Page 16 of The Staircase in the Woods

(Matty)

—follow her through.

“So we’re all in?” Nick said, finally.

Lore nodded and Hamish whooped ayawpof assent, and Owen smiled but didn’t say anything. They all got their bags as Nick was pointing to a trail that broke off from this little gravel lot, winding its way through the trees. Lore started to go with them but noticed Owen was hanging back, staring out at something. She paused by his side and asked, “What’re you looking at?”

But all she had to do was follow his gaze with her own in order to find the pair of ink-black crows picking bits of mashed squirrel off the road. Red threads like wet yarn plucked by plundering beak. A beat-up minivan blasted past, and the crows took flight into the trees, carping and nagging as they went.

A wind kicked up. Colder than expected. It shook the trees.

“Guess we’re doing this,” Owen said, and sighed. He looked sad. And she understood that. If only he could close it off, the way she did.

Owen turned to follow after the other two, and Lore asked him to wait up.

Into the woods they went.

10

A Walk in the Woods, Part Two

Owen had for himself an unspoken rule, one so unspoken he hadn’t even put it into words for himself until now:Don’t go into the woods.

And he had not. Not since—

(Matty)

—high school.

You go into the woods? You might not come out of them.

It was stupid, he knew. The logic didn’t even hold. It wasn’t the fault of the forest that day. Still, now, walking throughthesewoods—struggling with his fucking carry-on bag because caster wheels did not work on the forest floor—he felt this cold, dark feeling settle onto his shoulders. A free-floating oppression, like the air was heavy and wanted to push him down into the scrub, into the dead leaves, until the underbrush grew over him and swallowed him up. The trees seemed too tall. The shadows too long, too dark. The light seemed to go sideways. It felt otherworldly, like one step behind an oak or onto a patch of ivy and you could be gone, forever, and wouldn’t even know it until it was too late.

(Matty…)

But he’d agreed to go on this adventure. To follow Nick, foolish as that was, because his old friend had ended up with terminal cancer.

Owen switched to carrying his bag instead, which worked, but he kept crashing it into the tangle of understory, and at one point thesuitcase’s wheel caught in the fork of a branch of some viny plant, and he nearly fell when it jerked him backward.

“Here,” Lore said, “lemme help. It’s got two side straps—I’ll grab one, you grab the other. We can’t go side by side, but I’ll lead, you follow, the bag between us.” Owen nodded, and her plan worked. It was still annoying—but doable.

“Great,” Owen said, as they made their way down the trail.

“Problem-solving is a huge part of game design. Game playing too, obviously, and writing fiction—but it really shines during game design because everything is connected to everything else, and sometimes stuff breaks. And you have to have some real come-to-Jesus conversations with yourself when you try to figure out how changing one bit of innocuous code fucked up the rest of it.”

“Thanks for explaining that to me,” he said, unable to bottle up the bitter sarcasm. “Since I’m a total rube, apparently.”

“Sorry, sorry.”

“You really have done it all.”

“Not by half. Still more to do.”

“Well, I’m proud of you.” Those words were hard to say. They weren’t a lie. Not exactly. Hewasproud of her. But that pride came duct-taped to a whole lot of other baggage, didn’t it?

“You’re not,” Lore said.

“What?”

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