“Well, no, but—”
He took her hand. Katie jumped and tried to jerk free, but Jonathan held on. For a moment they might have been back in that clearing two years ago, but now it was Katie, not Jonathan, who was in a trance. She stared at her small hand, covered in Jonathan’s large one, but she wasn’t seeing these things; her vision stretched far beyond, to a dark and windswept patch of ground, dotted with tombstones. Lightning shattered the sky overhead, briefly illuminating the graveyard, and in that flash Katie saw a man digging at one of the graves. But his head was down; she couldn’t see his face.
With a tremendous yank, she pulled her hand free of Jonathan’s. The connection between them broke with a sizzling flash that made Katie cry out. Her hand tingled as though it had been asleep.
“Why did you do that?” she demanded.
“This town is in danger.”
“I know that.” But she suddenly wondered if they were talking about the same thing. She had been thinking of Yusuf’s disappearance, but now her mind brought up all of the complaining she had heard this week, all of the vitriol directed toward those who had been exempted from the harvest, the same ideas she had heard from Row for so many years: there was no point in treating everyone as equal when they simply weren’t. Some people were more valuable than others. This sort of thinking was anathema to the Town, of course, and Row was careful never to say such things where William Tear might overhear. But Row’s ideas were steadily gaining ground. Sometimes Katie felt as though there were two towns: the community she had known all of her life, where all were equally valuable, and a second community springing up beside it, inside it, a dark cousin growing in the Town’s shadow. The outbreak of religious fervor, a phenomenon that Katie had never seen before, seemed to have lodged itself inside this second town like a parasitic growth.
“I don’t agree with everything my father says,” Jonathan remarked, breaking off another ear of corn. “But I believe in his vision. I believe we could reach an equilibrium where everyone has an equal chance at a decent life.”
“I believe that too,” Katie replied, then paused, surprised at herself. All the times she and Row had discussed a different sort of town . . . those years were not so far off, but they seemed very distant, as though Katie had shed a younger skin and left it behind.
“But we’ll never get there unless we commit to it,” Jonathan told her. “Doctrines of exceptionalism will have to go.”
Katie blushed, thinking he had read her mind, but a moment later she realized that Row’s wasn’t the only such doctrine knocking around the Town. The underground religious movement was full of people who claimed that they were better because they believed. Even Gavin had started mouthing some of this nonsense, though he, too, was careful to keep it out of William Tear’s earshot. Those who had been saved—and there was a word, saved, that Katie had never trusted—had apparently earned the right to forget that they had once been sinners, too, as though baptism could erase the past. Why had William Tear never put a stop to it? He disapproved, yes, but he did not forbid. Every time Katie thought she was coming to understand Tear, even a little, she realized that she didn’t understand him at all.
In the distance, the bell gonged, signaling the end of work for the day.
“Come on,” Jonathan said, and they each picked up a basket of corn. Katie’s lower back protested, but she did not complain. The first day of the harvest, when she had tweaked a muscle, Jonathan had offered to carry her basket for her, and that could never happen again.
They hauled their baskets down the row toward the warehouse, where Bryan Bell stood waiting to take the count. Bryan’s was only one of about twenty lines that had formed as pickers streamed in from the other fields; two lines over, Katie spotted Gavin and Row, each looking just as filthy and disgruntled as herself, each hauling a basket of dirty squash.
Katie had never been inside the enormous warehouse, which stood more than two stories high. But she knew from Mum that there was a long trough in there, and every morning it was filled with fresh water. Later, Bryan and the other checkers would count all of the produce, wash it free of dirt and insects, and then divvy it up. Some would go to everyone in town, a fair portion for each citizen, but most of the drying vegetables, like corn, would be taken for storage or seed. The bulk of the warehouse consisted of storage bins, constructed in Dawn Morrow’s wood shop, their lids so flush that they were effectively airtight.
“Do you want to come over for dinner?”
Katie blinked. For a moment, she thought that Jonathan must have been speaking to someone else.
“Wake up, Katie Rice. Do you want to come over?”
“Why?”
“For dinner.”
“Why?”