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  The body appears on a crisp October morning, breaking the glassy surface of the lake like a soft bubble of air escaping from the depths. There’s a moment of stasis, several seconds where the corpse is still, framed by an apple-pink sunrise, autumn sweetness in the air. Then it begins a languorous drift toward shore.

  Auto forward: DrkLegnds

  From: AsphyxiA

  Subject: Surfacing

  I’m using the contact form on your site, which is probably weird but also my only option: They’re monitoring my email. I’d give you some space, except I can’t stop thinking about it, and I need to ask the one person who can explain it:

  The surfacing.

  I don’t know how it happened exactly, but I have ideas about how it looked. How she looked.

  You probably know all about it by now. You probably know that it took three months for her to appear out of nowhere, like an ember sparking to life in the ash. You know some backwoods local found her, a surprisingly long way from the caves, changing that particular corner of Colorado’s woods forever.

  You probably weren’t surprised.

  I haven’t messaged the other girls; I think they need more time. Three months isn’t very long—no time at all, really—to move past what happened down there. The dark changes things. But you know that.

  I sent you all the details, like you asked, even though you already knew them. Everyone already knew—my testimony wasn’t public, but these things get around. People love tragedy.

  I guess I do, too; I’m a little obsessed with the moment of her surfacing. I like to tell it like a story, in honor of Sasha and her way of looking at things. I have a habit of trying to emulate her storytelling. But of course you know that, too.

  I can picture it in my mind’s eye, clear as day:

  The body appears on a crisp October morning, breaking the glassy surface of the lake like a soft bubble of air escaping from the depths. There’s a moment of stasis, several seconds where the corpse is still, framed by an apple-pink sunrise, autumn sweetness in the air. Then it begins a languorous drift toward shore.

  One of the locals, a boy, is organizing himself for one last fishing trip—maybe illegal, this late in the season—at the pier. He glances up, sure the prize-weight pike he’s been after all summer is giving him a final chance. Pikes are known to sit on the surface like that when they’re hungry. He dials his brother in his excitement—get down here quick—but pauses when he looks again. No. Not a pike. No fish at all. Call dad.

  In a half hour all of Upward Junction, population thirty-eight, is gathered at the water’s edge. The body has come to rest against the wooden pilings: faceup, bobbing like a sunseeker on a pool floatie in mid-July. Hair drifting like a silken, seaweed-colored cloud, skin luminescent in the morning sun.

  A shape-shifter morphing from the grotesque to the sublime.

  The crowd is perplexed. She isn’t one of theirs, isn’t from around here. And with one road into Upward Junction and no visitors in days, there’s only one way she could’ve arrived: the confluence—the hidden source that feeds their lake. She’s emerged from that underground river, which means she’s been beneath the mountain and traveled a long way—miles, maybe—to grace this shore.

  They call the cops. And wait. No one dares touch her. No one dares disturb that … repose.

  When a white patrol car finally crunches across the gravel it’s a quarter to noon. Deputy Vargas didn’t receive the message for the better part of an hour, and Meeker is a twenty-minute drive down the mountain.

  She steps out of her cruiser, shading her brow against the Colorado sun, and eyes the residents of Upward Junction on the shore. Her small, strong frame moves with purpose as she starts down the bank. She stops shy of the crowd, a pressed-lip nod indicating she has, unfortunately, been waiting for this.

  She takes a breath to ask them to disperse, give her room. Upward Junction isn’t nearly as remote or unlawful as the spot the girl disappeared, but authorities aren’t common around these parts. These people are bound to linger, gossip. Maybe even give Vargas a hard time on account of her being an outsider.

  But the resignation on Vargas’s face—young girl, go on home now, I’ll handle this—cracks when the residents step back to give a view of the body. Her eyebrows knit as she leans forward to peer closer, then shoot skyward.

  Her face drains of color.

  Disbelief. A stunned pause.

  And then she fumbles for her cell phone.

  At least, I like to imagine it that way. Vargas is the deputy who handled the investigation, and my arrest; it makes sense for her to be there. She’s there, and she’s rethinking everything I told her that day.

  But I can’t quite picture what happened after that.

  It’s ghosting around my thoughts, slippery and unformed. It’s there, waiting for me to catch hold, see it. Understand.

  I don’t blame you for anything; I made my choice, and I take responsibility for that. I see, now, how alike we are … and how very different.

  But I do want to understand.

  Help me understand.

  What happened when she surfaced?

  —Amelie

  3 MONTHS EARLIER

  WEDNESDAY, JULY 26, 1:02 P.M.

  The girl was a blood-spattered wood nymph, a tiny figure dwarfed by tall pine trees, splash of sunlight filtering through the boughs above, dappling her slight shoulders and dark cap of hair with white-gold. Blood had dried on her pale arms in a lattice pattern—dark-crimson, elbow-length lace gloves. Gore and particulate speckled her face and neck. Her T-shirt—a six-inch-long rip near the hem—jeans, and tennis shoes were coated with a chalky substance, like ghastly fairy dust. She was perched on one of three giant rocks placed in a line across the trailhead, feet on the boulder, wrists resting on her bent knees, gaze fixed on the ambulance.

  Behind her, a weathered wooden sign sported a sun-faded, lacquered map, an uninspiring masthead, detailing the hiking paths in the dense forest beyond. Next to the trail sign sat a steel box, holding the emergency phone she’d called from an hour ago. Her voice was hoarse and halting, giving only the most pertinent information: My name is Amelie Desmarais. We’re at the White River National Forest, staging area number fourteen. Come quickly.

  She’d been mute since the first responders arrived, answering the paramedic’s questions—does this hurt? How about this?—with a head shake, outright ignoring the deputies. Uninjured, the paramedics had confirmed, everything intact, fully conscious, and space in the ambulance was tight, so …

  So she was now the temporary charge of two deputies, dispatched from Meeker.

  Vargas ended her call and tucked the phone away. “Cheyenne got her mother,” she said to Draker. “We’ll take her with us, meet them at the station.”

  Draker jerked his head toward the dusty red Toyota Echo sitting at the far end of the parking lot.

  Vargas shook her head, raked three fi
ngers along her scalp to smooth the wispy curls that were escaping her bun. “No keys and not her car, apparently. I mean, even if it was—”

  “Parents are coming from where?” Draker had a bad habit of cutting her off when he knew what she was going to say. In this case: Even if it was her car, there’s no way she could drive after this.

  “Some retreat facility in Colorado Springs? Didn’t catch the name. They were halfway to Denver.” Vargas had offered the girl her phone to call her parents herself. The girl had keyed in the number, handed the phone back. The call, plagued with static, had dropped twice. Vargas finally radioed the station, had their clerk call.

  Halfway to Denver meant hours away. “We’ve got time. We should get her talking,” Vargas said.

  “Here?” Draker slapped a mosquito on his arm, looking impatient. Probably because it was hot and buggy. Or maybe because Cheyenne was collecting for the next round of Powerball drawings—the station had a lottery group—and if they weren’t back by four, he’d wouldn’t get his twenty-six bucks in.

  “I don’t want to miss something.”

  “Search and rescue can handle it.”

  “Handle what, Dray?” They had no idea what had gone on here. This scene was hardly procedure. “Hey.” Vargas peered at him. “You okay? You look a little green.” She shaded her eyes against the sun to peer at him.

  Truthfully, she wasn’t feeling great herself. Not because of the amount of blood everywhere, the barely coherent babble of the one wild-eyed girl, and the ashen color of the other, who’d been drifting in and out of consciousness. Vargas hadn’t attended a ton of accident scenes—she’d only been with the Rio Blanco County Sheriff’s office two years, and Meeker wasn’t exactly a hotbed of crime—but she’d seen enough accidents to know how to compartmentalize, shut the horror into a corner of her mind and focus.

  It wasn’t that. It was this place.

  There were spots in the wilds of Colorado where law enforcement didn’t fit, places that operated foremost on the laws of nature and second on their own, self-made law. Locals out this way never requested police presence.

  Draker straightened up. “I’m good.”

  “Okay.” She let him go first and lingered, falling several steps behind as they approached the girl. No good appearing as though they had an agenda, better to look casual.

  “Your parents are on their way,” Draker announced. Vargas stopped several feet away, giving the girl space, but Draker moved in close. “They’ll be a little while.” Like she’d gotten a flat tire on her bike and needed a ride.

  Behind them, the paramedics sealed the back of the ambulance, hopped in, and peeled out. The light flashed eerily without the siren as they turned onto the highway and disappeared behind a row of tall pines, leaving the white-and-black patrol car and the Echo the only vehicles in the parking lot.

  The girl’s gaze had followed the ambulance to the highway. She stared at the spot it had been, a strange expression on her face. Not relief. Not fear.

  Haunted was the word Vargas would’ve used. She shifted her stance, moving into the girl’s line of vision. “They’ll take good care of them, don’t you worry.”

  “We’ve got some time,” Draker added, like it was his idea. “We’d like to talk a bit”—he glanced at his phone, the transcription of the SOS call, like he hadn’t already memorized her name—“Amelie. If you don’t mind? Get a handle on what happened here.”

  The girl nodded wordlessly but didn’t shift her attention.

  “You might be feeling a bit out of it,” Vargas said. “That’s okay. We’re here to help. And when you don’t want to talk anymore, you say.”

  Another silent nod. A dragonfly landed on the girl’s shin, its iridescent wings and jeweled body an incongruent bit of sparkle on her filth-crusted jeans. She took no notice.

  “You want to sit somewhere more comfortable?”

  The staging area wasn’t a campground; there were no picnic tables or benches. That left the back of the patrol car. The girl straightened her legs, displacing the dragonfly, which whizzed off over the trees and into the cloudless sky. She shook her head.

  “No problem.” Draker settled himself on the rock nearest her, affecting a casual lean, one hand on his knee. “Can you walk me back a bit? Tell me why you’re out here?”

  “Where are they taking them?” First words since they’d arrived twenty minutes ago. Her voice was a rasp.

  “The hospital in Rifle,” Vargas said. “Their parents are on the way. Like I said, they’ll take good care of them.”

  “Amelie,” Draker said again. “Can you tell us what you were doing out here?”

  The girl pulled her gaze several feet closer, to the middle of the parking lot, her brow knitting. It was like she was trying to figure that out.

  “Or a bit about you?”

  Her brow furrowed deeper. She looked up at the cops.

  “You wouldn’t tell the paramedics that one girl’s name,” Draker pressed. “The one with no ID.”

  She glanced up. “I don’t know it.” She sounded surprised—as though she’d just realized this.

  Draker exchanged a look with Vargas. “You mean you can’t remember?” Vargas clarified.

  “I mean that I don’t know it.”

  “Because you met on the trails?”

  “No. We came together.”

  Draker looked at the red Echo, shared another glance with Vargas. “But you don’t know one another.”

  “We just met.”

  “At school or something?”

  “Dissent.” Pause. “It was a … meetup. For thrill seekers. In Denver.”

  “And you came out here for a … hike?” Draker glanced at the girl’s dirty tennis shoes—hardly adequate footwear for the backcountry.

  Now she was looking at her feet as though they were a new addition to her body.

  Draker leaned in. “Amelie, you on something?” Vargas shifted, put her hand to her side—a go-easy signal. Draker ignored her. “Molly? Weed?”

  “I…” The girl seemed at a loss.

  “You’ve been through something,” Vargas interjected. “So how about you start at the beginning. Maybe … in Denver. Is that where you’re from? You could start—”

  “One of your friends had a bad wound,” Draker persisted. “A laceration on her thigh—”

  “I didn’t stab her.”

  1:07 P.M.

  The girl stated it as a matter of fact, no emotion.

  Draker and Vargas didn’t look at each other, but a moment passed between them. A stab wound was exactly what it had looked like, though the paramedics hadn’t had time to confirm. Both deputies had witnessed the girl babbling “She did it. Amelie did it” as they packed her into the ambulance. She’d been looking at her wound, though at the time Vargas couldn’t be sure she’d been referring to it. Now …

  “No one said you did.” Draker’s tone wasn’t accusatory, but it was hardly neutral.

  Then, he wasn’t a subtle man: a by-product of his authority never being questioned? Vargas wouldn’t know. “The wounded girl said there were four of you,” Vargas said carefully.

  “There were.”

  “So, where’s the fourth?” Draker, again.

  A long silence. It was hardly absolute; in the distance a crow was calling—a constant garbled refrain—and the radio in the patrol car was crackling sporadically through the open passenger window, but the girl’s stillness had a strange muting effect on the scene. Her eyes were clouded with thought, as though she was listening to some internal monologue. Her mouth twitched. She seemed conflicted, wrestling with something. A slight shake of the head and her eyes hardened. Decision made.

  She drew her head up. “There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.”

  The crow called again, clear and shrill, punctuating the silence that followed. Draker stood, a muscle working in his jaw. Vargas kept her face blank. It was a bizarre non sequitur, but also familiar. Draker gave Vargas the signal f
or a quick sidebar.

  She hesitated, catching hold of the memory. “Friedrich Nietzsche,” she said. She looked at the girl. “Beautiful surfaces.”

  The girl nodded.

  “Nietzsche,” Draker repeated. His brow wrinkled. “‘God is dead’? That guy?”

  “Yeah, but it’s not…” Vargas paused. “You need the context.”

  “It’s important,” the girl said, though for some reason Vargas didn’t think she was referring to “context.” She didn’t have the chance to clarify. Draker was jerking his head again, looking impatient.

  “We’ll be right back,” Vargas said.

  “Where are you going? I thought we were going to talk.”

  “We will,” Vargas assured her. “Just going to check in with the hospital.” As she turned to follow Draker, Vargas cataloged the change in the girl. Her strange detachment had been replaced by a palpable nervous energy. Was that typical, post trauma?

  They moved to the far side of the patrol car, out of earshot.

  “I know psychos come in all shapes and sizes,” Draker muttered. “But a pint-sized pixie psycho is a first, for me.”

  “Maybe she’s in shock.”

  “Her vitals were perfect, and shock victims don’t quote dead philosophizers.”

  “Philosophers.”

  Draker squinted at her. “About that—”

  “I took a philosophy course in college, okay?”

  A resigned frown. He drew a breath. “Well, we should Mirandize her.”

  “Because we’re charging her with…?”

  “Nothing, yet. But I’d rather anything she says be admissible.”

  “That Nietzsche quote really weirded you out, huh?”

  “She’s weirding me out. The whole thing is weird.”

  “Agreed. But I don’t want her to shut down again; we just got her talking.” And she seemed suddenly keen to continue. “Give me a few minutes with her. You’re making her nervous.”

  He sighed loudly.