At first I think it’s Levi—he’s woken, he’s heard us, and he’s stumbling for the stairs, bumping into furniture, still half-asleep and fully intoxicated.
But then I hear a voice; someone shouting for help, fists pounding against a door.
I walk carefully into the living room, to the stairwell, straining to hear. And I know the voice: It’s Bee.
THEO
Her voice is hoarse against the grain of the wood door. “Let me out!”
Bee is trapped inside the closet, and Calla reaches for the knob, but a lock has bolted the door shut. I reach up to the top of the doorframe, feeling for a key, but find only dust.
“Stand back,” I say to Calla.
Her eyes swivel to mine, and she steps away quickly. I ram my shoulder into the door, but it doesn’t move—the wood frame is solidly built. I spin around, looking for something I can use to it pry open. But the hallway is mostly empty.
“Calla,” Bee pleads from the other side. “Please, open the door.”
“We’re trying,” Calla whispers, as if she needs to be quiet, as if Levi might return and hear us in the house.
I bolt back down the stairs, and in the living room I find an iron poker hanging from a hook beside the fireplace. I grab it, and for a split second, an image flashes across my vision: of Levi holding the metal poker and jamming it into the fireplace to spur on the flames. His face turns, looking back at someone behind him. “You could be valuable here,” he says. “Part of our community. It’s a better life than what you left behind.” And then another face comes into focus, the man standing behind him in the living room: It’s me.
I drop the poker to the ground and press a hand against my eyes. The afterimage was from years ago, when I first arrived and Levi tried to convince me to stay. I swallow and take a deep breath, letting the image recede. In my other life, as Travis Wren, I would see glimpses of the past in the objects I touched—but that talent has gone dormant, forgotten, along with everything else. But now perhaps it’s stirring awake, a creature blinking its eyes open after years of hibernation. First, I saw Maggie moving through the house and out to the pond when I held the Foxtail book, and now the metal poker.
Slowly, I bend and pick up the poker from the floor, but when the image of Levi starts sparking across my eyes, I blink and stuff it back down. When I can feel it fading like shadows on a cloudy day, I open my eyes and head for the stairs, taking them two at a time.
I don’t tell Calla what I saw—there’s no time—instead, I wedge the sharp end of the poker into the space between the door and the frame, and pull. Surprisingly, the wood begins to crack and separate as soon as I apply force, prying the door free. One more good shove and the lock mechanism breaks and the door pops open.
Bee tumbles out as though she’d been leaning against the door, blinking wildly, blood along her cheek and dripping down her shins to her feet. Calla grabs Bee by the arm and holds her steady. “I heard you,” Bee says, breathing deeply, eyes too wide—like a terrified animal whose heart is about to burst. “I heard you downstairs. I knew it was you.”
“What are you doing here?” Calla asks. “You were supposed to go get Colette and the baby.”
Bee draws her arms away from Calla and wipes the hair back from her face, stained red with blood, and stands up straight. “I know,” she answers, blinking, blinking. “He lied,” she chokes out. “He lied about everything.”
“Who?”
“Levi.” She looks down the hallway, to the stairs. Looks down the hallway—as if she can actually see the hall and the stairwell. Her pupils narrow and contract, skipping from Calla’s face to mine. “I don’t think there is a disease,” she says. “There never was. We could always leave Pastoral.”
Calla moves closer to Bee. “But Ash and Turk were sick, their blood was black.”
Bee shakes her head. “He made us see what he wanted us to see. He’s been lying all this time, hypnotizing us. The pox, the border trees, none of it’s real.”
Calla flashes me a look, and I know she’s thinking the same as I am: Was it Levi who made us forget who we used to be? Erased our old lives and replaced them with something else. Lies woven into more lies.
“We have to go,” Calla says, grabbing Bee by the arm and tugging her toward the stairs. “We have to get out of Pastoral.”
We scramble down the stairs and flee out through the back door, into the dark—three figures moving among the tall, shadowed pines. Three figures who are starting to remember who we really are. And one who might be able to see when yesterday she could not.
CALLA
We have the key to the truck.
Theo is ahead of me, his dark shirt swaying in and out of focus in the dull moonlight, while Bee moves beside me. We make our way around the back of the community, along the garden fence where the pale-yellow stalks of corn are now taller than our heads—reaching toward the scattered night sky. We won’t be here for the harvest; we won’t peel back the husks and taste the sweetness of corn when the kernels pop on our tongues.
My heart burns at the thought of it, the lost moments we will never have, but we keep going.
My throat burns too—strangely—the night air cutting like glass in my lungs, the taste of smoke on my tongue. Of ash.
Something is burning.
The fire comes into view like a bloodshot sunrise just breaking through the trees, all crimson and violent.
The birthing hut is on fire.
“Holy shit!” Bee screeches, her voice a metallic, half hiss. Her legs kick into a run, and she moves with an odd sureness, as if she can see the uneven ground ahead of her.
At the door into the birthing hut, she stops, a hand reaching forward, but Theo is there and yanks her back before she can touch the handle.
“They’re inside,” she breathes, flashing a panicked look up at Theo. “They were waiting for me to come back.”