.” August was grinning. He’d been a stowaway himself once. “We haven’t had a stowaway in years.”
The stowaway was the girl who’d followed Kirsten in St. Deborah by the Water. She was crying and sweaty, her skirt soaked with urine. The first cello lifted her to the ground.
“She was under the costumes,” the first cello said. “I went in looking for my tent.”
“Get her some water,” Gil said.
The conductor swore under her breath and looked off down the road behind them while the Symphony gathered. The first flute gave the girl one of her water bottles.
“I’m sorry,” the girl said, “I’m so sorry, please don’t make me go back—”
“We can’t take children,” the conductor said. “This isn’t like running away and joining the circus.” The girl looked confused. She didn’t know what a circus was. “Incidentally,” the conductor said to the assembled company, “this is why we check the caravans before we depart.”
“We left St. Deborah in kind of a hurry,” someone muttered.
“I had to leave,” the girl said. “I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I’ll do anything, just—”
“Why did you have to leave?”
“I’m promised to the prophet,” the girl said.
“You’re what?”
The girl was crying now. “I didn’t have any choice,” she said. “I was going to be his next wife.”
“Jesus,” Dieter said. “This goddamn world.” Olivia was standing by her father, rubbing her eyes. The tuba lifted her into his arms.
“He has more than one?” asked Alexandra, still blissfully ignorant.
“He has four,” the girl said, sniffling. “They live in the gas station.”
The conductor gave the girl a clean handkerchief from her pocket. “What’s your name?”
“Eleanor.”
“How old are you, Eleanor?”
“Twelve.”
“Why would he marry a twelve-year-old?”
“He had a dream where God told him he was to repopulate the earth.”
“Of course he did,” the clarinet said. “Don’t they all have dreams like that?”
“Right, I always thought that was a prerequisite for being a prophet,” Sayid said. “Hell, if I were a prophet—”
“Your parents allowed this?” the conductor asked, simultaneously making a Shut up motion in the direction of the clarinet and Sayid.
“They’re dead.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Were you spying on me in St. Deborah?” Kirsten asked.
The girl shook her head.
“No one told you to watch us?”
“No,” she said.
“Did you know Charlie and the sixth guitar?”
Eleanor frowned. “Charlie and Jeremy?”
“Yes. Do you know where they went?”
“They went to the—to the Museum of Civilization.” Eleanor said museum very carefully, the way people sound out foreign words of whose pronunciation they’re uncertain.
“The what?”
August whistled softly. “They told you that’s where they were going?”
“Charlie said if I could ever get away, that’s where I could find them.”
“I thought the Museum of Civilization was a rumor,” August said.
“What is it?” Kirsten had never heard of it.
“I heard it was a museum someone set up in an airport.” Gil was unrolling his map, blinking shortsightedly. “I remember a trader telling me about it, years back.”
“We’re headed there anyway, aren’t we? It’s supposed to be outside Severn City.” The conductor was peering over his shoulder. She touched a point on the map, far to the south along the lakeshore.
“What do we know about it?” the tuba asked. “Do people still live there?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“It could be a trap,” the tuba murmured. “The girl could be leading us there.”
“I know,” the conductor said.
What to do with Eleanor? They knew they risked accusations of kidnapping and they had long adhered to a strict policy of non-intervention in the politics of the towns through which they passed, but no one could imagine delivering a child bride back to the prophet. Had a grave marker with her name on it already been driven into the earth? Would a grave be dug if she returned? Nothing for it but to take the girl and press on into the unknown south, farther down the eastern shore of Lake Michigan than they’d ever been.
They tried to engage Eleanor in conversation over dinner. She’d settled into a wary stillness, the watchfulness of orphans. She rode in the back of the first caravan, so that she’d be at least momentarily out of sight if anyone approached the Symphony from the rear. She was polite and unsmiling.
“What do you know about the Museum of Civilization?” they asked.
“Not very much,” she said. “I just heard people talk about it sometimes.”
“So Charlie and Jeremy had heard about it from traders?”
“Also the prophet’s from there,” she said.
“Does he have family there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell us about the prophet,” the conductor said.
He’d come to St. Deborah by the Water not long after the Symphony had left Charlie and Jeremy there, the head of a sect of religious wanderers. The sect had moved into the Walmart at first, a communal encampment in what had once been the Lawn and Garden Department. They told the townspeople they’d come in peace. A few people were uneasy about them, this new population with vague stories about travel in the south, in the territory once known as Virginia and beyond—rumors held that the south was exceptionally dangerous, bristling with guns, and what might they have done to survive down there?—but the new arrivals were friendly and self-sufficient. They shared their meat when they hunted. They helped with chores and seemed harmless. There were nineteen of them, and they mostly kept to themselves; some time passed before the townspeople realized that the tall man with blond hair who seemed to be their leader was known only as the prophet and had three wives. “I am a messenger,” he said, when introduced to people. No one knew his real name. He said he was guided by visions and signs. He said he had prophetic dreams. His followers said he was from a place called the Museum of Civilization, that he’d taken to the road in childhood to spread his message of light. They had a story about setting out in the early morning and then stopping for the day only a few hours later, because the prophet had seen three ravens flying low over the road ahead. No one else had seen the ravens, but the prophet was insistent. The next morning they came upon a collapsed bridge and a riverside funeral, women singing, voices rising over three white shrouds. Three men had died when the bridge fell into the river. “Don’t you see?” the prophet’s followers said. “If not for his vision that would have been us.”
When the winter fever struck St. Deborah by the Water, when the mayor died, the prophet added the mayor’s wife to his collection and moved with his followers into the gas station in the center of town. No one had quite realized how much weaponry they had. Their stories about travel in the south began to fall into place. Within a week it became obvious that the town was his. Eleanor didn’t know why the prophet’s dog was named Luli.
20
TWO DAYS OUT OF St. Deborah by the Water, the Symphony came upon a burnt-out resort town. A fire had swept through some years ago and now the town was a meadow with black ruins standing. A sea of pink flowers had risen between the shards of buildings. The charred shells of hotels stood along the lakeshore and a brick clock tower was still standing a few blocks inland, the clock stopped forever at eight fifteen.
The Symphony walked armed and on full alert, Olivia and Eleanor in the back of the lead caravan for safety, but they saw no signs of human life. Only deer grazing on overgrown boulevards and rabbits burrowing in ashy shadows, seagulls watching from lampposts. The Symphony shot two deer for dinner later, pried the arrows from their ribs, and strung them over the hoods of the first two caravans. The lakeshore road was a complicated patchwork of broken pavement and grass.
On the far side of town they reached the limits of the fire, a place where the trees stood taller and the grasses and wildflowers changed. Just beyond the fire line they found an old baseball field, where they stopped to let the horses graze. Half-collapsed bleachers slumped into tall grass. Three banks of floodlights had stood over this field, but two had fallen. Kirsten knelt to touch the thick glass of a massive lamp, trying to imagine the electricity that it had conducted, the light pouring down. A cricket landed on her hand and sprang away.
“You couldn’t even look directly at them,” Jackson said.