Katie blinked at the abrupt change of subject. “Of what?”
“Cancer, Mr. Miller thinks. Brother Paul should live out the rest of the year, but not much longer, and the pain may force him to end his own life long before that.”
“Is he allowed to end his own life? I thought that was a sin.”
“Maybe, but for most people, faith is a pretty flexible business.”
“I’ve noticed.”
Row grinned. “It doesn’t have to be a bad thing, Katie. The faithful are easy. Easy to convince, easy to direct, easy to discard. When Brother Paul dies, he’ll hand the church off to me.”
“What do I care?” Katie asked, but inside, she felt a chill. She thought of the packed church she had seen at Row’s last few sermons, the glut of people pouring out onto the porch.
How many? she wondered. Three hundred? Four?
“You could help me, Katie.”
“No.”
“Think about it. God has made these people malleable. They’ll believe any damned thing that comes out of Brother Paul’s mouth.”
“Or yours.”
“Or mine. We could make so much use of that!”
“To do what, Row?”
He grabbed her hand. If she had been talking to the new Row, charming and false, a few moments ago, she saw now that he was sincere. That made it worse, somehow. She would rather hear this from her enemy than from her old friend. She wanted to yank her hand back, but then she stilled as Row pulled a silver chain from beneath his shirt. Sapphire glimmered in the afternoon light.
“Where did you get that?” she demanded. “It’s Jonathan’s!”
“No, it’s mine. I made my own.”
“How?”
“You always thought William Tear was perfect,” Row said with a chuckle. “But he’s not.”
That was no answer, but Katie’s brow furrowed all the same, for she sensed an artful mixture of truth and lies in Row’s statement, sensed that there was an answer there, if only she could riddle out what he meant.
“It works for me,” Row told her. “Just like it works for Jonathan. I see things. I know things. I know that the great saint is dead.”
Katie jumped up, knocking over her chair, and leaned over to grab his shoulders, slamming him back against the headboard.
“You’ll keep your mouth shut, Row.”
“Think about it, Katie,” he repeated, ignoring her. “Tear is gone. The Town we always talked about, the Town where smart people like us would lead, and the rest would follow. We could make it ourselves.”
Katie wanted to protest that she had never thought any such thing, but she had, she remembered now. She had thought so many awful things when she was young. It hurt to remember them. Row dislodged her hands from his shoulders, and belatedly, Katie realized that, starved or not, he was much stronger now. Katie saw devilment in his eyes . . . but not the harmless sort she remembered from when they were young. He tucked the silver necklace and its sapphire back underneath his shirt.
“What about all the nonbelievers, people who don’t belong to your church? You think they’ll sit happily by?”
“They’ll be gone.”
The flat certainty of this answer made her cold, for she sensed violence in it, a vast, nascent shadow whose contours she could barely glimpse.
“And what about me, Row?”
“Ah, Rapunzel. I wouldn’t let anything happen to you.” He grinned crookedly, just like the old Row, and for a moment Katie’s guard wavered, all of her suspicion suddenly buried under nostalgia. They had been so close once, the two of them!
“What do you say, Katie?”
Despite everything, for a moment she was tempted to say yes, for even now, Row’s vision still had the power to sway her: the place they had talked about for years, a true meritocracy, with none of Tear’s ambiguous ideas to get in the way. She and Row had planned it together, built it like a castle inside their heads.
But I’m a different person now, Katie realized. All the resentment I used to feel, it doesn’t bind me now. I can let it go.
But could she? All the contempt she felt for the people in the Town—fools with so little sense of self that they needed to believe in an invisible God who would peek inside people’s bedrooms—that contempt suddenly overwhelmed her, and she could see Row’s vision spread out before her: a town where such people were relegated to disenfranchisement, where their own foolishness was quarantined so that it could hurt no one. How wonderful it would be to live in a town where weak minds were punished, where people like Row and Jonathan—
Now who’s being a fool? her mind demanded. Jonathan? You really think there’s room for Jonathan Tear in Row’s paradise?
That brought reality back with a thud. Katie might not know how Row meant to implement his grand plan, but she knew Row. He had always hated the Tears, hated the idea of them even more than the people themselves. Jonathan was not William Tear, perhaps, but he was far too dangerous to be allowed in Row’s kingdom.