“So you used that story, and you made up a new one?”
“Maybe the settlers were right, and there really was something in the trees.” His eyes skip away to the garden, drops of rain exploding against the cornfields, long leafy stalks twitching from the impact. “At first I only told the group that the road was unsafe, that we should close our boundaries and protect ourselves from the outside world. But they didn’t want to do it, they still talked of leaving, trading with the outside.” His temples twitch, like he’s admitting something he’s never talked about before, and it’s causing little stabs of pain behind his eyes. “I needed them to fear the woods, the road. I needed them to fear for their lives.” He swallows, and a strange, long-suffering look tugs at the features of his face—the truth of what he’s done sinking into his chest. “Every week at the gathering, I told the same story: about the illness in the trees. And soon they couldn’t remember a time when they didn’t fear the pox. They believed it so completely. Even you.”
“You made me carve marks onto the trees,” I say. “You used me.”
He nods, no longer hiding what he’s done. “I needed a way to make the pox real, to make the others believe without question that it waited outside our borders.”
I shake my head. “And you buried Ash and Turk in the ground, you cut them open and made everyone think they were infected.”
A coldness washes over his eyes. “The others saw what I told them to see.”
“You killed them and you didn’t need to.”
Levi takes a step closer to me, his forehead pinched flat. “I had to do it,” he says. “I had to prove a point. If you leave Pastoral, you will be punished.” His eyes press me to the earth. “I did it to protect what we’ve built here.”
I think of the others over the years, the ones who’ve slipped past the perimeter, their bodies sometimes seen in the woods—but we would never dare cross over the boundary to retrieve them. We believed the pox was to blame for their deaths, but it was Levi, teaching us the rules of the world he’s built, teaching us to obey. All this time. He was killing members of our community to protect his lie, to make it true.
But what he’s really done is make himself a murderer.
Now, he stands a foot away from me, looking hard-faced and indifferent, but I know his burdens have been unraveling him. An albatross of guilt. The alcohol numbing what he doesn’t want to remember.
“You’ve been killing us,” I say coldly—he is the monster we should have feared, not the disease. “You’ve made us prisoners.”
“No,” he says. “I’ve created a place where nothing can harm you.”
“Except you.”
His eyes dip quickly to the ground then back up, his pupils turned icy-cold, like he’s calculating something: the time it will take to reach forward and clamp his hands around me. “I needed a wife who wouldn’t abandon me, who wouldn’t turn against me,” he says now.
I take a step back, bile rising up into my throat.
“You were always the one I wanted,” he says. “The one I couldn’t live without.” This might have been true once, but not anymore. He loved the girl I was when I obeyed, the girl who didn’t question him in front of the others, who was blind and malleable and nodded when he asked me to carve marks into the border trees. But now, I cannot be trusted.
Now… I am dangerous.
“I gave you everything you wanted. I gave you a sister, I gave you things to lose—reasons to stay.”
My mind is wheeling faster now. A sister. And when I search the length of my mind, the deepest cavern, I see the thing that burns holes into the soft tissue of my heart: Calla and I never shared a childhood together. She appeared later, much later, coming to live inside the farmhouse—an outsider. But how swiftly I came to believe that we belonged together.
And now she’s fleeing Pastoral, a bullet inside her, and I might never see her again.
I should turn away from Levi and run into the trees toward the farmhouse, toward the road—I could still catch up to them if I go now. But Levi moves swiftly, stepping forward, and he grabs both my arms, as if he senses my urge to bolt. My muscles stiffen at his touch, recoiling, when days ago I would have softened in his arms, sunk closer. Pressed my skin to his.
But not now.
He pushes me back against the wall of the garden shed—my spine digging into the horizontal logs. The gash along my temple throbs, blood hardened like a shell on my skin. I know I’m outweighed, and he leans into me, breathing into my hair, yet I can’t tell if he’s going to bend close and kiss me or wrap his hands around my throat and push the life clean out of me.