Henry pushes open one of the massive barn doors, where inside, half a dozen goats are bedded down for the night. Several lift their heads but none stand up—they must sense that this midnight intrusion has nothing to do with them, there will be no fresh hay or grain tossed their way. Just to the left of the door is a small, metal wagon, a handmade doll propped up inside wearing a tiny blue dress. One of the community children likely stowed it away in the barn for the night.
Henry unfolds a ladder from the ceiling and it drops to the floor with a soft thud, a cloud of dust coming away with it. Henry coughs.
“It’s only until morning,” Levi assures, giving the two men a trusting nod. As if they have his word.
Ash helps Turk up the ladder, but he still winces and groans with each heave of his leg up into the loft. Once they’re settled, Henry pushes the ladder up into the ceiling and secures it shut with a lock.
“Do we really need to lock them in?” Calla asks.
“Can’t be too careful,” Henry answers, but his tone sounds far away, and he slides the barn door closed, slapping his hands against his legs to shake off the dust.
“They weren’t in the woods for long,” Levi adds. “But long enough. We need to be sure.”
I realize now that everything Levi told them at the border was only to coax them back across, to convince them to come with us. And they did, willingly, as if they didn’t have a choice. But Levi has no intention of letting them back into Pastoral so easily—he needs to be certain they aren’t sick, that they won’t infect the others. Or us.
“What will you do with them?” I ask.
Levi brushes a hand through his hair, smoothing down the sides. “We have to see if they’re infected.”
“We’ll know in a few days,” Calla says, flashing me a quick look. “We’ll see it in their eyes first.”
“It might be too late by then,” Levi answers.
Calla frowns, like she’s unsure what he means. But I know what Levi plans to do, what he’s going to say.
“If they have the pox, we have to treat it quickly,” Levi answers. “We have to rid it from their bodies.”
“How?” Calla asks, but the way her mouth pinches down, she’s starting to understand.
It’s been years since anyone was treated for the pox, treated in the old way. Most in Pastoral believe the ritual is cruel, a barbaric method for leeching illness from the flesh. But the first settlers who built this small town thought it was the only sure way to cure the sick for good.
“We will bury them,” Levi says matter-of-factly.
CALLA
The rain finally breaks open from the clouds and descends over the house, beating against the roof.
“We have to get them out of that barn.” My head thumps wildly, and in my hand I hold the small silver book I found in the garden, crushing it in my fist. It soothes me somehow. A thing that now feels like mine.
Theo closes the front door behind him. “Calla,” he begins, walking past me into the kitchen. “They went over the border. They might be sick.”
“So did you. And Bee.” My voice is too high; a thin, awful pitch. “She might have the pox, but I wouldn’t put her in the ground to find out. I wouldn’t do it to you, either.”
My husband stares past me at the wall, at nothing. “Even if we got them out of the barn, Turk wouldn’t be able to make it down the road.”
“Then we’ll hide them.”
“Where?”
“In our cellar.”
I think of Bee, the way she’s touched her stomach in recent days, her skin flushed and swollen. She might be pregnant. And if she is, if her child needed medicine, I would hope someone would brave the dark line of trees to bring back help. I would want someone to risk their lives for her, like Ash and Turk tried to do for Colette. But it’s not just this. It’s the Foxtail book, the white-cotton pages dusted with soil, the story of a girl who is unafraid, who marches into the woods beyond her house in search of a place that most would fear.
I have stood at the edge of the forest and felt my skin tingle and my ears thrum with the foreboding itch of what lies inside the shadowed trees. But the book has spurred something awake in me, and now I mistrust my own fear. Perhaps it has betrayed me, made me coil into myself when I should have stared down the road like my husband and wondered what lies at the end. I want to do what’s right, not what my fear has made me feel.
The living room feels suddenly cold, a musty dark in that way it does during a rainstorm—the walls fully sated with moisture. “If Levi found out you went over the boundary, he’d lock you up too,” I say, tears catching in my eyes.
Theo crosses the room, swift and sure, and draws me into his arms. I press my face against his shoulder, eyes pinched closed. “You know we can’t hide Ash and Turk here,” he says at last, his breath against my hair. “I want to help them, but there’s nothing we can do.”
My temples begin to pulse, the feeling I get when I haven’t had enough sleep. I think of Travis Wren, a stranger in our house, tiptoeing into the sunroom while we slept. Our very own ghost.
“Everything feels so wrong,” I say weakly, pressing my palms to my eyes. Two people came to Pastoral and vanished, now two people have tried to leave and been locked up. My heart roars in my chest, my mind a riot of too many disproportionate thoughts, each crowding out the others, making it impossible to think clearly.
THEO
My wife is upstairs, and I know I should return to the guard hut for the remainder of my shift, but my legs carry me down the back hall and I push open the old, crooked door into the sunroom.
I stand surveying it, looking for something out of place. A strange hum vibrates at the back of my throat, the murmur of a song rising up as if from some memory—a nursery rhyme maybe, something whispered to children before sleep—but when I step down into the sunroom, the memory fades.