, storm raging outside. Javi had sketched something on the back of an old notebook page—stick figures, crude but earnest. One was clearly Travis. Another was clearly himself. The third… he’d labeled with messy letters: NATALIE.
“You made me tall,” she’d joked.
“You are tall,” Javi had replied, deadly serious.
She’d laughed, ruffling his hair, but something inside her had twisted then. Because she wasn’t just a teammate or a friend to him. She’d become part of their family, whether she wanted it or not.
And now she had failed them both.
The guilt was corrosive. It seeped into every thought, every breath.
She wondered if Travis would ever look at her again without seeing his brother’s ghost. Without seeing her silence as betrayal.
Maybe she wouldn’t look at herself again, either.
She thought about the word complacency. It wasn’t as dramatic as murder, not as visceral as violence. It was softer. Easier. But maybe that was why it cut deeper.
Complacency was letting it happen. Complacency was nodding along while someone else held the knife. Complacency was the crown pressing against her head, a reminder that she hadn’t fought, hadn’t screamed, hadn’t run until it was too late.
She hated the word. She hated herself for wearing it.
Her stomach growled then, loud in the silence. It disgusted her.
She doubled over, arms wrapped tight around herself, willing it away. She would starve before she touched Javi. She swore it.
But the hunger didn’t care about oaths. Hunger only cared about survival.
And that terrified her more than anything—that maybe, one day soon, she wouldn’t care either.
A flicker of movement caught her eye. Branches shifting, snow falling. For a heartbeat, she thought she saw Javi standing in the trees, watching her. His face pale, his hair dripping water.
She blinked, and the vision dissolved into shadow.
Her chest ached. She didn’t know if it was grief or madness. Maybe both.
She thought of Travis again.
The way his hand had fit against hers. The way his voice softened only for her. The way he’d let her see the cracks he showed no one else. And now—now he was pulling away. She could feel it. He was slipping into silence, into a place she couldn’t follow.
She wanted to reach for him, to remind him of their rooftop nights, their whispered promises. But what good were promises when everything had been consumed? She imagined him looking at her, eyes flat, voice cold: You let him die.
The words didn’t need to be spoken. She heard them anyway.
Natalie tilted her head back against the tree and stared up at the sky. The stars were brutal tonight—sharp, glittering, too bright. They felt like teeth, watching, waiting.
For the first time, she wondered if maybe the wilderness didn’t want them to survive. Maybe it only wanted to strip them down, piece by piece, until there was nothing left but bone.
If that was true, then she was already half gone.
And then, quietly, she whispered to the night:
“I’m sorry, Javi.”
The Wilderness didn’t answer.
The woods blurred at the edges of Natalie’s vision. The cold had seeped deep into her bones, until she couldn’t tell whether she was shivering or simply unraveling.
She hugged her knees tighter, trying to keep herself together, but her mind kept slipping. Every time she blinked, memory bled into the trees, and the shadows wore Javi’s face.
At first, he was younger—before the crash. The boy who trailed behind, clutching his backpack straps like lifelines. He grinned at her, shy and open, and asked if she had a cigarette. She laughed, told him he was too young, but gave him one anyway just to watch him cough.
Then he was older, the wilderness version. Quiet but steady, following her into the trees with his wide, dark eyes. He handed her a rabbit he’d managed to catch, looking so proud she almost cried.
And then, just as suddenly, he was dripping water, lips blue, eyes clouded. The Javi they pulled from the lake.
Her stomach lurched. She squeezed her eyes shut, but the images didn’t fade.
“You let them,” a voice whispered.
She froze. The sound was thin, high, not quite real.
“You let them take me.”
Her throat closed. “No.”
“You watched.”
Natalie shook her head, pressing her hands to her ears, rocking against the tree trunk. “I tried. I—”
“You didn’t.”
The voice was Javi’s, but it wasn’t. It was jagged, twisted by grief and hunger, echoing through the hollow spaces of her mind.
“You didn’t fight.”
She thought of the rooftop again. The night sky stretching endlessly, Travis beside her, Javi sneaking out to curl between them. A fragile family carved out of smoke and silence.
She’d wanted to protect that. She’d promised herself she would.
And still, here she was.
Her chest burned. She couldn’t breathe. She pressed her forehead against her knees, trying to ground herself in the sharp sting of cold air, the bite of snow against her skin.
But the visions kept coming.
Javi standing at the edge of the clearing, crowned in shadows. Javi running through the trees, always just ahead, never turning back. Javi’s hand slipping beneath the surface of the lake, bubbles breaking like shattered glass.
Every image ended the same: with her silence.
She thought of Travis, and for a moment, the ache softened.
She remembered the way he’d looked at her once, not with pity or fear, but with something she hadn’t known how to name. Trust, maybe. Need. Something that tethered them together when the rest of the world fell away.
But even that memory twisted now.
Would he ever look at her that way again, now that Javi was gone? Or would her face only remind him of failure, of the moment he lost the only good thing left to him?
She imagined him turning away, shoulders stiff, eyes hard. She imagined him leaving her alone in the woods, crown slipping from her head into the snow.
The thought hollowed her out.
Her body ached with hunger. She hated it. Hated the way it gnawed at her insides, uncaring of grief or guilt. She would starve, she told herself. She would never touch Javi.
But another part of her—the part that knew how survival worked, the part that had already sat silent once—whispered that she couldn’t keep that promise forever.
And that was the worst truth of all.
The shadows shifted. For a heartbeat, she thought she saw Travis standing in front of her. His face was unreadable, carved from stone.
Then he spoke, and the words sliced through her:
“You don’t get to keep us both.”
Natalie jerked upright, heart pounding. The image was gone, swallowed by the trees. Only silence remained.
She pressed her hands to her chest, shaking.
Was it her mind breaking? Or was the wilderness speaking through the ghosts it kept raising in front of her?
She didn’t know anymore.
“I can’t. Not like this.”
Her voice cracked. She didn’t know who she was speaking to—Travis, Javi, herself, or the Wilderness itself.
But the words hung in the air, fragile, trembling, like the first spark of a choice.
She curled against the tree, exhaustion dragging her down. The fire’s glow pulsed faintly through the woods, a reminder of what she’d left behind.
As she drifted toward sleep, one last memory surfaced—Javi sketching her name beside his and Travis’s, all three stick figures holding hands.
Family.
Her eyes burned. She pressed them shut, clutching the image like a talisman, even as the darkness swallowed her whole.
The sky was gray when Natalie woke. Not the velvet dark she’d fallen into, but the thin, washed-out kind of light that made everything look bleached and unfinished.
Her whole body felt hollow, as if the night had wrung her out and left nothing but skin and bones. She pressed a hand to her chest, half-expecting to feel it caved in. But her heart was still beating—slow, heavy, like it had been dragged through mud.
For a long time, she just lay there, listening. The forest was quiet. No birds, no wind, not even the crack of branches. Only the far-off, faint murmur of voices.
The others.
Her stomach clenched. Hunger clawed up from the pit of her belly, sharper now, almost unbearable. The kind that made her teeth ache, her jaw twitch. She knew what they were doing back at the cabin. She didn’t need to see it to know. Her throat tightened. She pressed her forehead to her knees and breathed through the ache.
When she finally stood, her legs wobbled, weak as a fawn’s.
She would survive.
But survival felt different now. Survival meant swallowing more than hunger. It meant swallowing herself.
She thought of Javi, and for the first time in hours, the memory didn’t lurch into nightmare. She saw him laughing—the rare kind of laugh he let out when he thought no one was watching. She saw him sitting cross-legged by the stream, dragging a stick through the water. She saw him nudge Travis with his shoulder, that quiet, brotherly closeness only the two of them understood.
And she saw herself, always hovering at the edge. Not blood, not really family, but trying anyway. Filling cracks where she could.
She thought of how easily the Wilderness had closed over him. One moment there, the next gone, as if his life had been no heavier than a breath.
Fragile.
The word echoed in her chest. Fragile, and precious because of it.
Her mind pulled back further, unspooling time until she was a girl again, sneaking out of the trailer with Travis trailing behind. Smoke curling from their cigarettes, both of them pretending it didn’t matter that their fathers were the kinds of men who turned houses into war zones.
They hadn’t known then that a plane would fall from the sky, that their lives would knot together in ways that felt both inevitable and impossible.
Back then, it had been enough to sit shoulder to shoulder in the dark, pretending they could breathe.
Maybe it could still be enough.
The hunger roared louder. She pressed her fist to her mouth, fighting the thought of meat. Of fire. Of teeth tearing into something that had once been a boy.
She didn’t know how long she could hold out. But she knew she had to try.
Because if she didn’t—if she gave in, if she accepted the crown and sat among them—then Javi would be gone twice over. Once from the world, and once from memory, his face drowned under the weight of their silence.
She couldn’t let that happen.
By the time she stumbled back toward the cabin, the voices had grown clearer. Laughter, low and brittle. A sound that made her skin crawl.
She stopped just shy of the clearing. Through the trees, she saw the fire’s smoke rising. The smell curled toward her, warm and rich and unbearable.
Her knees buckled. She pressed her fist to her mouth again, choking back a sob.
She didn’t go closer. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
The sun climbed slowly, weak and cold. She sat there until her body shook, until her teeth clattered so hard her jaw ached.
She thought of Javi. Of Travis. Of the fragile, flickering thread that tied her to life.
It wasn’t enough, maybe. It might never be enough.
But for this morning—for this breath—it was.
Natalie drew her knees to her chest and whispered into the silence: “I’m still here.”
And for the first time since the crown touched her head, she almost believed it.