She needs Ava to know that she—not Ava—will win. That she’s better than Ava.
“You can’t kill it,” Linda says sweetly. “You could stand there and blow yourself to pieces with the beast right on top of you, and it would walk away. It’s not an animal; it’s not a person. It’s a concept. It’s a covenant. It’s an agreement between my grandparents and the universe that, as long as we feed it, we will thrive. And we will never stop feeding it. It might not want you, but it will take Mack, and LeGrand, and all the other pathetic branches we prune to feed it. It will always be here, and there’s absolutely nothing someone like you can do about it.”
Ava’s jaw clenches. She doesn’t want her part to be over yet. She wishes it had ended differently. But the universe has never cared about her wishes.
“Shut up and do it, bitch,” Ava says.
A shot cracks through the air.
* * *
—
Another shot, and this time it’s close enough that Mack notices, and fears. She puts on a burst of speed she didn’t know she had. For someone who often wondered if she would have been better off dying with her family, Mack is suddenly, desperately aware of how easy it is to die and how very much she doesn’t want to.
* * *
—
Ava feels the crack of the gun, the power of the shot, reverberate through her whole body. And she watches Linda drop her rifle and stumble as her floral robe blooms with fresh scarlet before she falls back on the ground.
LeGrand steps free of the wall he was behind, tossing Linda’s decorative handgun to the side. “Out of bullets,” he says, matter-of-factly. “Come on. Mack should be here soon.”
He grabs one side of the generator’s cage, and Ava, still not quite sure how she’s not shot, grabs the other. Together, they drag the generator to its place.
“Is this a good spot?” LeGrand asks.
Ava isn’t sure, but they aren’t exactly spoiled for time here. Mack will be here any moment. She has to be. Mack will make it.
Ava unscrews the gas cap and twists Christian’s shirt so she can feed it in until it touches the gas. Please, she prays, careful to direct the prayer only to her mother’s god and not to any others that might be listening in this cursed place, please let there be enough gas.
* * *
—
Atrius’s arrows run out.
Mack is at a crossroads. Two paths diverge in a deadly maze, and she can’t afford to take the one less traveled.
Maybe Atrius came from a different starting point. Maybe he didn’t mark this one. This entire park was designed to keep a monster in, to confuse and twist and double back so that the beast never wandered too far out, and so that its prey was sucked in, too. The park does its job incredibly well.
Mack hears the pounding of hooves behind herself, all her gained ground covered in mere heartbeats counting down until her end.
“Ava,” she whispers, closing her eyes.
Something nudges her to the right. Whether it’s the pull of Ava’s gravity, or hope, or folly, Mack doesn’t know, but she’ll find out soon.
* * *
—
Linda groans. Ava sweats. LeGrand stands on the waist-high stone wall lining the path into the park, looking. Waiting.
* * *
—
Mack stumbles to a halt, her heart seizing in terror.
She hasn’t picked a path to the gate. She’s run straight to her first hiding spot. To the sunken-roofed duck stand, the one that hid her, that bonded her with Ava, that gave Ava the tools to scale the fence.
But it’s not safety anymore, it’s not hope. It’s exactly the opposite direction she was trying to go. She’s deeper in the labyrinth now, heading the wrong direction. She knows how to get to the pavilion from here, but it requires doubling back. Going toward the relentless, patient hoofbeats heading her way.
Mack runs forward, trying to correct, trying to get back on the right path. She’s heedless of direction now, turned and twisted. Her heart races and her breath is ragged and she’s going to die and then LeGrand is going to die and then Ava is going to die, and once again it will be her fault. It was her choice to come back into the park. Her selfishness.
Mack stumbles and careens off a lone roller-coaster cart waiting in the middle of the path.
She needs time. She has to buy herself time to figure out where the hell she is.
The roller-coaster cart eyes her wearily, the painted face of a long-suffering cow begging her to look at what it sees.
She turns her head. The tracks are right next to her, a wooden path leading off her traitorous trail and up, up, up into the trees. She can’t see where it ends through the tunnel of branches and ivy. It’s obviously not a path that will lead her to the gate. But maybe, just maybe, it will save her.