The nice man who had last seen Puppy was off to one side, speaking with another man in a white outfit who had a bald circle in the center of his head even though he looked too young to be bald. The outfit was strange. Like a blanket. Instead of two legs, it had only one, and it was big enough that it swirled around him and made it so you couldn’t hardly see his feet. The nice man with the dark whiskers seemed to be arguing a point. The man in the white blanket just frowned and stood there. Now and then, one or both of them would glance at Elise, and she worried they were talking about her. Maybe they were talking about how to find Puppy.
The furniture grew into straight lines, all facing the same way. There weren’t any tables like the rooms she used to eat in behind the farms, the places where she would hide under furniture and pretend she was a rat with a whole rat family, all of them talking and twitching their whiskers. Here, it was just chairs and benches facing a wall where a colorful glass picture stood with some of the glass broken out. A man in coveralls worked behind that wall, was visible through the broken glass and hazy behind the part that remained. He spoke to someone else, who passed a black cord through a door. They were working on something, and then a light burst on back there, throwing colorful rays across the room, and a few people moving furniture stopped and stared. Some of them whispered. It sounded like they were all whispering the same thing.
“Elise.”
The man with the dark whiskers knelt down beside her. Elise startled and clutched her bag to her chest. “Yes?” she asked, her voice a whisper.
“Have you heard of the Pact?” the man asked. The other man with no hair on the center of his head and the white blanket around his shoulders stood behind, that same frown on his face. Elise imagined that he never smiled.
She nodded. “A pack is a bunch of animals, like deer and dogs and puppies.”
The man smiled. “Pact, not pack.” But it all sounded the same to Elise. “And dogs and puppies are the same animal.”
She didn’t feel like correcting him. She’d seen what dogs looked like in her book and in the bizarre, and they were scary. Puppies weren’t scary.
“Where did you hear about deer?” the man in the white blanket asked. “Do you have children’s books over here?”
Elise shook her head. “We have real books. I’ve seen deer. They’re tall and funny with skinny legs, and they live in the woods.”
The man with the whiskers in the orange coveralls didn’t seem to care about deer. Not as much as the other man. Elise looked to the door, wondered where everyone she knew was. Where was Solo? He should’ve been helping her find Puppy.
“The Pact is a very important document,” said the man in orange. She suddenly remembered his name was Mr. Rash. He had introduced himself, but she was bad with names. Only ever needed to know a few. Mr. Rash was very nice to her. “The Pact is like a book but only smaller,” he was saying. “Similar to how you’re like a woman but only smaller.”
“I’m seven,” Elise said. She wasn’t small anymore.
“And you’ll be seventeen before you know it.” The man with the whiskers reached out and touched Elise’s cheek. Elise pulled back, startled, which made the man frown. He turned and looked up at the man in the white blanket, who was studying Elise.
“What books were these?” the man in white asked. “The ones with these animals, they were here in this silo?”
Elise felt her hands drop to her bag and rest protectively there, rest on her Memory Book. She was pretty sure the page with the deer had gone into her book. She liked the things about the green world, the things about fishing and animals and the sun and stars. She bit her lip to keep from saying anything.
The man with the whiskers – Mr. Rash – knelt beside her. He had a sheet of paper and a purple stick of chalk in his hands. He set these on the bench by her leg and rested his hand on Elise’s knee. The other man stepped closer.
“If you know of books in this place, it is your duty to God to tell us where they lie,” the man in the blanket said. “Do you believe in God?”
Elise nodded. Hannah and Rickson had taught her about God and the night prayers. The world blurred around her, and Elise realized she had tears in her eyes. She swiped them away. Rickson hated it when she cried.
“Where are these books, Elise? How many of them are there?”
“A lot,” she said, thinking of all the books she’d stolen pages out of. Solo had been so angry with her when he’d found out she was taking pictures and the How-To’s from them. But the How-To’s showed her a better way to fish, and then Solo had shown her how to stitch the pages in and out of books proper and they had fished together.
The man in the white blanket knelt down in front of her. “Are these books all over the place?”
“This is Father Remmy,” Mr. Rash said, making room for the man with the bald patch and introducing him to Elise. “Father Remmy is going to guide us through these troubling times. We are a flock. We used to follow Father Wendel, but some leave the flock and some join. Like you.”