The girls have become accustomed to dodging roving parents and wanderers. The majority of them have been chased across fields, plunging into seas of muck or thick hedges to hide. Some have even clambered up trees to cling to high branches and wait out baying adults. And then, almost overnight, the hunt stops. Suddenly they are able to sleep through the day instead of jolting alert to crackling footsteps, and the quick, panicked scatter of night vigils becomes a thing of the past. The bolder girls walk freely through cornfields and orchards, taking large steps and swinging their arms in wide brash arcs, almost daring someone to come and snatch them. Nobody does.
Most of the girls simply assume that the adults have given up. Laughing, they recount their most hair-raising tales of pursuit and beatings like veterans of a consummated war. Gathering in larger and larger groups, they sing songs loudly and hop about in frenetic games, celebrating their victory over the adults, the wanderers, the entire island.
But the older girls remain uneasy, aware that this cease-fire could mean something other than triumph. “They’re plotting something new,” Mary tells Janey. “Do you think…do you think they would kill all of us?”
Janey shakes her head. “That would be too much. That would turn people against them, if they killed a bunch of children.”
“They’ve already killed a child, and that didn’t seem to change anything.”
Janey shrugged. “They probably lied about how she died, and people didn’t know any better. But dozens of children, they can’t hide that.”
Rosie’s death is lodged deep within Janey like a sharp black thorn. She is always aware of it; it cuts her flesh when she moves. Her impotent grief and guilt branch throughout her at unexpected moments, almost doubling her over. Whenever she sees the stunned, miserable Caitlin, Janey imagines how she could have prevented Rosie’s death. She could have screamed the right words. She could have overpowered the wanderers and sprinted away with her. Rosie, her unwanted protector. Rosie, the hopeful truth teller, presuming that adults would believe the tales of children and turn immediately against their guardians and idols. Rosie the angry, the rebellious, churning with fury she could never fully release. Rosie, cold and dead, bones broken, suspended in mud under someone’s winter field.
“Well, if they’re not going to kill us, then what are they planning?” asks Mary.
Janey shakes her head. “I don’t know. If I were the wanderers, I would arrange for every adult to come out at the same time, take all the girls they could, watch them constantly so they couldn’t go back, and wait for the rest of the girls to give up and come home.”
“What do we do then, if they do that?”
Janey shrugs. “Who knows? We might be at home, with someone watching us.”
“They’d probably plant a wanderer outside your door. You’re the most dangerous.”
“Very dangerous,” says Janey, smirking.
“I’m serious.”
Janey looks at her bony, dirty lap and snorts. “I’m hardly in shape to fight someone.”
“It’s your mind.”
“My mind.” Janey massages her temples, as if to soothe it. “My mind is tired.”
After a few days, some of the intoxicating rebellion of strolling around during daytime fades a bit, and the sharper girls notice something odd: there are no adults outside. It might as well be summer. There are no women dipping buckets of water from the rain barrels, feeding chuckling white hens, or walking over to visit a neighbor. There are no men at work—no farmers pulling winter weeds, no fishermen fringing the beach with their wooden poles, no builders repairing roofs or windows. Even the children who did not come to the beach, who are much derided and pitied, are not walking to and from school, or chasing one another around in their thick sweaters, or toddling after their mothers and falling on their rumps. There is simply nobody in sight.
“What if everyone’s dead?” asks Fiona. “What if the ancestors killed everybody except us?”
“That would mean they decided we should be the only ones here,” says Sarah, looking intrigued.
“But that goes against everything, Our Book, the wanderers, everything,” points out Violet.
“Not to mention that if we were the only ones left, we couldn’t have children, so after us there would be nobody,” says Mary.
“The island would be cleansed,” whispers Fiona, who tends toward the dramatic.
“We need to figure out what is happening,” says Janey. Inwardly, she worries the wanderers are planning their mass murder, but she keeps her tone mild as she continues, “We need to go look into houses, see what’s going on.”
“But then they’ll take us!” wails eight-year-old Eliza Solomon, who has inched forward to hear the conversation.
“We have to know,” says Mary, looking troubled. “We have to know what’s happening.”
And so Janey gathers Mary, Fiona, Sarah, and Violet, and leads a small expedition. There is nowhere in particular to go, so they simply walk through fields and grasses, trying to decide which door to knock on, where to find someone willing to give information without looping them into a beating and detention. As they skirt a hedge between the Balthazar cornfields and the Joseph potato plot, they hear a moan. Alert as a hound, Janey swivels her gaze around, and it alights on what looks like a dead body.
Quietly, slowly, they move toward the corpse, flinching when it suddenly flings out an arm. Stepping closer, they see it is Lydia Aaron, the young wife of Mr. Aaron the dyer, lying slumped on the ground.
“Mrs. Aaron?” says Mary anxiously. “Mrs. Aaron?” The woman’s hands shake frenetically. Kneeling, Mary lifts the sweaty head to her lap. “Mrs. Aaron?”
Mrs. Aaron’s eyes roll back in her head, the orbs shining like tide-soaked stones, and a thread of blood slowly zigzags down her lower lip. She coughs, a deep hack like there is mud in her lungs, and flecks of blood hang in the air like tiny red stars before collapsing to the ground.
“By the ancestors,” whispers Violet. “She’s sick.”
“She must be very sick,” murmurs Janey. “I’ve never seen someone cough blood like that before.”
“Mrs. Aaron?” says Sarah hopefully. Mrs. Aaron groans.
“She needs help,” says Mary. “Janey, get her some help!” Nodding and rising, Janey motions to the other girls, and they run toward the nearest house, the farmer Josephs.
Janey pounds on the door, but there is no reply. Frowning, she pounds again. “Hello!” she calls, but nobody comes.
They move to the next house, the weaver Gideons, and she knocks, then pounds, then calls, but the house stands silent, its windows blank and lifeless as dead eyes.
Finally, at the fisherman Moseses’ house, they hear someone coming toward the door. “Who is it?” calls a woman.